Trouble at Mill

The law

The legal definition of murder stretches back to the early part of the 17th century. The hugely influential English jurist Edward Coke laid down a description of murder for law that still stands today:

'Murder is when a man [interpreted to mean woman as well] of sound memory, and of the age of discretion, unlawfully killeth within any country of the realm any reasonable creature in rerum natura [natural] under the king’s peace, with malice aforethought, either expressed by the party or implied by law, so as the party wounded, or hurt die of the wound or hurt within a year and a day after the same.'

Without the year and a day rule, a person who wounded someone would remain under threat of prosecution for their murder forever. Since we are all going to die, murder is in fact simply an acceleration of death. What matters is whether the wound inflicted by an attacker caused the death and the jurists felt that it would not be possible to show such link after more than a year and a day had elapsed.

In addition, the attacker would have to be shown to have intended to kill or been so reckless as to the consequences of his or her acts that the law would imply such an intention. Malice aforethought does not mean that the attacker needed to have planned the assault for any length of time, but rather that, according to a rule laid down in 1975:

1. The suspect intended to kill, or
2. The suspect intended to do an act knowing that it was probable that it would kill any person, or
3. The suspect intended to cause grievous bodily harm [serious injury] to any person, or
4. The suspect intended to do an act knowing that it was probable that it would cause grievous bodily harm to any person.

Up until the 1960s the death penalty was the sentence for murder, but in the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Act 1965, this ultimate punishment was suspended and has never been re-introduced.

Similar considerations to the 1975 rules of intention applied in the Victorian era, but little regard was given to extenuating circumstances that may have led the suspect to kill. This qualification arrived after Ruth Ellis was hanged in 1955 for shooting dead her lover who was trying to end their tempestuous affair. Such was the public outcry that followed her execution, that the Homicide Act 1957 was introduced. It allowed a person to escape the death penalty through a lesser conviction for manslaughter if it could be shown to the jury’s satisfaction that the attacker were provoked in a way that 'was enough to make a reasonable man do as he did'.

Manslaughter, rather than murder, may apply if the suspect can not be shown to have had malice aforethought. This would include assailants intending to inflict some, but not serious, harm or gross negligence in performing a duty, such as an operation.

One man's poison ...

Many people look at the 19th century as the golden age of poisoning, because of a few high-profile murder cases and the relatively easy availability of toxic substances such as strychnine and arsenic. At the same time the life insurance industry was growing in popularity, making murder by poison even more attractive since it produced little evidence — no marks, blood or noise.

The inequality of strength and access to weapons between the sexes led women to choose poisoning as their favoured method for killing in the 19th century. Glaswegian aristocrat Madeleine Smith, for example, fell under suspicion for just such a killing, accused of poisoning her lover with arsenic.

Since women were in charge of the home, no-one questioned their purchase of rat poison. Anyone buying toxic substances was simply required by law to sign a so-called poison book which was kept in every chemist and hardware shop.

Toxicology as a branch of forensics began to take off at the same time, with two important tests for arsenic developed in the early part of the century — the Marsh test and the Riensch test.

Perhaps one of the most famous cases of poisoning occurred shortly after the Victorian era, in 1910. Dr Harvey Crippen, a homeopath, aroused suspicions when his wife Cora Turner disappeared and his secretary Ethel Le Neve with whom he was having an affair, moved in with him and began wearing his wife's clothes. Human tissue found at his home was discovered to contain hyosine poison, and he was convicted of murder and hanged. Some people believe he was innocent and gave the poison to his wife as a homeopathic remedy.

During that late 19th and early 20th century, public anxiety about poisons led Parliament to enact a series of laws restricting the sale of poisons and requiring doctors to register deaths. At the same time, the forensic science of toxicology was advancing, reducing the attractions of poison as a weapon of murder. In drama it lives on in works by the likes of Agatha Christie.

Now a state-controlled list of prohibited substances prevents sale without a licence, greatly reducing the opportunity of using poison to kill.

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