Benjamin Geering got better when somebody else started feeding him. He was eighteen, or about twenty by the Times, he had fallen ill on Easter Sunday, he had been vomiting for weeks and complaining of a hunger nothing would satisfy, and he was the fourth member of his household to fall ill that way in seven months. The other three were dead and buried in Guestling churchyard. A Hastings surgeon named Ticehurst changed the young man's diet, had him taken out of his mother's care, watched him recover, and drew the conclusion that follows from it. Within days the coroner had a warrant out to dig up the graves.
The marriage at the center of the case was not one Mary Ann Geering had wanted. She was born Mary Ann Plumb in 1800 at Westfield in Sussex, the eldest of five children of George Plumb, an agricultural laborer, and went into service young, at Coghurst Farm. She became pregnant by Richard Geering while still a teenager; the Spectator, writing the week of her execution, put her age at sixteen, though another account has her going into service at eighteen and meeting him there. They married at Westfield parish church, and the child was born three months later. Under the bastardy laws then in force the parish officers could compel a marriage to keep a child off the rates, and they did. She was carried into church. Ten children followed, eight of whom were living when she went to trial.
Richard Geering was fifty-six, a laborer, and the couple lived in a cottage on the Green at Guestling, a few miles inland from Hastings. On two occasions in the late summer of 1848 he was taken ill immediately after eating his dinner; his fellow laborers later described it in court. He lingered a while and died on September 13. Nobody suspected anything, though the body was noted at the time to be in an unusually bad state after death.
George Geering, twenty-one and living at home, died on December 27. He had complained to the attending surgeon, J. I. Pocock, of having heat on his inside. James Geering, twenty-six, also living at home, died on March 6 the following year. All three men had suffered the same violent vomiting, and Pocock had attended all three.
Three weeks after James was buried, Benjamin began to show the same symptoms with the unnatural hunger on top of them. Ticehurst was called in alongside Pocock, altered what the young man was eating, and he began to mend. That was the whole of the medical breakthrough in this case: a change of diet and a recovery.
N. P. Kell, the coroner for the rape of Hastings, opened an inquest at the White Hart Inn at Guestling on Friday, April 27, 1849. He issued a warrant for the exhumation of Richard, George and James, and the next morning the three coffins were dug out of the churchyard and carried into the church to await him. A small piece of white, gritty matter was recovered from George's stomach. The stomach contents went to Alfred Swaine Taylor at Guy's Hospital in London, and his analyses found arsenic in Richard and James. In George the poison was mercury.
Mary Ann Geering was arrested on April 28 and taken to Hastings Gaol. Her three youngest children went to the poor house. On May 7 she was examined at length at the Town-hall before the county magistrates, Mr. Briscoe and Mr. Staines among them, on suspicion of poisoning her husband and three of her sons. The Times, which had reported the inquest a week earlier, reported that too.
The evidence that made the case was a shop ledger and a chemist's memory. Pittman, a chemist at Hastings, testified that she had been a regular customer and had bought arsenic from him on four separate occasions, two pennyworth at a time. He called that a large quantity to sell over the counter and said he would not have sold as much to a stranger. She had told him it was for rats. Other witnesses established that the reasons she gave for the purchases were untrue.
Her trial came on at the Lewes Assizes in the first days of August 1849. The Patriot, reporting on the sixth, described her as a woman of masculine and forbidding appearance, aged forty-nine, and placed the arraignment on a Wednesday, which would put it on the first of the month. She was arraigned for the murder of her husband, the murder of two of her sons, and the attempted murder of a third, and this is the part of the case that the record is precise about and later accounts are not: the prosecution proceeded on the count concerning Richard Geering alone. The other three counts were never tried.
So the jury that convicted her heard about the sons as evidence rather than as charges, and it heard about them mainly from Benjamin. The son she had been accused of trying to poison gave evidence describing his father's death and those of his two brothers, and the symptoms in each. A newspaper account of the period put it as convicting her largely on the testimony of the son she had tried to kill.
She had counsel only because her daughter asked for it. A Mr. Hust volunteered to appear for her after the girl begged that her mother not go undefended, and he argued the one point available: that there was no motive worth killing for. Richard had inherited twenty pounds two years earlier and there was money due from a burial club, but as Hust told the jury, the club money would be very nearly swallowed up by the cost of the funerals.
The jury was out ten minutes. She heard the death sentence almost unmoved.
In the sixteen days between the verdict and the drop she made the admissions the court had not asked her for. She confessed to the murder of two of her sons and to attempting to murder a third. By the Spectator's account she was penitent and wrote several affectionate letters to her surviving family, and the chaplain at Lewes spared her the ordeal of attending her own condemned sermon.
She was hanged in public at Lewes at noon on August 21, 1849. The Times reported that between three and four thousand people turned out to watch, and recorded that no feeling was manifested when she mounted the scaffold. She was hanged outside the Lewes House of Correction. The body was cut down after an hour, when very few of the crowd were left, and buried within the prison precincts at four o'clock.
One of them was a woman named Hannah French. Three years later French poisoned her own husband with an onion pie at Broomhill, and when the Lewes authorities came to consider her case they concluded that watching Mary Ann Geering hang had given her the idea. French was hanged at Lewes in 1852, the last woman to be executed publicly there, and the town stopped holding public executions, on the reasoning that a crowd at a scaffold was as likely to teach the method as to deter it. Parliament abolished public hanging across England sixteen years later. In Sussex the argument had been settled in front of the Geering gallows.
Some details stay unsettled. The contemporary Times gives December 27, 1848 for George's death, and a modern retelling places it in January. Benjamin's age is given as eighteen in most accounts and about twenty in the Times report of the inquest. A modern retelling dates the trial to August 5, 1849, but the Patriot's contemporary report places the arraignment on a Wednesday, and August 5 that year fell on a Sunday, when no assize court sat.