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  He also had a temper and, when he was drunk, it often manifested itself violently. With a loaded pistol in his hand, he once kept a girl in his room overnight, swearing he would blow her brains out if anyone tried to enter. On another occasion, he chased a girl through the house armed with the same pistol.

  The girls said he never seemed short of money. He earned some cash by providing private French tutoring and also by giving unofficial medical treatment – generally to acquaintances and to fellow French émigrés. One, a woman, admitted receiving some sort of treatment from him but refused to divulge the nature of the illness, which suggested it may have been a sexually transmitted disease or perhaps an abortion.

  As his conviction in England proved, he was not above forcing himself on a woman. In January 1867, a Miss Ellen Lucy Holme applied for the position of housekeeper in the Chantrelle home. She was shown into the dining room to be interviewed by Chantrelle who listened sympathetically as she relayed to him how unhappy she was, living with her father, a clergyman, and her stepmother, who was ‘not kind’. Miss Holme, then around twenty-seven, was grateful for his kind words but then things turned nasty. He attacked her, threw her down on the floor and, one hand clamped over her mouth to stifle her screams, raped her. This one act of ‘forcible connection’ made her pregnant and she gave birth to his illegitimate son in September that year. She was adamant that Chantrelle, and only Chantrelle, could possibly be the father.

  That he owned a pistol was common knowledge – especially after an incident during a holiday in Portobello when one of his sons got hold of it and fired it, slightly injuring both his brother and his father. Elizabeth was also no stranger to her husband’s rages – or, indeed, the pistol. He often threatened her with it and even blasted away at a door in the house to practise his aim. Not content with taking out his abusive rages on the working girls, he also regularly turned on his wife. On one occasion, again while on holiday in Portobello, he stayed out all night and when he returned, Elizabeth had gone to bed. In a subsequent letter, she told her mother:

  I might have been sleeping for about an hour or more when I was awakened by several blows. I got one on the side of the head which knocked me stupid. When I came to myself I could not move my face and this morning I find my jaw bone out of its place, my mouth inside skinned and festering and my face all swollen. The servants who sleep in the next room heard it all … they heard him say that he would make mincemeat out of me. And terrible language …’

  She told her mother that he had often threatened to kill her. He said he would use his medical knowledge to poison her in such a way that no one would ever detect it. Elizabeth was desperately unhappy and the love she had felt – or at least thought she had felt – quickly died in the early days of the marriage. She told one servant, Jemima McGregor, that she hated her husband, that she had married too young and had known no better. According to Jemima, Elizabeth said she’d had another sweetheart before Chantrelle, a draper, who she had liked better. Divorce, though, was not an option. There had already been enough scandal attached to the family thanks to the manner of the marriage.

  She also knew of her husband’s sexual proclivities, telling the servant that she was convinced he was visiting ‘a bad house’. She said her husband had told her that, in France, this was common – a husband would go with other women with his wife’s knowledge while a wife would go with other men.

  Jemima witnessed Chantrelle’s abuse. She often heard the couple arguing and, on one occasion, the master threatened to pull up his wife’s clothes and ‘whip her bottom’. He actually pulled her over his knee and started to hitch up her skirts. Jemima, for decency’s sake, looked away, but she heard him beating Elizabeth. She said he often called his wife a whore and a bitch. ‘I think Mr Chantrelle was not a proper person,’ she said.

  Sometimes the abuse would be too much for Elizabeth and she would go home to her mother – despite the fact that some of her family had no sympathy for her because of the circumstances surrounding her wedding. But, each time, she would return to Chantrelle – and more violence. Given that she was so miserable, it will come as no surprise that she sought solace in other men. Jemima McGregor said that Madame Chantrelle received visits from a Mr Gillespie, a clerk who worked in rooms below their apartment. The servant said that she often heard them together, alone in a room. Later Mme Chantrelle confessed that Mr Gillespie had kissed her but, as Jemima said, ‘from her hair being down and the state of her dress I thought they had been doing more than kissing’.

