Daisy de Melker was hanged in Pretoria on December 30, 1932, for murdering her son. Rhodes Cecil Cowle was 20 when he died of arsenic poisoning in 1932, a little over a year after his mother's third marriage. His death led investigators back to her two earlier husbands, William Alfred Cowle and Robert Sproat, both of whom had died in the 1920s and both of whom had left her money. Their bodies and his were exhumed, and she was put on trial for all three deaths. After a trial of about a month that filled the courtroom and the streets outside, the court convicted her of her son's murder and acquitted her of both husbands' deaths, finding the evidence on those counts insufficient. She was sentenced to death and went to the gallows without confessing.
The case has been retold ever since, in press features, in a play staged at the old Johannesburg prison where she was held, and in a 2023 biography by the Gauteng writer Ted Botha. Much of what is repeated about her, including how many people she may have killed, goes beyond what the court found.
According to the Dictionary of Women Worldwide, Daisy Louisa Hancorn-Smith was born on June 1, 1886, at Seven Fountains, near Grahamstown, in what was then the Cape Colony. That reference work describes her as a trained nurse. The Sunday Times, in a 2017 retrospective, also said she had trained as a nurse. In the extract from his book that the Mail & Guardian published in 2023, Ted Botha describes the hospital work she did in the 1920s as that of a "theatre portress", helping in the operating theatre and cleaning instruments, rather than nursing.
She had a sister, who lived in Kimberley in the early 1920s, according to Botha. A review of Botha's book by Jennifer Platt, the Sunday Times books editor, says that before her first marriage she lived with an aunt in Bertrams, Johannesburg. The same review says that she had been due to marry a man in Rhodesia who fell gravely ill, with what was thought to be blackwater fever, and died on the day set for the wedding. No court finding concerns that death, and it is not established that it was anything other than illness.
Her first husband was William Alfred Cowle, known as Alfie, who worked for the municipality. Accounts differ on how many children they had. The Dictionary of Women Worldwide says she had five children with him, of whom only one survived infancy. Botha writes that she told a doctor in 1923 that four of her children had died. Platt's review of his book says the couple had three children and that only one boy lived past the age of five, the other two having died of "convulsions", a word then used when the real cause was unknown. The surviving child was Rhodes, who, Botha writes, was named after Cecil John Rhodes.
By Botha's account the family lived in Johannesburg in the early 1920s. Daisy kept the house and cooked, and Rhodes, at 11, was struggling at school and preferred football. In September 1922, Botha writes, she took out a 15-year endowment policy on her son for 100 pounds, which would pay 500 pounds when it matured in 1933, with Rhodes as the beneficiary unless he died first.
William Cowle fell ill over Christmas 1922 and died at home on the morning of January 11, 1923. Botha reconstructs his last days from the records of the case; the court that tried his widow in 1932 did not find that he had been poisoned.
According to Botha, Cowle had been unwell for some days. His wife told neighbors and doctors that he had taken Epsom salts that morning. Two doctors were called. One of them, the provident fund doctor, considered several possible causes, strychnine poisoning among them, and asked that the bottle the salts had come from be given to the police before any death certificate was signed. Cowle died while that doctor had gone to fetch instruments. The acting district surgeon carried out a post-mortem, found a brain hemorrhage and chronic kidney disease, and concluded that either could have caused death. The first doctor assumed that the bottle had been handed in and accepted those findings. Botha writes that the bottle is not mentioned again in the record of the body's removal. Cowle was buried on January 12, 1923.
His widow inherited the family house and received 1,245 pounds under his will and 553 pounds from the municipal pension fund, according to Botha. The Sunday Times in 2017 gave her inheritance as 1,795 pounds. She was 37, Botha writes, and Rhodes, then 12, was her only surviving family. She sent him to Hilton College, a boarding school in Pietermaritzburg, rented out the house, took lodgings, and went to work at the new Children's Memorial Hospital in Johannesburg, where she stayed for about three years.
