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The strange case of Catherine Foster who poisoned her husband. |
Catherine was one of
two teenage girls executed in the period from 1840 - 1868. She was just seventeen years old when she
poisoned her twenty four year old husband, John Foster a farm labourer, to whom she had been married for only three
weeks, at
John and Catherine
had known each other since she was at the village school and had been having a
relationship for two years or so, after Catherine had left school at the age of
fourteen and gone into service. John was
seven years Catherine’s senior and it is probable that he was rather more keen on her than she was on him. He also wanted to move out of his mother’s
home as his sisters both had small children who got on his nerves. The relationship with Catherine continued and
he persuaded her to marry him, which she did on Wednesday the 28th of October
1846 at
On Tuesday the 17th
of November 1846 Catherine decided to cook dumplings and potatoes with tea for
dinner. That afternoon her mother and
John were out at work so only Catherine and her younger brother, eight year old
Thomas, were in the house. John was a
healthy young farm labourer who had previously
enjoyed good health. He came home from
work some time after six o’clock and went into the yard to wash his hands
before eating. Catherine and Thomas were
eating when he came back in and she took his dumpling, wrapped in a cloth, from
the stove and gave it to him. He began
to eat it but almost immediately became ill and had to go back into the yard
where he threw up. Catherine took the
remains of John’s dumpling out into the yard and broke it up for the
chickens. By seven o’clock when Mrs.
Morley returned John had gone up to bed, retching and experiencing severe
stomach cramps. This continued through
the night and in the morning Catherine went to the nearby
Mr. Jones and another
local surgeon carried out the autopsy and removed John’s stomach for analysis which
was sent to Mr. A. E. Image in Bury St. Edmunds. He detected a large amount of
arsenic in it and confirmed that this was the cause of death. John was not the only victim, the chickens,
who had eaten bits of the dumpling and John’s vomit which Mrs. Morley had
thrown into the adjoining ditch, had also died. Their crops were found to
contain arsenic and suet, an ingredient of dumplings. The coroner’s jury returned a verdict of
murder and charged Catherine with the crime.
She was therefore arrested and committed to Bury St. Edmunds gaol,
charged with poisoning John. She passed
her eighteenth birthday in Bury St. Edmunds Gaol awaiting trial.
Catherine was
examined by the magistrates whilst in prison in the presence of the gaoler’s wife, Mrs. James.
Her mother was also present and took young Thomas with her. Catherine is alleged to have said to him “You
good for nothing little boy, why did you tell such stories” and refused a cake
he had brought her.
The police made a
search of Mrs. Morley’s cottage
on Monday the 24th of November. The constable of Melford,
George Green and Sergeant Rogers took samples of flour and also the muslin
cloths that were used for cooking dumplings in and sent them to Mr. Image for
analysis. The flour did not contain any
poison but one the muslin clothes tested positive for it.
Catherine was tried
at the Suffolk Lent Assizes on Saturday the 27th of March 1847 before the Chief
Baron, Sir Frederick Pollock, on the charge of the willful murder of John
Foster. She was attired in deep
mourning, appeared calm in court and pleaded not guilty. The prosecution was led by Mr. Gurney and he
called a number of witnesses to give the background to the case, John’s
previous robust health, the administration of the arsenic and the forensic
evidence from Mr. Image who had carried out Reinsch's
test and Marsh's test to be certain that what had been found in John’s stomach
was actually arsenic. Perhaps the most damning evidence against Catherine came
from her younger brother Thomas. On the
day that Catherine made the dumplings Thomas had got home from school at three
o’clock in the afternoon. He told the
court saw his sister empty the contents of a small paper packet into the
mixture and then throw the paper onto the fire. Elizabeth Foster, John’s mother
told the court that she had heard that her son was ill but by the time she got
to Mrs. Morley’s house he had died. When
she arrived she found Catherine and Mrs. Morley there and asked Catherine why
she had not been sent for earlier.
Catherine told her that John had been too ill to leave and that she had
nobody to go and fetch
Catherine’s defence was presented by Mr. Power who opened by saying that
in view of the handbills that had been circulated around Suffolk proclaiming
his client a murderess before she was even tried it made a fair trial very
difficult. He endeavoured
to destroy the alleged motive for the murder by showing that Catherine and John
had actually been in love using the letters that she had written him before
their marriage, which were found in his effects after he had died. He also told the jury that when Catherine had
suggested visiting her aunt, John had told her to take a month but she returned
after just ten days. None of this
succeeded and the jury found Catherine guilty after fifteen minutes of
discussion. As it was nearly seven
o’clock in the evening sentencing was postponed until nine o’clock on the
Monday morning. Sir Frederick Pollock told her “And it is my melancholy duty to pronounce the sentence of
the law upon you, which in conformity and in obedience to the law of God,
requires that your life should be forfeited for the crime you have committed. I
would advise you to make the utmost use of the short time that may remain to
you in this world. Seek peace and mercy where now alone you will be able to
find them. It remains for but to pass the judgment of the law, that you be taken to the place from which you came, and thence to the
place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck till you are dead, and that
your body be buried in the precincts of the prison in which you shall last be
confined. And may God in His infinite mercy have compassion your soul.” Catherine displayed no emotion at the verdict and very
little when she was sentenced to death.
