Bloody Valentine Page 6

  Her sickness first manifested itself in October 1864 and, the following month, against her husband’s wishes, she went to Edinburgh to stay for a time with her mother, Jane Taylor. Once there, Mary Jane’s health improved greatly. Her colour returned, she put on weight and she was soon back to her old self. By Christmas, she was thought well enough to return to her Glasgow home and once again shoulder her wifely duties.

  But she should have stayed in Edinburgh for, within two weeks of her arriving back at Clarence Place, her illness returned – with a vengeance. She could not keep food or liquid down and soon all the weight she had gained while staying with her mother had dropped away. Catherine Lattimer, the cook, heard her throwing up in the pantry and on being summoned to Mrs Pritchard’s bedroom found her in agony from cramps in her stomach and sides. Her hands were also affected – during the attacks, the fingers became stiff and straight and the thumb was twisted underneath. ‘Catherine,’ said the seriously ill woman, ‘I have lost my senses. I never was as bad as this before.’

  Dr Pritchard arrived and gave his wife some spirits and water but the symptoms continued for some time afterwards. On the surface at least, her husband appeared deeply concerned by his wife’s condition. He contacted her cousin Dr James Cowan, also a doctor, and asked him to come to Glasgow and offer a second opinion. Pritchard said his wife was suffering from irritation of the stomach so Dr Cowan suggested that a mustard poultice be applied. He also prescribed small quantities of champagne. Once back home in Edinburgh, Dr Cowan contacted Mrs Taylor and suggested she go to Glasgow to relieve some of the household pressures on her daughter. There were only two servants and with a husband and four children to look after – at the time, the eldest daughter, Fanny, was staying with her maternal grandparents – things could not be easy.

  Meanwhile, Mary Jane’s condition was worsening. As her husband stood over her, the cook, Catherine Lattimer, heard Mary Jane say to him, ‘Don’t cry. If you cry, you are a hypocrite.’ Catherine Lattimer looked but saw no tears in the doctor’s eyes. As the ferocious stomach cramps struck her again, she demanded to see Dr William Gairdner, a noted physician who was resident in nearby Blythswood Square. Dr Gairdner, Professor of Medicine at the University of Glasgow, duly attended and was told by Dr Pritchard that his wife was suffering from catalepsy. Later, at the trial, Dr Gairdner would testify that Pritchard’s diagnostic skills were ‘a little at random’ and that he was not ‘a model of accuracy, wisdom and caution in applying names to things’. Mrs Pritchard, Dr Gairdner noted, was somewhat the worse for drink and Pritchard was forced to admit he had been giving her spirits on the advice of Dr Cowan. Dr Gairdner ordered him to stop giving the woman strong drink and promised to return the following day. When he did so, he found the patient much improved. While the two men conferred by the fire, Mrs Pritchard was heard to say, ‘You are hypocrites together.’ That was Dr Gairdner’s last visit to the Pritchard household. He did, however, write to Mary Jane’s brother, also a doctor, who had a practice in Penrith, and expressed a wish that she should lodge with him for a time. But Dr Pritchard said his wife was not well enough to travel. This was probably true but it was not his real reason for wishing to keep her at home.

  And then Mrs Taylor arrived to take charge. The seventy-year-old woman, alarmed by Dr Cowan’s description of her daughter’s condition, had rushed from Edinburgh to help. She immediately took over everything to do with Mary Jane’s wellbeing. She supervised her eating habits. She even slept in the same room so that she was available day and night. She wanted her daughter well again so that she could take care of her husband and her family once more. Mrs Taylor was a kind and considerate Victorian lady.

  But she was in the way now.

  On Monday 13 February, three days after her mother arrived to care for her, Mary Jane Pritchard decided she would like some tapioca. The fact that she was showing interest at all in food was a good thing so one of the children was sent to fetch some. The packet lay unattended on a table in the hall before it was taken into the kitchen. Half a cup full was prepared by Catherine Lattimer and taken upstairs to Mrs Pritchard’s room. Mary Jane only had a taste of the pudding, telling Catherine Lattimer that it was not very good and it was rather tasteless. However, Mrs Taylor ate the tapioca. The vomiting began almost immediately and she thought that she had developed a touch of whatever ailed her daughter. She could not have been more right.