Her second husband was Robert Sproat. The Sunday Times placed the marriage about four years after Cowle's death. Sproat died in 1927; the Dictionary of Women Worldwide gives the month as October. According to the Sunday Times account, no post-mortem was carried out on him, and his widow inherited about 4,500 pounds. The World Rugby Museum, writing about the case in 2018, says that she was the sole beneficiary of both men's wills, and that the first husband's doctor had been suspicious but that nothing further was done at the time.
The prosecution later alleged that both husbands had died of strychnine poisoning. That allegation was tried in 1932 and the court did not find it proved.
In January 1931, in Germiston, she married Sidney Clarence de Melker, known as Syd, according to the columnist Peter Martin, writing in GO! & Express in 2024. Martin gives his birth as March 31, 1884, in Kimberley. He was a widower with a daughter, and he worked as a plumber, the World Rugby Museum says. He had played rugby for South Africa: Martin writes that he made his Test debut against the British Isles touring team at Kimberley in 1903 and was picked for the first Springbok tour of Britain in 1906 and 1907, where he played 13 matches, among them a drawn Test against England. The museum, which holds his tour blazer, describes him as a half-back; Martin calls him a centre.
Martin writes, drawing on Botha's book, that a friendship between Syd's daughter and Rhodes brought the two families together. He also writes that Syd's daughter thought Rhodes lazy, and that Rhodes wanted a new car, resented his mother's refusal to buy him one, and wrongly expected a large sum of money when he turned 21. The Dictionary of Women Worldwide says that Rhodes had told friends he would soon inherit on turning 21.
Rhodes Cecil Cowle was his mother's only surviving child. He had been to boarding school in Pietermaritzburg and, by 1932, was 20 and working. Little else about him has been reported beyond his schooling, his love of football as a boy, and the tensions over money that Botha describes.
According to the Sunday Times, she bought arsenic from a chemist in early 1932, saying it was to put down a sick cat. About a week later her son fell ill after drinking coffee from a flask she had prepared, and he died. The World Rugby Museum account says he became ill at work, that a co-worker who also drank some of the coffee fell ill as well and recovered, and that Rhodes died at home a few days later. The Sunday Times said she received 100 pounds from his life insurance.
The court found that she had poisoned him with arsenic. That is the only killing of which she was convicted.
The World Rugby Museum account says that the brother of her second husband, Robert Sproat, became suspicious and went to the police. The bodies of Rhodes Cowle, William Cowle and Robert Sproat were exhumed. The museum says the tests found arsenic in her son's body, and that the prosecution's experts reported strychnine in the remains of the two husbands. It also says that a chemist who had sold her arsenic recognized her from a photograph in a newspaper, and that she had signed the poisons register with the name "Mrs D L Sproat", one of her earlier married names. She was arrested and charged with the murders of her son and both former husbands, Martin writes in GO! & Express.
In 1932, before she was hanged, she was held at the Women's Jail on Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, according to the Mail & Guardian.
Her trial opened in Johannesburg in October 1932, according to the Dictionary of Women Worldwide and the World Rugby Museum, and lasted about a month. Martin writes that crowds competed every day for seats, and that hundreds of people who could not get in waited outside for news of what he calls "the crime of the century". She faced three counts of murder: the deaths of William Cowle, Robert Sproat and her son.
The Crown was led by Cyril Jarvis, whom the World Rugby Museum quotes recalling that Syd de Melker "stood loyally by his wife during her trial." She was defended by Harry Morris, with Isie Maisels as his junior. Sydney Kentridge, writing about Maisels in the journal Consultus in 1993, named the De Melker murder trial of the early 1930s as Maisels's first famous case, in which he was junior counsel to Morris for the defence. Morris later wrote a book about the case, the Mail & Guardian noted in 2006, and in his biography Ted Botha describes Morris as impressed by her. The novelist Sarah Gertrude Millin and the writer Herman Charles Bosman both covered the trial, according to Jennifer Platt's review of Botha's book in the Sunday Times.
The prosecution's case was that she had poisoned both husbands with strychnine and her son with arsenic, each time with money to gain.
