Sarah Carnell had rewritten her will in her nurse's favor only a short time before the nurse brought her a drink. It was 1862. Carnell, separated from her husband and confined to bed, had taken Catherine Wilson into the house as nurse and companion, and Wilson now handed her what she called a soothing draught with the words "Drink it down, love, it will warm you." Carnell took a mouthful and spat it out because it burned her mouth. Where the liquid landed it ate holes in the bedclothes. The glass held sulfuric acid, by one contemporary estimate enough to kill fifty people.
Wilson fled. Carnell asked the chemist who had made up her medicine whether there had been a mistake, was told there had not, and went to the police. Wilson was found about six weeks later and in April 1862 was charged at Marylebone Police Court with attempted murder. At trial she was defended by Montagu Williams, who put it to the jury that the chemist's young assistant had handed her acid by mistake. The judge, Baron Bramwell, told the jurors plainly that the theory could not stand: acid of that strength, he said, would have heated the bottle until it grew hot or burst long before she carried it to the invalid's bedside. The jury acquitted her anyway, to the astonishment, Williams later wrote, of almost everybody in court.
She did not get far. While the Carnell case was being prepared, police had been working backward through her employment and had exhumed several of her former patients. When Wilson stepped down from the dock a free woman she was arrested again, by one account at the hands of a detective from Lincolnshire, and held on suspicion of seven deaths. The Crown chose to go first on the case that looked strongest, the murder of Maria Soames, who had died six years earlier. A second indictment, for the murder of Ann Atkinson, was pending against her by the time the Soames case reached a verdict.
The history the police assembled began in Lincolnshire. She is usually said to have been born in Boston in 1822; no birth record has been cited for her, though the age of forty recorded at her trial fits that year. She worked as a nurse at Spalding, apparently without formal training, and by about 1850 was keeping house at Boston for Peter Mawer, a retired sea captain. Mawer suffered from gout and rheumatism and was taking colchicum, the extract of meadow saffron that doctors prescribed for gout in small doses and that kills in large ones. He made a will leaving his money to his housekeeper, and in October 1854, after an illness of about two weeks, he died. Because the drug was already part of his treatment, nobody suspected her. After the funeral she left for London.
In London she took up with James Dixon, a younger man whom she described in some places as her husband and in others as her brother, and late in 1855 the two moved into the house of Maria Soames in Bloomsbury, presenting themselves as brother and sister. Dixon was the nephew of Ann Atkinson, a milliner from Kirkby Lonsdale in Westmorland who ran her own business with an assistant and three apprentices and came to London once a year to buy stock. Dixon drank. In June 1856 he fell ill; the doctor called to him diagnosed rheumatic fever, and Wilson told him she had been treating Dixon with colchicum. Two days later Dixon was dead, and a bottle of colchicum was found in his room. The doctor wanted a post-mortem examination. Wilson begged him not to perform it, saying Dixon had a horror of being cut up, and he gave way. To the Atkinson family she wrote that Dixon had died of consumption.
Maria Soames was a widow, forty-nine or fifty by different accounts, who owned several properties and lived at 27 Alfred Street, off Bedford Square, where she let the first floor to Wilson. She had two daughters at home, Ann Maria, who married a German watchmaker named Herman Naacke that year, and Sarah, and a lodger couple, the Stevensons, on the second floor. By the late summer of 1856 the two women were close. Soames guaranteed a loan for her lodger, and while she was away on holiday her house was reported burgled and her silver taken, along with some of Wilson's belongings. Her daughters later said she had begun to worry about money. Her half-brother, Samuel Barnes, testified that a few months before her death he had paid her more than forty pounds, and that in October she came to him asking to borrow ten; he lent her nine. Prosecutors said she, too, had changed her will to benefit Wilson.
On Wednesday, October 15, she called on Barnes in the afternoon, dined at his house and stayed about half an hour, and he told the court she was perfectly well. She took tea with her daughters that day too. The next morning she was ill and in bed, nursed by Wilson, and on October 18, 1856, after an illness of violent pain, she died. Barnes and her doctor, Mr. Whidborne, were both uneasy enough to want an inquest, but the post-mortem found heart disease and peritonitis and nothing more. She died almost penniless. Wilson produced a note for ten pounds that she said Soames had signed. Her explanation for the death, then and afterward, was that Soames had poisoned herself in despair after a man named Taylor cheated her of money with a false promise of marriage. Taylor was himself on the list of people Wilson was later suspected of trying to poison; he survived.
In 1859, back in Boston, Wilson visited a friend, Mrs. Jackson, regularly. Mrs. Jackson drew a large sum from her bank and was dead four days later. Accounts of the sum differ, one putting it at one hundred and twenty pounds and another at nearly two hundred, and one says Wilson used Mrs. Jackson's name to make the withdrawal herself while the husband, a millwright, was away from home.
