A CRIMINAL’S DEATH

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXII, Issue 9000, 13 November 1907, Page 1

A CRIMINAL’S DEATH

i Tiie death this week in her 79th : year, at Broadmoor Criminal •; Lunatic Asylum, of Christiana I Edmunds, recalls one of the most ; notorious criminal trials of last ! century. It is more than 85 years • since this woman was sentenced at the Old Bailey for the murder of a i boy named Sidney Barker, at Brighi ton. The evidence at her trial re- ! vealed a curiously cunning and subtle attempt at wholesale poisou- ; ing conceived with the object of I diverting suspicion from herself. ! Christiana Edmunds had been atI tended in 1870 by a Brighton medical ’ man, with whom she appeared to be ion very friendly terms. In Decem- | her of that year Edmunds was visiti ing at the doctor’s, and she gave i chocolate cream to the doctor’s wife, who, finding that it tasted bitter, ! spat it out, and though she was i made unwell, she suffered no permanent injury. Her husband, how- i ever, suspected something, and charged Edmunds with having attempted to poison his wife. Then I Edmunds, finding herself cut off from association with the doctor, j whose wife she fondly hoped to I succeed, planned a diabolical course i of action to make it appear that the poisoned swceetmeat had come from a well-known sweet shop in Brighton. She induced children to go to that shop to purchase chocolate creams. These she impregnated with strychnine, and then sent them back : ‘to the shop, with the excuse that they were not of the right sort. So the poisoned sweets got into the hands of other'customers, and one of them, the ’boy Barker, died. Edmunds distributed other poisoned sweets to children in the street, and ; a number were poisoned, but happily no others died. She even voluntereed evidence at the inquest on Barker, saying that she herself had been made ill by sweets bought at the shop where she had “planted” the poisoned chocolates. She was sentenced to death, but insanity being proved to exist in her family, the sentence was commuted to confinement at Broadmoor.