In November 1932 the court convicted her of murdering her son. It found the evidence insufficient on the deaths of William Cowle and Robert Sproat and acquitted her on both counts, according to the Cape Argus, GO! & Express and the World Rugby Museum. The Mail & Guardian, in 2006, summarized the result in the same way: found not guilty of poisoning her two husbands and convicted only of killing her son.
She was sentenced to death. Martin writes that the judge said hanging was the only sentence he could impose.
Syd de Melker kept his belief in her innocence. The Cape Argus says he maintained it throughout the trial, and Martin writes that he remained convinced for the rest of his life that his wife was not guilty of murder.
Daisy de Melker was hanged at Pretoria Central Prison on the morning of December 30, 1932, according to the World Rugby Museum, the Cape Argus and GO! & Express. South African Tourism, in a page on the prison's gallows, names her among those hanged at the prison now called Kgosi Mampuru II. She did not confess, according to the Dictionary of Women Worldwide and a 2006 Mail & Guardian article. Martin writes that her death certificate was supplied by Jack van Druten, a former Springbok forward who held a senior post in the prisons department.
Syd de Melker later remarried. He died in 1953, at 69, Martin writes.
The court acquitted her of the deaths of William Cowle and Robert Sproat. Many later accounts nevertheless state as fact that she poisoned both men, among them the 2017 Sunday Times retrospective. Those statements go beyond the verdict.
Ted Botha's 2023 biography argues that she may have been guilty of murdering her two earlier husbands and possibly others: Martin's column says Botha raises the possibility of an earlier fiancé and three young sons, and Platt's review says Botha suggests she may have begun killing as early as 1908 and raises, without answering, the question of whether she poisoned two of her infant children. None of these deaths was ever charged.
A 2006 Mail & Guardian article said that, besides the two husbands and her son, seven other suspected murders were being investigated in Rhodesia. It gave no detail, and no charge from any such inquiry was reported.
Martin repeats a story, which he takes from Botha's book, that after her belongings were sold, the buyer of her gramophone took it for repair and a technician found inside it an envelope of white powder addressed "For dear old Syd", which police analysis showed to be arsenic. No date is given for the discovery and no court considered it.
Several accounts give her motive for killing her son as money: his insurance policy, his expectation of an inheritance at 21, or his demands for a car. The court convicted her of his murder; the reason she killed him was never settled by any confession.
She still appears in South African press features on crime; the Cape Argus included her in a December 2024 feature on South African serial killers, noting that she was convicted of her son's death and acquitted of the husbands'. In 2006 the Mail & Guardian's Matthew Krouse interviewed the actor Robert Colman about Daisy's Well Hung, a two-man drag show about her, directed by Vanessa Cooke and Robert Whitehead and staged in the Women's Jail on Constitution Hill, where she had been held; the article repeats the story that her ghost haunts the old prison. Ted Botha's book, Daisy de Melker: Hiding among killers in the City of Gold, appeared in 2023 and was reviewed in the Sunday Times and excerpted in the Mail & Guardian.
June 1, 1886: birth date given by the Dictionary of Women Worldwide, at Seven Fountains near Grahamstown, Cape Colony.
September 1922: she takes out a 15-year endowment policy on her son, Rhodes (Botha).
January 11, 1923: William Alfred Cowle, her first husband, dies at home; a post-mortem attributes death to a brain hemorrhage or chronic kidney disease.
January 12, 1923: Cowle is buried.
About four years after Cowle's death (Sunday Times): she marries Robert Sproat.
1927: Robert Sproat dies (October, according to the Dictionary of Women Worldwide).
January 1931: she marries Sidney Clarence (Syd) de Melker in Germiston.
1932: she buys arsenic, saying it is for a sick cat; about a week later her son, Rhodes Cecil Cowle, 20, falls ill after drinking coffee from a flask she prepared, and dies.
1932: Robert Sproat's brother goes to the police; the three bodies are exhumed; she is arrested and charged with three murders.
October 1932: trial opens in Johannesburg; it lasts about a month.
November 1932: convicted of murdering her son; acquitted on both husbands; sentenced to death.
December 30, 1932: hanged at Pretoria Central Prison.
1953: Syd de Melker dies.
2023: Ted Botha's biography is published.