Ann Atkinson had kept in touch with her nephew's companion and called on her during her London buying trips in 1859 and again in October 1860. On the first visit her purse was stolen. On the second, a few days after she arrived, her husband in Westmorland received a telegram from Wilson: "Come at once. Wife seriously ill." He found her dying, and she died the next day, October 19, 1860, at fifty-five. Of the considerable sum she had brought to London, about twenty pounds remained, and Wilson handed it to him. Once again there was no post-mortem: Wilson told the widower that his wife had not wanted to be opened after death.
The September session of the Central Criminal Court opened on September 22, 1862, and the Soames case came on before Mr. Justice Byles on September 25. Mr. Clerk and Mr. Beasley prosecuted; Williams again led the defense, with Mr. Oppenheim and Mr. Warton. Wilson pleaded not guilty. The prosecution wanted to show the jury that seven people Wilson had lived with as a nurse had died after altering their wills in her favor, almost all of them sufferers from gout. The judge refused to admit that evidence, so the case turned on Soames alone and on the toxicologist Alfred Swaine Taylor, who testified to colchicum poisoning. Williams answered that the drug could not be reliably detected in a body so long buried. In his summing-up Byles told the jury that "if such a state of things as this were allowed to exist no living person could sit down to a meal in safety." They convicted her, and he put on the black cap and sentenced her to death. She showed no emotion.
It was the first death sentence the Central Criminal Court had passed on a woman in fourteen years. In the condemned cell at Newgate she was watched day and night by pairs of female warders and visited by the prison chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Davis, and she confessed nothing. The Times observed that not a single effort was made on her behalf; even the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment let the case go. On Saturday, October 18, the under-sheriff of Middlesex went to the Home Office and was told there would be no reprieve.
She was hanged by William Calcraft outside the Debtors' Door at eight in the morning on Monday, October 20, 1862, before a crowd reported at twenty thousand in some accounts and twenty-five thousand in others. No woman had been hanged there since Harriet Parker in 1848, and none was ever hanged in public in London again. Asked by the governor, Mr. Jonas, whether she had anything to confess, she answered, "I am innocent." The Daily Telegraph wrote that she walked to the scaffold with a firm and resolute step and seemed much less concerned than many of those watching. A broadside was sold, and Madame Tussaud's put her in wax.
After the trial Byles called Williams to his chambers, told him he had conducted the defense remarkably well but that the facts were too strong, and added that in his opinion Williams had that day defended "the greatest criminal that ever lived." The remark was made in private and became public through Williams's memoir.
Ann Atkinson's case was never tried; the indictment was not proceeded with once Wilson had been condemned. Byles had read the depositions in it, and said he had no more doubt that Mrs. Atkinson was murdered by Catherine Wilson than if he had seen the crime committed. Harper's Weekly, reporting the execution, went further and set out a list: Mawer and Dixon poisoned, a Mrs. Jackson robbed and poisoned, Soames and Atkinson murdered, an attempt on Taylor, the acid given to Carnell. It called the result "seven murders known, if not judicially proved," though its own list holds five deaths and two survivors. Only the death of Maria Soames was ever proved in a courtroom. Everything else rests on exhumations whose results were never tested before a jury, on what the judge read, and on a newspaper's arithmetic.
1822: Catherine Wilson is usually said to have been born in Boston, Lincolnshire, this year.
About 1850: she is keeping house at Boston for Peter Mawer, a retired sea captain.
October 1854: Mawer, who has made a will leaving his money to her, dies after an illness of about two weeks.
Late 1855: she and James Dixon move into the Bloomsbury house of Maria Soames.
June 1856: Dixon dies two days after she tells his doctor she has been treating him with colchicum; she talks the doctor out of a post-mortem.
October 18, 1856: Maria Soames dies after a violent illness, nursed by Wilson.
1859: in Boston, Mrs. Jackson dies four days after drawing a large sum from her bank.
October 19, 1860: Ann Atkinson, fifty-five, dies in London after Wilson telegraphs her husband; there is no post-mortem.
1862: Sarah Carnell spits out a drink Wilson gives her, which proves to be sulfuric acid.
April 1862: Wilson is charged at Marylebone Police Court with attempted murder; a jury later acquits her, and she is arrested again on suspicion of seven deaths.
September 25, 1862: her trial for the murder of Maria Soames comes on before Mr. Justice Byles; the jury convicts her, and she is sentenced to death.
October 18, 1862: the Home Office tells the under-sheriff of Middlesex there will be no reprieve.
October 20, 1862: she is hanged by William Calcraft outside Newgate.