Little is reported of
her time in the condemned cell where she received the ministrations of the
chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Thomas West, the Gaol chaplain, the Rev. Mr. L. Ottley, her parish priest and the Rev. Mr. C. J. P.
Eyre. On Friday the 16th he preached the
condemned sermon in the Gaol chapel.
Catherine asked him to be with her at the execution. On the 12th of April, in the presence of Mr.
P. Macintyre, the prison’s governor, and Rev. Mr. West, the she made and signed
a written
confession in which she accepted her guilt and said that she deserved her
punishment but did not give any reason for the killing. Catherine asked Mr. Ottley
to take the bible he had given to John’s mother, as a memento to her son. She appears to not to have been hysterical as
some women were in this position and to have remained composed throughout her
time in the condemned cell.
The hanging was
carried out at 9.00 a.m. on Saturday the 17th of April 1847 by William Calcraft
on the New Drop gallows, erected in the meadow outside Bury St. Edmunds
Gaol. It was reported that having been
pinioned, Catherine walked unsupported through the prison to the stairs leading
to the iron door in the prison wall and through it onto the gallows. A warder tried to assist her to climb the
steps but she refused his help. As per
her request the Rev. Eyre was present.
On the platform she remained calm and surveyed the crowd. Catherine was asked by the governor, Mr.
Macintyre, if she had any final words and replied “No, I thank you Sir, I
cannot speak.” Calcraft then completed
the preparations.
It was recorded by the Bury Post
newspaper that when the bolt was drawn “her limbs were convulsed for a minute
or so and that she plucked at her gown with her pinioned hands. A thrill of horror ran through the crowd”
which numbered some ten thousand people, among them many women. The execution was described as a deeply
moving spectacle by witnesses. After
hanging for an hour Catherine’s body was taken down and removed to a room
inside the prison where a plaster cast was made of her head. It was afterwards buried within the prison as
was now the legal requirement and quicklime was added to the coffin, as it was
thought to speed decomposition.
Future executions at
this prison took place on the flat roof between the Infirmary and the entrance
to the Porter's lodge as it was felt that the crowd had been able to get too
close to the gallows and its teenage prisoner.
The iron door to the meadow had been installed for the execution of
William Corder on the 11th of August 1828.
After the body was
taken down a letter to her mother was discovered hidden in her bosom. Apparently Catherine did not want it
delivered to her mother as when asked by the governor if there was anything she
wanted him to do for her she answered no.
The contents of the letter are very strange, considering Catherine’s death
was so imminent. Here are several
paragraphs of this letter - “My dear Mother, I never wrote to you with so much
joy and pleasure in all the letters that I have wrote to you. Dear Mother, you
know I never had any wish to live and I wish it had pleased the Lord to call
before I had known anything. My dear
Mother, I hope you will make yourself happy for me, for I am going to a better
place than being in this world of trouble, and I wish I had been there ten
years ago, but I am glad to come to it at last.
Dear Mother, if my life could have been spared I did not wish for
it. This is from the bottom of my
heart. I have a great hope that I am
going to Heaven and there to see my Saviour face to face and also the dear
creature that I have injured (John) and the years that I might have spent in
pleasure with him on earth, I hope I shall rest with him in Heaven.”
It was reported that some years earlier Catherine had told her mother that she
wanted to die young, so perhaps this was her way of realising
this desire. As a child she was
withdrawn and silent and did not make friends.
What made a seventeen
year old girl poison her husband of three weeks? We cannot know but her confession makes it
clear that while she was not in love with John, she had no reason to hate him
or want him dead. There has never been
any suggestion that she stood to benefit financially from the murder. It has been suggested that she was pushed
into marriage by her mother but this was not what Maria Morley told the
court. In fact almost the opposite was
the case, she seemed concerned that Catherine was too
young at seventeen. The undelivered
letter to he mother likely offers the best clue to her motive.
She was the last
female to be hanged in public at Bury St. Edmunds. A pamphlet
was printed about the execution by an anti death penalty group decrying that a
seventeen year old girl was to be “PUBLICLY STRANGLED”.
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