FAMOUS POISONING CASE RECALLED.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXII, Issue 9017, 3 December 1907, Page 4

FAMOUS POISONING CASE RECALLED.

The death atßroadmoor'Asylum of j Christina Edmunds recalls one of tho most notorious criminal trials of tho last century; It is more than 35 years since Edmunds was tried at the Old Bailey, and almost everybody connected with the trial has predeceased her. The judge, Baron Martin; Sergeant Ballautyne, one of the prosecuting counsel; Sergeant Parry, one of the counsel who defeuded; and Sir William Gull, who was instrumental, after sentence of | death had been passed, in saving the j condemned woman from the gallows , —all liavo passed away. Edmunds j was sentenced for the murder of a j hoy named Sidney Albert Barker, of- j Brighton, and the evidence of the i trial revealed, a curiously cunning • and subtle attempt at wholesale ; poisonuig, conceived with the object of diverting attention from prisoner Herself. Christina Edmunds had been attended in 1870 by a Brighton medical man, with whom she appeared to bo on very f:. .jmliy (onus. In December of that yer.r Edmunds was visiting at the doctor's, and she gave a chocolate cream tj the doctor's wife, who, finding fiat it tasted bittsr, spat it out, and though she was made unwell, she suffered no permanent injury. Her hnsbaud, however, suspected something, and lie charged Edmunds with hiving attempted to poison his wife. She visited the doctor no more. Tlie presumption was that out of joalousy, and with tho view of facilitating her own attachment she had t-ied to kill tho doctor's wife. Then Edmunds, finding herself cut off from associating with the doctor and his wife, planned a diabolical course of action to make it appear that the poisoned sweetmeat had come from a well-known sweet shop in West t-treot, Brighton. She induced children to go to that shop and purchase chocolate creams. These she i'liproguatod with strychnine and then sent them back to the shop, villi the excuse that thay were not of tho right sort. The poisoned chocolates so received back were sold unsuspectingly to a Brighton family, with the result that one member of tho family, Sidney Albert Barker, . was immediately poisoned. Edmunds distributed other- poisoned sweets to children in the street, and a number were poisoned, but no others died. At the inquest on Barker she even volunteered evi-j deuce, and told a cnuning story of having herself been ill as a result of eating sweets bought at tho West street shop. The verdict of the jury was " Accidental death," and the confectioner, a man of the highest integrity, was exonerated. Edmunas was arrested in 1871. and after a sensational trial was sentenced to death for tho murder of the boy Barker. Shortlv afterwards it was shown that her father, well-known as the designer of Trinity Church, and many other public buildings in Alargate" had died in a luuatic asylum, and 'that her brother had died as an epileptic idiot in Earlswood Asylum. The result was that Mr Bruce, the Homo Secretarv of the day, on a report from Sir" Wiliam 'Jull, commuted the sentence, and ordered her detention at Broadmoor. Here she lived for thirty-flvc years, ami when death released her the other day she was in her 78th year. Whatever might have been her mental state at the time when the crime was eommitte I, siio showed unmistakable si<rus of insanity at Broadmoor. ' She was au exceedingly vain woman, and it is reported of her that she secured odd ends of rope out of which she manufactured a wig of yollow tow. This she invariably ■ she expected a visitor; She |also j contrived to make a fine powder out i of a piece of red brick which "she i rubbed on her pale cheeks with a I most uncanny effect. Her long dei tent-ion at Broadmoor probabbly cost S tho State over £IOOO.