  Eleven days later she was dead. By that time, Catherine Lattimer had left the household to take up another position but she often returned to visit the children and talk to Mrs Taylor. On 24 February, she spoke to the older woman who was still puzzled by her daughter’s condition. ‘I don’t understand her illness,’ she said. ‘She is one day better and two worse.’

  That night, servants Mary Patterson, who had replaced Catherine Lattimer as cook, and sixteen-year-old maid Mary McLeod found Mrs Taylor in the bedroom. She was sitting in an armchair, unable to move but gagging and retching. Her daughter sat in the bed, calling to her, ‘Mother, dear mother, can you not speak to me?’ Dr Pritchard was called and, as they moved the woman on to the bed, a small bottle fell from her dress which Mary Patterson recognised as Battley’s Sedative Solution, an opium-based drug which the woman used to combat severe headaches. Pritchard grabbed the bottle and, seeing it was half-empty, remarked, ‘Good heavens – has she taken this much since Tuesday?’

  He immediately sent for another medical man, Dr James Paterson – and so began one of the most puzzling aspects of the case. For this doctor had it in his power to save Mrs Pritchard but chose, for whatever reason, not to do anything. There was, however, nothing he could do to save poor Mrs Taylor. Pritchard had told him she had suffered an apoplectic fit but Dr Paterson knew that was not the case. It had also been hinted that she was addicted to laudanum but the cause of the elderly lady’s illness was not an overdose of opium. ‘If a person is in the habit of taking opium to a great extent,’ he said in evidence, ‘you generally find that they are not very good in colour. They are generally thin in features and hollow about the eyes – in fact, not of a healthy appearance generally.’ Mrs Taylor, he noted, was stout and healthy looking. He knew immediately, though, that she was under the influence of some drug – but not opium.

  As he had examined Mrs Taylor, he could not help but notice her daughter who was sitting up in bed and obviously in a very distressed state. She was ill, he knew that, and by her appearance – and her mother’s – he felt someone in this house was administering poison. More specifically, he suspected antimony. It is believed the ancient Egyptians discovered the poisonous qualities of antimony but, as usual, it was the Romans who used it to great effect, as an emetic. Revellers would eat and drink their fill, swallow some antimony and immediately vomit, thus clearing some space to continue with the feasting and imbibing. However, in small doses administered over a period of time, the substance is lethal. The victim suffers violent cramps, continuous vomiting, chronic diarrhoea, extreme weakness and depression. Violent cramp attacks the limbs and, towards the end, the skin can turn cyanotic or blue. Dr Paterson was a good enough physician to spot the signs in both women but, amazingly, despite his strong suspicions, he said nothing. He tried to rouse Mrs Taylor and was rewarded by a brief moment of consciousness, during which the ever-solicitous Pritchard said to his mother-in-law, ‘You are getting better, darling.’

  But Dr Paterson knew better. ‘Never in this world,’ he muttered.

  Announcing there was nothing he could do, Dr Paterson left. At just before 1 a.m. the following morning, he was asked to return but refused, believing it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened. He was right – at 1 a.m. Jane Taylor died.

  ‘Edward, can you do nothing yourself?’ Mary Jane asked her husband.

  He replied, bluntly, ‘No! What can I do for a dead woman? Can I recall life?’

  Dr Paterson was not finished with the Pritchard household yet. About one week after Mrs Taylor’s death, he met Pritchard in the street
who said he was going to Edinburgh the following day to bury his mother-in-law. Pritchard then asked Dr Paterson if, in his absence, he would be good enough to attend to his wife who was still suffering from gastric fever. Dr Paterson, knowing full well that she was not suffering from gastric fever, agreed. His subsequent examination only confirmed his initial suspicion of antimony poisoning. But, again, he said nothing.

  In court, he explained himself by saying, ‘I had no right. I was under no obligation.’ Even after his second visit, he declined to share his suspicions of murder with anyone, not even with the patient herself. Nor did he return to see her after that because, he said, he did not actually consider her his patient. He did not see her again until the night she died. ‘I had no right or title to go back and visit her,’ he said. ‘I would have considered myself intruding on the family had I done so.’

