Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths In & Around the Fens by Glenda Goulden

Author:Glenda Goulden
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Bisac Code 1: TRU000000; TRUE CRIME / General
ISBN: 9781783408672
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books
Published: 2008-10-15T16:00:00+00:00

We cannot reconcile the prisoner’s conduct with entire innocence as the evidence fully bore out the crime of manslaughter and we fear that the merciful view of the case taken by the jury was misplaced.

In the other case of opium poisoning before the same court, twenty-two-year-old Mary Rumbelow, a married woman, was indicted with the manslaughter of her baby, John, by giving him sixty drops of laudanum, which she admitted.

John was a cross baby and never well and she usually gave him laudanum or Godfrey’s Cordial at night to help him to sleep. Godfrey’s Cordial was widely used as a baby settler, ‘a dark brown horrible mess’ prepared by local druggists to their own recipe of an opiate mixed with treacle, syrup, liquorice or aniseed.

The day before John died, in October 1847, Mary went to Cheesewright’s grocers in Littleport. She had intended to buy Godfrey’s, but she had bought a pennyworth of laudanum instead. She gave him a third of a teaspoonful that night, and the next morning she had found him dead, killed by an overdose that she knew should not have happened. She was in the habit of giving John laudanum and she knew what a safe dose was.

When she appeared in court, so did Robert Cheesewright who had sold her the laudanum. Unlike Dawbarn in March, who prepared his own laudanum on his premises, he bought his from ‘a reliable source in London’. The only explanation he could give was that he had received a batch of unusually high strength. That was accepted by the jury, although no other of Cheesewright’s many regular customers for laudanum had been affected. Only John Rumbelow.

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