  Chantrelle heard about the affair after his wife sacked Jemima McGregor. The twenty-four-year-old maid was a good-looking young woman and it seems Mme Chantrelle was convinced she and her husband had been enjoying a dalliance. Jemima did not take the termination of employment, or the accusation of adultery, lying down for, one night, she and her aunt returned to the Chantrelle house to have it out with Elizabeth. During the resulting argument, she accused Elizabeth of taking men into the house while her husband was out. Mr Gillespie downstairs was named and he eventually gave Chantrelle a written apology for behaving in such an inappropriate manner. A young man, who worked at the bank, was also named and, at first, Mme Chantrelle denied this but, after some pressing – no doubt violently – she admitted to ‘repeated adulterous intercourse’ with him. Chantrelle challenged the man and, through blackmail, wrung a £50 solatium out of him in return for not informing his employers about his improprieties. Chantrelle later said this money was donated to a hospital in his hometown of Nantes but, given his expensive tastes in nightlife and his meagre bank balance, this was probably not the case. Chantrelle magnanimously forgave Elizabeth for her indiscretions.

  However, according to Chantrelle, life with his beloved was no bed of roses. Although he admitted she was seldom ill and, when she was, she preferred him to treat her, he said, ‘My wife did have her peculiarities. I do not know if she thought I was sufficiently attentive to her. I was as attentive to her as I could be. I had a great deal to do. I was not at all jealous of her.’

  However robust her physical health, he claimed her mental state was far from stable. As well as flouncing out of the house without the slightest provocation, she also, more than once, threatened suicide. To an extent, this picture of a delicate mental condition is borne out by the tone of some of her earlier letters, in which she is given to dramatic flourishes of romantic language, but how much of what Chantrelle subsequently claimed is true can only be guessed. He said that she threatened to drown herself. On one occasion, he told her to ‘go and do it’ and she stormed from the house. Later, he went out on other business and subsequently met up with her. She said to him, ‘You are a nice man to let me go and drown myself.’

  He replied, ‘You have been going to do that so often that I cannot always be running after you to prevent it.’

  At other times, he would come into her bedroom, where she washed herself in a tub, to find her ready to put her face in the water. Sometimes she would appear to be in a swoon and he would lay her on the bed and rub her hands to bring her round – despite the fact that he did not believe she had actually fainted while in the water. He told her that, one of these times, he would leave her all night in the bath. On one occasion, he found her on the floor apparently in a dead faint. He told her she had not convinced him and she did not try that trick again. He said she was in the habit of reading ‘penny trashy novels’ and this was her attempt at recreating scenes from them.

  He appeared indignant when she accused him of paying attention to other women, which was a bit of a cheek considering his nocturnal activities. She objected to him tipping his hat to female students but, bearing in mind how she got involved with him, it was perhaps not unreasonable that she requested him not to do this. He also claimed she once accused him of watching a woman in a lodging house across the street and ‘stroking his chin at her’. He lost a family of lodgers because she believed he was having an affair with the mother. She firmly believed he was playing around with Jemima McG
regor although her suspicions in this case might well have been groundless.

  But one thing she did know for certain was that he had insured her life for £1,000. ‘Mama,’ she said to her mother on one occasion, ‘my life is insured now and you will see that my life will go soon.’

  Things in the Chantrelle household were deteriorating badly. With Chantrelle’s volatile nature, his extra-marital activities, his wife’s suspicions and a meagre bank balance, something was bound to happen.

  In the early hours of Wednesday 2 January 1878, the Chantrelles’ new servant, Mary Byrne, heard a strange moaning coming from her mistress’s bedchamber. She knew that she and the master had not slept together for some time and Mme Chantrelle had retired early the previous night complaining of feeling unwell. She had already vomited once and had been suffering from a severe headache. As was her custom, she took their youngest child, then aged thirteen months, to bed with her. Chantrelle said that he had heard the child crying through the night and had taken the baby from his wife’s bed in order that she was not disturbed.

