On Monday, March 20, 1843, a coroner's inquest sat in the Chequers Inn on the high street of Wrestlingworth, in Bedfordshire, over the exhumed body of William Dazley, a laborer who had died the previous October in his mid-twenties. The viscera were found to contain arsenic, and a warrant went out for his widow. Sarah Dazley had seen it coming. She had left the village for London, where Superintendent Blunden of the Biggleswade police found her in a rented room on Upper Wharf Street. She told him she was completely innocent, that she knew nothing about poisons and had never obtained any.
She had been born Sarah Reynolds at Potton, a few miles from Wrestlingworth, the daughter of the town barber, Philip Reynolds, and his wife, Ann. Most accounts put her birth in about 1819; one local history gives 1815, and a Bedfordshire library timeline makes her twenty-two when she died. Her father was jailed for debt in 1825 and died not long after his release. Local accounts describe a mother who had a string of relationships afterward, and a daughter who grew up pretty and confident and was seldom without an admirer. The press would call her the Potton Poisoner, after the town.
At nineteen she married a local man, Simeon Mead. They lived at Potton for two years and in 1840 moved to Tadlow, just over the county line in Cambridgeshire, reportedly to end one of her attachments. A son, Jonah, was born there in February 1840 and died in infancy; accounts give his age as seven months or nine. In October 1840 Simeon died suddenly too, and the village was shocked. Four months later, in February 1841, she married William Dazley, a twenty-three-year-old laborer, and they moved to Wrestlingworth. Both were popular, the local historian Ronnie Pickford has written, though some of the village women had their doubts about her.
She asked Ann Mead, a teenage relative of her first husband, to live with them; some accounts make Ann Simeon's daughter, others his sister. William objected, and the marriage went bad. He drank heavily at the village public house and at least once hit her. She told a friend, William Waldock, that she would kill any man who hit her.
Then William fell ill. Dr. Sandell of Potton prescribed pills, and under Ann Mead's nursing he began to recover. Sarah was seen throwing the prescribed pills away and putting something else in their place, and when challenged said she did not trust the doctor and had gone to the village healer. Ann Mead walked in on her rolling pills of her own. When William would not take them, Ann swallowed one to show him they were safe, and both were violently ill. Both recovered from that. William Dazley died on October 30, 1842, and after an inquest that found nothing amiss he was buried in Wrestlingworth churchyard.
Within weeks the banns were being read for Sarah's marriage to William Waldock, of Cockayne Hatley. Neighbors warned him not to go through with it, and he broke off the engagement at about the time the talk reached the local magistrate, Francis Pym. Pym persuaded the coroner, Ezra Eagles, to reopen the case, and William Dazley was dug up.
Suspicion reached back to Tadlow, and the bodies of Simeon and Jonah Mead were exhumed as well. Arsenic was found in the child. Simeon's body was too decomposed to test, and his death has never been more than a suspicion.
The trip back to Bedford after her arrest needed an overnight stop, and Blunden lodged her at the Swan Inn in Biggleswade in a room with three of the women who worked there. She slept badly and spent the night asking them about capital trials and hanging. They told Blunden, who thought it strange.
She was committed to Bedford Gaol on March 24, 1843, and spent the months before trial trying out defenses. In one, William had poisoned himself by accident. In another, William had poisoned Simeon and Jonah to have her to himself, and she had poisoned him in revenge. The local press called her a female Bluebeard. By the time of trial her counsel's case was that she had given William the poison by mistake.
She was tried on July 22, 1843, at the Bedfordshire Summer Assizes before Baron Alderson, for William's murder only; the charge over Jonah was held back in case the first failed. Two chemists testified that they had sold her arsenic. Ann Mead and a neighbor, Mrs. Carver, described the pill-making, and William Waldock repeated what she had said about killing a man who hit her. The arsenic in William Dazley's body was shown by the Marsh test, a method then only a few years old, and presented to the jury as forensic evidence. The jury took about thirty minutes. Alderson called her utterly heartless and sentenced her to death.
She was hanged at midday on Saturday, August 5, 1843, outside Bedford Gaol at Gallows Corner on Bromham Road. Bedford was described as swarming with spectators, and the crowd was put at more than ten thousand, by some counts twelve thousand; William Waldock was among them. The prison chaplain had visited her every day, and the press reported it understood she had made him some confession of her guilt.
She is often called the last woman publicly hanged in England. The more careful accounts say only that she was the last in Bedfordshire, or the only woman publicly hanged at Bedford Gaol, and later public hangings of women elsewhere in England make the wider claim wrong. She has also been called Britain's first female serial killer, a claim that runs into the fact that only one of the three deaths was ever proved against her.