Read Online Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum by Mark Stevens - Free Book Online

woman who satisfied certain stereotypes, and her
story included sex and murder. The tabloids christened Christiana
‘The Chocolate Cream Poisoner’.
    Born in
Margate, Kent, the daughter of a local architect, and sent to
private school, Christiana grew up in a household already touched
by insanity. For the Victorians, the mental illness found in
Christiana’s close family would prove to be a strong factor in her
own diagnosis. Hereditary insanity was marked: her father had
apparently gone mad before his early death, and two of her siblings
died in adulthood, a brother in Earlsfield Asylum in London, and a
sister allegedly by her own hand. Nevertheless, she came from a
very comfortable, middle class background, and was described at her
first trial as ‘a lady of fortune, tall, fair, handsome and
extremely prepossessing in demeanour’. From the age of around
fourteen, she lived alone with her sister and their mother, an
aging landlady..
    Little is
known about her early adult life, except that as a party to an
independent income, she did not need to work. The family moved to
Brighton in the mid 1860s. Her recorded history properly begins
when in the middle of 1869 she first met, then fell in love with a
Dr Charles Beard who lived nearby. She sent him love letters, and,
to begin with he reciprocated her friendship. In such times, any
form of intimacy was significant, and it appears that they carried
on some level of romantic relationship for the next few months. The
nature of this level has to remain a matter of conjecture, and the
extent of the relationship may have been greater in Christiana’s
mind than in reality. Dr Beard always maintained that there had
been no affair in a physical sense, but even if it was purely an
emotional affair, some sort of connection had been made.
    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