  Mary Byrne, hearing the odd sounds, went into Mme Chantrelle’s room and found her unconscious. She called M. Chantrelle and he came in, obviously having been roused from bed. He looked at his wife and then told Mary he could hear the baby crying. She went to see to the child who was still fast asleep. When she returned to Mme Chantrelle’s room, she saw the master walking back from the window and could smell a strong odour of gas.

  Dr James Carmichael had a practice in Burntisland but lived in Edinburgh’s Northumberland Street. Although he was known to Chantrelle, for both were members of the Red Cross Knight Order of Masons, he was surprised to find the man at his front door, asking him to come to his house for his wife was very ill. He knew Chantrelle lived in George Street and other doctors lived close by but there he was at his door. Dr Carmichael accompanied the tall Frenchman back to his home. There, he found the patient lying ‘profoundly unconscious’ in bed in a back room. She was obviously very ill as she looked extremely pale. Dr Carmichael said with ‘her respiration very much interrupted’, she was ‘breathing at intervals only’. He could smell gas and he ordered that the woman be moved into a front room. Chantrelle said that he did not know where the gas was coming from – he had checked the pipes and turned off the stopcock. The doctor suggested that the supply should be turned off at the meter and Mary Byrne was sent to do so.

  Had he not smelled the gas, the doctor might have thought at first Mme Chantrelle had been poisoned or drugged. Her eyes were virtually insensible to light – there was a slight contraction when the flame of a candle was brought closer but, in the main, the pupils were immobile. Although this could be one symptom of poisoning, there was no sign of the muscle contractions, spasms or sweating which he might also expect to see. There was some evidence of cyanosis – blueness – around the lips and traces of vomit on the bed sheets and pillowcase. When he arrived, he also spotted some matter oozing from the side of her mouth and he dislodged a wedge of what appeared to be orange pulp from her mouth.

  However, the plain and simple truth of it was that Dr Carmichael could smell gas. So he sent a note to Dr Henry Littlejohn, a professional toxicologist, who was also the police surgeon for the City of Edinburgh, saying, ‘If you wish to see a case of coal-gas poisoning, I should like you to come up here at once.’

  Dr Carmichael had suggested that a nip of brandy should be given to the unconscious woman but, as he waited for Dr Littlejohn, he noted that the level of spirits in the bottle was falling steadily and neither he nor the patient was drinking it. Clearly, M. Chantrelle had been imbibing heavily throughout the morning but that could easily be put down to worry over his wife’s health. Artificial respiration was attempted but nothing could revive the woman. When Dr Littlejohn arrived he thought she was dead and ordered that she be removed to the city’s Royal Infirmary.

  Being a police surgeon, he knew something of the troubles between the Chantrelles for, on at least two occasions, his law-enforcement colleagues had been called to the house. He went into the back room with Dr Carmichael to trace the source of the gas leak but could find nothing. The apparently worried husband had been told to remain with his wife and continue the artificial respiration but, much to the surprise of the medical men, he gave up and joined them in the back room. Again he said he could not account for the smell of gas, suggesting that it was perhaps coming up through the floorboards.

  Elizabeth Chantrelle was taken to the Royal Infirmary where she died at four o’clock that afternoon. Dr Littlejohn and Dr Douglas MacLagan, who had worked together in the Pritchard case, conducted the post-mortem. By the end of it, they were unsure what exactly had killed the young woman but they were certain of one thing – it was not gas. They noted no bright patches on the skin as they would expect to find and there was no odour when they opened the cavities, in particular the lungs. The woman’s blood was dark and fluid – in cases of coal-gas poisoning, the blood was usually more florid in colour. They would also have expected to find a smell of gas from the brain but, when the skull was opened, there was no such odour.

  They had no doubt the woman had been poisoned. They just didn’t know with what.

