The letter reached the Nottingham crematorium in September 1935 with two medical certificates, and the words that gave it away were squeezed in at the end: "my last wish is that my relatives shall not know of my death." Dr. Cyril Banks, the city's Medical Officer of Health, thought the cramped line had been added after the rest was written. He refused to let the cremation go ahead and took his doubts to the coroner. The woman whose last wish it supposedly was, Ada Baguley, had died in a private nursing home at 32 Devon Drive run by a woman who called herself Nurse Waddingham and had no nursing qualification at all.
Dorothea Nancy Waddingham was born at Hucknall, near Nottingham, in 1899 or 1900; the records disagree. After school she worked in a factory and then took a post at the Burton-on-Trent Workhouse Infirmary, where she picked up enough on the wards to pass herself off as a nurse. She married Thomas Leech in 1925 and had three children, Edwin, Alan and Mary, before he died of throat cancer, in 1930 by one account and 1933 by another. A Home Office file later recorded five previous convictions for obtaining money by fraud; a local history of the case lists probation for stealing toothbrushes in 1925, probation for ordering goods on credit she never meant to pay for, and three months in prison for pawning an employer's watch. After Leech's death she went back to her maiden name and took up with the family's former lodger, Ronald Sullivan, six years older, with whom she had two more children. Together they opened the house on Devon Drive as a home for the elderly and chronically ill, and the county authorities accepted her as a competent nurse.
On January 12, 1935, Miss Blagg of the County Nursing Association asked them to take two new residents at thirty shillings a week. Louisa Baguley was an eighty-nine-year-old widow, and her daughter Ada, fifty, was disabled by a progressive disease, described then as disseminated sclerosis or "creeping paralysis", that had left her unable to walk; her mother could no longer look after her. The only other resident, a Mrs. Kemp, died in February of an illness that had been treated with large doses of morphine, and some of the drug stayed in the house after her death. With her went most of the home's income.
Ada's existing will left her savings of about £1,600 in trust for her mother, and after her mother's death to two cousins, Lawrence Baguley and Fred Gilbert. On May 4, she called in her solicitor, Mr. Lane, and changed her will, leaving everything instead to Waddingham and Sullivan on the condition that they care for her and her mother for the rest of their lives. Whether the idea was Ada's or was pressed on her has never been settled; it was suggested that Waddingham had threatened to send the two women to the workhouse because she could not afford to keep them. Eight days later, on Sunday, May 12, Louisa Baguley died. Heart trouble in a woman of nearly ninety raised no questions, and she was buried.
Ada lived on at Devon Drive through the summer. A friend, Mrs. Briggs, visited on Tuesday, September 10, and found her in good spirits and promised to have her over for tea in a couple of days. The next morning Waddingham telephoned Ada's doctor, Dr. Mansfield, to say she had gone into a coma; by the time he arrived she was dead, and he put it down to a cerebral hemorrhage. Waddingham showed him a letter dated August 29 in which Ada asked to be cremated. Sullivan had written it for her and she had signed it. Mansfield signed the certificates, and the papers went to Dr. Banks. A cremation could not go ahead without notice to the family, and Waddingham said Ada had no relatives. She had cousins.
The coroner, Wilfred Rothera, ordered a post-mortem at the Leenside Mortuary, and analysis of Ada's organs found more than three grains of morphine. The Home Office's senior analyst, Dr. Gerald Roche Lynch, confirmed it, and on September 30 Louisa Baguley was exhumed. There was morphine in her too. An inquest into both deaths closed on January 30, 1936, with a verdict of murder against Waddingham and Sullivan, and both were arrested. Waddingham had recently given birth to her fifth child and nursed the baby on remand.
They were tried together before Mr. Justice Goddard at the Nottinghamshire Assizes on the charge of murdering Ada Baguley. The trial opened on February 24 by most accounts, though some date it to the 4th. Norman Birkett, far better known for defending, led the prosecution; J. F. Eales defended. On the second day the judge discharged Sullivan for lack of real evidence against him. Waddingham's defense was that Dr. Mansfield had given her morphine tablets for Ada's pain. Mansfield denied it flatly: he had prescribed morphine for Mrs. Kemp, he said, not for Ada. In the witness box Waddingham said Ada had been depressed and in great pain and that she had given her up to ten tablets over two days. She had told the police something different before the post-mortem results were known: that Ada had eaten a large lunch on the Tuesday and seemed well. Under Birkett's questioning she admitted serving the invalid pork, baked potatoes, kidney beans and two helpings of fruit pie, a meal the judge suggested no nurse with common sense would give a patient in pain, and she admitted throwing away the bottle and the medicine glass Ada had last used.
On February 27, the third day, the jury took two and a quarter hours to convict and added a recommendation to mercy. Goddard sentenced her to death. The Court of Criminal Appeal, with Lord Chief Justice Hewart presiding, dismissed her appeal on March 30, and on April 14 the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, announced there would be no reprieve; the Home Office worked to an unwritten rule that poisoners were not reprieved. On the eve of the execution a crowd gathered outside Birmingham's Winson Green Prison, led by the abolitionist Violet Van der Elst, whose loudspeaker lorries played hymns and carried placards against hanging the mother of five children. By the morning it numbered about two thousand, with some five hundred police. Thomas Pierrepoint, assisted by his nephew Albert, hanged her on April 16, 1936. She was the only woman ever executed at Winson Green, and she was buried in the prison grounds. The Home Office file, opened at the National Archives in 2004, adds what the crowd never knew. After the sentence she had claimed to be pregnant, and a medical examination found she was not. Shortly before the hanging she confessed to both murders. The same file records that Ada Baguley's fiancé took his own life after her death, and it puts the crowd on the last morning at ten thousand, five times the figure in other accounts.
1899 or 1900: Dorothea Nancy Waddingham is born at Hucknall, near Nottingham.
1925: she marries Thomas Leech.
January 12, 1935: the County Nursing Association asks the home at 32 Devon Drive to take in Louisa Baguley and her daughter Ada.
February 1935: another resident, Mrs. Kemp, dies after treatment with large doses of morphine.
May 4, 1935: Ada Baguley changes her will to leave everything to Waddingham and Ronald Sullivan.
May 12, 1935: Louisa Baguley dies and is buried.
September 1935: Ada Baguley is found in a coma and dies; Waddingham produces a letter asking for cremation.
September 1935: Dr. Cyril Banks refuses to let the cremation go ahead and takes his doubts to the coroner.
September 30, 1935: Louisa Baguley is exhumed, and morphine is found in her body.
January 30, 1936: an inquest returns a verdict of murder against Waddingham and Sullivan, and both are arrested.
February 1936: the trial opens before Mr. Justice Goddard (February 24 by most accounts, the 4th by some); Sullivan is discharged on the second day.
February 27, 1936: the jury convicts Waddingham with a recommendation to mercy, and she is sentenced to death.
March 30, 1936: the Court of Criminal Appeal dismisses her appeal.
April 14, 1936: the Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, announces there will be no reprieve.
April 16, 1936: Thomas Pierrepoint hangs her at Winson Green Prison.