  In court, he also said it might not have been safe to mention his suspicions to Dr Pritchard but he refused to expand on his comment, despite being asked by the Solicitor General to do so. Amazingly, he was allowed to remain silent on why he did not mention anything to the apparently worried husband. He did tell the court that he believed the same person who had poisoned Mrs Taylor was also poisoning Mrs Pritchard but he was not pressed to any great extent as to why he kept his own counsel and allowed the second woman to die.

  He did, however, refuse to certify Mrs Taylor’s cause of death. He returned the form to the Registrar of Deaths for Blythswood District with a note saying:

  Dear Sir,

  I am surprised that I am called on to certify the cause of death in this case. I only saw the person for a few minutes a very short period before her death. She seemed to be under some narcotic; but Dr Pritchard, who was present from the first moment of the illness until death occurred, and which happened in his own house, may certify the cause. The death was certainly sudden, unexpected and to me mysterious.

  Pritchard duly obliged. According to him the cause of death was first paralysis and then apoplexy At the time, no one seemed to notice that it should have been the other way round.

  It was up to the letters pages of the press to criticise Dr Paterson’s role in the affair. He and his Glasgow colleagues defended his position. But that came later – and too late to save Mrs Pritchard.

  With Mrs Taylor out of the way, Dr Pritchard was free to make sure his wife was well looked after. He made her camomile tea and he gave it to Mary McLeod to serve to her. His wife vomited. On one occasion, he had Mary Patterson prepare an egg flip but he fetched the lump sugar himself to put in it. Curiously, the sugar came not from the kitchen, or even the dining room, but from his surgery. Mary Patterson sipped the drink before it was taken upstairs and announced, ‘What a taste it has!’ After drinking a glassful, Mrs Pritchard was violently ill – and so was Mary Patterson. The cook also fell victim to a piece of cheese she was asked to taste by the weakened Mary Jane – cheese provided by her husband. She felt a burning sensation in her throat, like pepper, and vomited throughout the night.

  What is puzzling, throughout all this, is that no one, apart from Dr Paterson and he was keeping his lip tightly buttoned, seemed to smell a rat – the rat in question being the good Dr Pritchard who was about to deliver the coup de grâce on his hapless wife.

  Although Mary Jane had being growing steadily weaker for months, she finally lost all sense of reality. Mary McLeod found her standing at the top of the stairs dressed only in her nightclothes and pointing at the floor saying, ‘There is my poor mother dead again.’ The maidservant called Mary Patterson and together they eased Mrs Pritchard back into bed. She complained of cramps in her hands and the servants began to rub them but the sick woman told them to leave her and rub her mother instead. Dr Paterson was called later that evening and was, it seems, greatly shocked by the change in the woman. If he had done something about it earlier, then perhaps that poor man’s shock could have been avoided. There was, however, nothing he could do for her now. His silence had sentenced her to death.

  At 1 a.m. on 18 March 1865, Mary McLeod was sent by Dr Pritchard to fetch a mustard poultice for his wife. By the time she returned, the poor woman’s suffering was over – and Pritchard had launched into his greatest display yet of hypocrisy. He threw himself on the bed, begging her to come back to him. The two Marys watched the show – one of them no doubt remembering his promise to marry her should his wife die. Once he had regained his composure, Pritchard went downstairs to write some letters – to his own mother, to Mary Jane’s relatives and to his bank, which was pressing him regarding an overdraft, and then he went out to post them. On his return, he told the cook a very strange story. ‘Mary Jane walked down the street with me,’ he said, ‘and told me to take care of the girls but said nothing about the boys.’ Then, he said, she kissed him and went away.

  Again, he certified the death himself, in this case claiming it was gastric fever. She was to be buried beside her mother in Edinburgh’s Grange Cemetery and, on Monday 20 March, he accompanied the body by train. The funeral was to take place on Thursday 23 March and, before interment, the body lay in the house of her father. Here, Pritchard treated spectators to another bizarre display of emotion. He asked for the lid to be removed and, as the family watched, he bent and kissed the cold, dead lips of his cold, dead wife.

