The Rugeley Poisoner

The case

On the morning of 26 November 1855, in a room at the Talbot Arms in Rugeley, two young medical men began a post-mortem examination on the body of John Parsons Cook while a crowd looked on. One of the onlookers was Cook's friend and doctor, William Palmer. During the examination he jostled the man doing the work, and he tried to make off with the jar holding the stomach and its contents. He later offered a post-boy money to upset the jars on the way to the railway. The samples that reached the toxicologist in London were of poor quality, and a second examination had to be made. It was the sort of thing that made a whole county suspicious of its local surgeon.

Palmer was born in Rugeley in 1824, the son of a prosperous timber merchant and sawyer, and qualified as a doctor in London in 1846. He set up practice in his home town but cared more for racing than medicine, keeping horses and betting heavily. He married Ann Thornton in 1847. Over the next eight years a striking number of people around him died: his mother-in-law, who had come to stay; a racing acquaintance who had lent him money; four of his five children, all in infancy; his wife Ann in 1854, on whose life he had a policy for £13,000; and his brother Walter in 1855, whose life he had also insured heavily. By then he owed huge sums to moneylenders on bills bearing his mother's forged signature, and the insurance company was refusing to pay on Walter's death.

In mid-November 1855 Palmer and Cook went to the races at Shrewsbury. Cook's horse Polestar won, and he collected a good sum; Palmer lost. That evening at the Raven in Shrewsbury Cook drank brandy and water and complained that it burned his throat, and was violently sick in the night. He told friends he believed Palmer had dosed him.

Back in Rugeley, Cook took a room at the Talbot Arms, across the road from Palmer's house, and Palmer took charge of his care. Cook was repeatedly sick. On Monday 19 November Palmer went to London and settled Cook's betting accounts, applying the money to his own debts. That evening, back in Rugeley, he obtained three grains of strychnine from a local surgery, and around midnight Cook was seized with convulsions. The next morning Palmer bought more strychnine at another shop. That night Cook took two pills from him, and in the early hours of 21 November 1855 he died in convulsions. Palmer produced papers claiming Cook owed him money, and an elderly local doctor certified apoplexy.

Cook's stepfather, William Stevens, was not satisfied and demanded an inquest. The analyst Alfred Swaine Taylor found antimony but no strychnine, yet told the coroner he believed Cook had been poisoned. Palmer, meanwhile, tried to influence the coroner with gifts, and the local postmaster opened letters for him. On 15 December the inquest jury named Palmer as the killer, and he was arrested. The bodies of his wife and brother were exhumed; Ann's contained antimony.

Feeling in Staffordshire ran so high that Parliament passed a special Act in April 1856 allowing the trial to move to the Central Criminal Court in London. It opened on 14 May before Lord Chief Justice Campbell. The Attorney General, Sir Alexander Cockburn, led the prosecution; Serjeant Shee defended. The medical evidence was fiercely contested: the defence called witnesses who said strychnine, if given, should have been found, while the Crown argued that Cook's symptoms could only be strychnine. On 27 May the jury convicted him. William Palmer was hanged in public outside Stafford gaol on 14 June 1856.