Old - PVorld Trials.
37*
OLD-WORLD TRIALS. V. THE TRIAL OF WILLIAM DOVE. BEFORE the murder by Palmer of John Parsons Cook, poisoning by strychnia was, forensically speaking, almost unknown. There had been a shrewd suspicion that Miss Abcrcromby, whose death formed the subject of incidental inquiry in Wainsright v. Bland (1 Meeson & Welsby 32), had succumbed to this deadly alkaloid; and one of two cases of poisoning by verminkiller powders, of which strychnine is nearly always a constituent, had occurred. But poisoning as a fine art had made compara tively slight advances since the days of the Marchioness of Brinvilliers, and arsenic, opium and antimony seemed to exhaust the ingenuity of criminals. Now, although Lord Campbell in passing sentence of death upon Palmer had said, " I hope that this terrible example will defer others from committing such atrocious crimes, and that it will be seen, whatever art or experience or caution may accomplish, that such an offense will surely be detected and punished," the in ference which was vulgarly drawn from the Rugeley murders was of a precisely opposite character. The one fact which seemed to have impressed the public mind was that chemical analysis had not, and, as some said in their haste, could not reveal the presence of strychnine, and Palmer's conviction was attributed partly to the suicidal folly of which he had been guilty, partly to the splendid advocacy of Cockburn. The mis taken assumption that " there was no test for strychnia " both brought about and was removed by the cause celebre of the Queen v. William Dove. The prisoner was the son of a Mr. Chris topher Dove, a leather manufacturer in Leeds, -who djed at Christmas, 1854, leaving his son an income of £90 a year, on which
he lived. He was brought up as a farmer, but at the time when his wife died was without employment. Mrs. Dove was the daughter of equally respectable parents : her father was a leather merchant at Plym outh, named Jenkins, and her brother had married the sister of the prisoner. Dove was addicted to drink; his wife was a sickly, delicate woman, who was — to use his own language — a considerable " cost to him in doctors' bills "; his intellectual calibre, as will appear more fully hereafter, was feeble; and he had already fallen in love with a Mrs. Whitham, a widow of highly reputable character, who neither did nor said anything to encourage his advances. On 2d January, 1856, the adjourned inquest was held on the body of Cook who, as our readers are aware, had been poisoned by William Palmer in the preceding November; and on the 3d or 4th the papers proclaimed in every home in England, the news that Dr. Taylor and Dr. Rces had failed to find strychnia in the body of the murdered man. Dove read this and commented upon it to a person named Harrison, a soothsayer whom he had got into the habit of consulting. Forthwith he discovered that his house was infested with rats, purchased at first ten, and soon afterwards five grains of strychnia, and announced that he, had reason to believe that Mrs. Dove would not long survive the month of February, 1856. Sure enough, after a few preliminary attacks of the same character, she died on the first of March with all the peculiar symptoms of poisoning by strychnia. By violently resisting a post mortem examination, and falsely asserting that he did so in deference to the wishes of his late wife, Dove succeeded in attracting attention to himself and was duly arrested.