  ‘Those lips,’ his defence counsel would later say, ‘which his hand had closed, suppose that is the case. One would almost believe the thunderbolt of the Almighty would have stricken down the man who would have done it.’ But obviously the Almighty was engaged elsewhere for there was no thunderbolt. However, there was one waiting for him back in Glasgow. Pritchard prepared to return home, no doubt believing that he had committed not one but two perfect murders. As far as he knew, no one suspected a thing. He was free and clear. But a conscience is a powerful thing – and someone’s had finally been pricked.

  The letter was anonymous but obviously written by an educated person. It arrived on the desk of Lanarkshire procurator fiscal William Hart shortly after Mrs Pritchard died. It read:

  Sir,

  Dr Pritchard’s mother-in-law died suddenly and unexpectedly about three weeks ago in his house in Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow, under circumstances at least very suspicious. His wife died today, also suddenly and unexpectedly and under circumstances equally suspicious. We think it right to draw your attention to the above, as the proper person to take action in the matter and see justice done.

  The letter was signed ‘AMOR JUSTICIAE’.

  Although never proved, the received wisdom is that the tip-off letter was the work of none other than Dr James Paterson. He confirmed he had discussed the matter with medical colleagues but denied he sent the letter, either personally or as part of a team. Even if he did have a hand in tipping off the authorities, the fact remains that what he did was too little, too late. Had he taken action after the death of Mrs Taylor, then perhaps Mary Jane Pritchard could have lived a long life.

  As he sat in his first-class railway carriage, speeding home to Glasgow, Dr Pritchard had no idea that his plans had careered off track. He chatted to a fellow passenger, even giving him one of his trademark photographic calling cards, before getting off the train at Queen Street Railway Station. Perhaps there was a spring in his step – maybe even a smile on his lips and a song in his heart as he walked down the platform. But that spring became unsprung, the smile died and the song went badly out of tune when he was stopped by Superintendent McCall, of Glasgow City Police, who informed him that there was a warrant in existence for his arrest on the charge of murder. The bearded doctor had expected to be safely home in Clarence Place that night but, instead, he found himself occupying a cell in the city’s North Prison on Duke Street. Later, he was transferred to Edinburgh’s Calton Jail to await trial.

  Naturally, he denied everything. He did not administer antimony to his dead wife – it was as simple as that. At this time, no one in his or his wife’s families or even members of the public at large, for that matter, belie
ved he was guilty. That changed when the post-mortem, carried out by Professor Douglas McLagan (who had examined the organs taken from Agnes Montgomery’s body), Dr Arthur Gamgee and Dr Henry Littlejohn, showed that there were particles of antimony in the liver. However, despite their findings, Pritchard’s protestations of innocence did not alter one jot. And when Mrs Taylor’s body was exhumed, examined and found to contain antimony, he never wavered. He was innocent. Even when evidence that he had bought the poison came to light, it failed to dent his apparent confidence.

  He impressed many people by his calm and gentle disposition. He prayed. He insisted he was unjustly accused. He prayed some more. His defence counsel expressed a feeling that not guilty and not proven verdicts were unlikely. But Pritchard said cheerily, ‘Keep up your heart, we will return to Glasgow together.’

  The trial, it seems, was the most eagerly awaited hearing since that of Madeleine Smith who was accused but acquitted of poisoning her lover in 1857. Pritchard’s trial began in Edinburgh on Monday 3 July 1865 and would last five days. Newspaper reporters from all over the country descended on the capital and the courtroom had to be specially adapted to allow them to report the proceedings to their rapt readers. Meanwhile, those members of the public who wanted to hear it for themselves crowded into Parliament Square to await the opening of the doors. Some of the lucky few – generally those of higher birth – had special tickets which meant they did not need to mingle with the great unwashed and were allowed in first. However, as soon as the doors opened officially, there was a rush for the remaining spaces. The upper and lower public galleries were filled to capacity and every available bit of space – standing and sitting – was taken. This was the trial of the year and every member of the eager audience craned forward, anxious for their first glimpse of the killer doctor.