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By Root 176 0

on Thursday 10th August 1871, when six prominent local men and women, including Mrs Emily Beard, received parcels of poisoned fruits and cakes, couriered on a train to Brighton from Victoria Station. This time, two of Mrs Beard’s servants had been invited to taste her gift; they had duly eaten a poisoned plum cake and fallen ill. Mrs Beard’s household was not alone: one of the Beard’s neighbours had also been poisoned, along with the editor of the local newspaper. And, once again, Christiana Edmunds had received one of the poisoner’s parcels. When the Police arrived to remove her parcel, she told them that that she feared for her safety, as it seemed impossible that the culprit could ever be found. ‘How very strange’, she said, ‘I feel certain that you’ll never find it out’. After she had shut the door on the local boys in blue, she took up her pen and paper, and wrote her latest letter to Dr Beard, drawing much attention both to Mrs Beard’s near miss, and to the Barker inquest earlier in the summer.

Christiana was taunting the Police, and she was taunting Dr Beard; in fact, she was taunting everyone. Did she want to be caught? If so, she had sown the seeds of her own capture. It was after he received that latest letter that Dr Beard decided to go to the Police and voice his suspicion that Christiana Edmunds might have something to do with it all. He handed over the large cache of letters which she had continued to write to him, even after her banishment from his presence. That he had kept these letters, secretly, meant that they were potentially incriminating to him as well; but he concluded that the seriousness of the situation required him to face his own, social judgement. The Brighton Police decided to test his theory. They wrote to Edmunds about the Barker case, and received a reply in the same hand as the doctor’s correspondence. They decided that the matter warranted further investigations.

Christiana was arrested a week after that last batch of poisoned parcels arrived. Immediately, the Police began to ask around about Miss Edmunds and what she did, and suddenly, many small and unconnected incidents began to make sense. It did not take long to discover that she had left Brighton on Tuesday 8th August to spend two days in Margate, attending to family business. Further enquiries indicated that she had then caught the train to London, before returning to Brighton from Victoria on the Thursday in question. She was on the same train that carried the poisoned post, and had been placed at the scene of the crime However, what exactly was the crime? The Police worked forwards from Dr Beard’s letters. They concluded that the motive must be sex: Christiana was demonstrably in love with Dr Beard, and had decided that her only hope at union lay in the removal of Mrs Beard from this mortal coil. Edmunds was charged with attempted murder.

This set the scene for her committal hearing, which began at the Brighton Police Court one week after her arrest, on 24th August 1871. Christiana appeared decked in black: a long silk dress, a lace shawl, and a veiled bonnet. Over the course of three hearings over the next fortnight, many witnesses provided pieces in the jigsaw. Dr Beard testified to the events of September 1870, when his wife had fallen sick after eating chocolates. A boy called Adam May testified that he would run errands for Edmunds, taking forged prescriptions to druggists to obtain poisons. He would also purchase sweets and chocolates for her from Maynard’s. A chemist called Isaac Garrett testified that he had known Edmunds as ‘Mrs Wood’ for four years, and that in March 1871 and two subsequent occasions he had supplied her with strychnine. She had said she wanted to poison some local cats which had become a nuisance. Garrett said that a local milliner called Mrs Stone had vouched for Edmunds’s good character. There were others who were called to the stand, too, placing Edmunds at the scene of other poisoning events, hitherto unknown.

It quickly became apparent that enough evidence existed to charge Edmunds with additional