  Elizabeth Cullen Dyer Chantrelle was buried in her wedding dress on 5 January in Edinburgh’s Grange Cemetery – the same burial place of both Mrs Pritchard and her mother. Eugène was the very image of the grieving husband, even attempting to throw himself into the open grave after his beloved. It was a fine display of emotion and by all accounts an impressive performance. Yet a performance was all it was. Eugène Marie Chantrelle was no devoted husband, left desolate by the sudden death of his young wife. He was a lying, cheating, scheming, whore-monger who had systematically abused his wife for years before callously murdering her in order to obtain the £1,000 from the insurance policy he had taken out on her life. He had boasted he would poison her in such a way that no one would ever detect it. With the finest medical brains in Edinburgh scratching their heads over the cause of death, he probably thought he would be laughing all the way to the bank.

  But those fine medical brains were still convinced the woman had been poisoned. Their initial examination of the body revealed little. However, their study of the vomit on the bed sheets proved very enlightening. They found traces of grapes and orange in the sample while her stomach contents revealed she had eaten both fruits. But it wasn’t the fruit that was to be her husband’s undoing. Chemical analysis revealed traces of opium – and a police investigation discovered that M. Chantrelle had bought a large supply of that very drug. But, although they found a selection of narcotics and poisons in Chantrelle’s study – used in his unofficial medical duties – they found no opium.

  And examination of the gas supply revealed that a pipe under the window – the one Mary Byrne had seen Chantrelle walking away from – had been sabotaged. Quite obviously, someone had simply twisted the thin pipe until it ruptured.

  On his return from the funeral, Chantrelle was arrested. He denied everything, of course, suggesting his wife was capable of taking her own life, that she suffered from depression, that she had threatened to kill herself with laudanum, which was an opium-based sedative.

  It has to be said that the case against him was largely circumstantial. Apart from the fact he had bought a supply of opium, there was no evidence that he had actually administered it to her, either in the fruit or in lemonade he was known to have bought and served at New Year. Even when the body was exhumed for further examination, scientists could still find no trace of the poison. But the abuse he inflicted on her during their nine years together, coupled with his sexual adventures among the city’s working girls and the existence of the recently purchased insurance policy, all combined to convince the Crown they had a case for murder and Chantrelle was remanded in custody.

  The French Consul in Edinburgh took an interest in the case and requested that the Crown Office supply a copy of the indictment. In a letter, the consul said that as this ‘was t
he first time in living memory that a Frenchman of some notoriety is tried for murder in Scotland, the Law Office (of the Foreign Office in Paris) feel a very natural curiosity to know intimately the proceedings of your Court of Justice in such a case.’ The indictment also caused a very public falling-out between the proprietors and editor of the Edinburgh Evening News and the procurator fiscal’s office. The newspaper published an extract from the indictment prior to it being made public. The Crown Office and procurator fiscal wanted to know how such a leak happened, insisting that no such indictment had been in existence when the newspaper printed its story on 8 April 1878. The newspaper revealed that the information came from someone they considered reliable and added that they ‘had no expectation that its publication should have caused surprise to any one, seeing that the case is one in which considerable public interest taken’. They also chided the authorities, saying:

  If gentlemen occupying official positions would deal more generously with the press and give access to documents of public interest as soon as they could do so, consistently with the proper discharge of their duties, complaints of this kind could be less numerous. It is impossible even in the High Court of Justiciary for our reporters to obtain an indictment until a prisoner pleads, while according to your letter it is public property as soon as it is served.

  While Chantrelle sat in Edinburgh’s Calton Jail preparing his defence – asking for various scientific books from his home to assist him – the authorities continued to build their case. The procurator fiscal travelled north to Inverness to interview Jemima McGregor whom, he knew, had been with the accused ‘when a matter of some delicacy’ was discussed – namely, his wife’s infidelities. The procurator fiscal also applied for permission from the Crown Office to pay Mary Byrne the sum of seven shillings per week for room and board until the trial. After the murder, she had taken up service in a house in Murrayfield but had resigned when her new employers refused to let her attend chapel. She was staying with friends but planned to go back to Ireland if she could not find another job. The Crown Office said that payment ‘would be expedient in this case’.