Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [22]
There was a small problem, however: Dr Beard was already married. He now found himself a respected member of the local community who was being disloyal to his wife. Whatever he was up to, it was unwise. During the summer of 1870, the burden of deceit became too much, and Dr Beard asked Edmunds to stop writing to him: ‘This correspondence must cease, it is no good for either of us’. Edmunds did not stop. By now, she was used to calling on the Beards from time to time, and she used this familiarity to take additional action. One day in September 1870, Edmunds visited Mrs Emily Beard, the good doctor’s wife, with a gift of chocolate creams for her. Mrs Beard ate some of the chocolate, and was promptly, and violently sick afterwards. Dr Beard accused Edmunds of poisoning his wife, although Edmunds refuted the allegation. Instead, Christiana complained that she was as much a victim as Mrs Beard, for the same chocolates had made her sick too. Beard withdrew his accusation, but Edmunds was banished from the Beard household, after a last, climactic meeting in January 1871. Dr Beard also wished to banish Edmunds from his life, but in this respect he was not successful. The letters continued to arrive at his offices, sometimes forwarded to him from home, two or three times every week. He ignored them.
This might have just become another case of a spurned lover, except that over the next few months there were many further cases of people falling ill in Brighton after eating sweets and chocolates. None of these cases was newsworthy on its own, despite their personal drama. All of them featured a violent sickness, which passed quickly and without lingering harm. Consequently, stories of them spread by word of mouth rather than through the local media. Then on 12th June 1871, a man called Charles Miller, on holiday in Brighton with his brother’s family, bought some chocolate creams from a sweet shop called J.G.Maynard’s, ate a few, and gave one to his four year-old nephew, Sidney Barker. Miller became ill but recovered. Barker died.
This was altogether a more serious episode. It was necessary to hold an inquiry into the tragic event. Amongst those who came forward to give evidence at the inquest was Christiana, who claimed that she and her friends had also become ill after eating sweets from Maynard’s store. She blamed Mr Maynard for some personal discomfort caused the previous year, when the wife of a good friend had suffered a similar event. There was evidence to back this up, because tests before the inquest discovered strychnine in the chocolates sold by Maynard’s. What was not resolved at this inquiry was how the strychnine had come to be within the chocolates. As a consequence, a verdict of accidental death was recorded on the boy, and the shop owner John Maynard exonerated of any intentional poisoning. He destroyed all his stock.
If, at the time, Barker’s death was considered to be an unfortunate accident, there followed a series of occurrences to arouse suspicions of foul play. Shortly after the inquest on Sidney Barker, three anonymous letters were sent to the boy’s father urging him to sue Maynard for his son’s death. All the letters suggested that the ‘young lady’ who spoke to the inquest would be prepared to help in further proceedings. Did someone know more than had been discovered at the inquest? Also, the poisonings continued. A palpable sense of fear crept through the streets of the seaside town: where and who would the poisoner strike at next? The Police had no leads, and no obvious way of protecting the local population. They decided to make a public appeal. Brighton’s chief constable placed an advertisement in the local newspaper offering a reward for any information which led to the arrest of the poisoner.
That action became part of the endgame. Another element was the imminent departure of the Beards from Brighton to a new life in Scotland. The intrigue culminated