Poison at the Castle

"The Guardian," October 6, 1911, via Newspapers.com

England's Lancaster Castle is your typical brooding ancient fortress. Unlike most old castles, however, it does not carry any legends of curses or angry spirits.

Judging by what happened there in 1911, perhaps it should.

During that eerie year in the castle's history, it was occupied by the Bingham family. The clan's patriarch, 73-year-old widower William Bingham, had been the castle's caretaker and tour guide for some forty years. Most of his children also worked in various capacities around the estate. William's daughter, Annie, had been acting as housekeeper at the castle, but in November 1910, she died suddenly of what was ruled "hysteria and cerebral congestion."

William was a strong, healthy man, so it was surprising when on January 22, 1911, he suddenly came down with violent stomach pains and vomiting. He died the next day. Despite his lack of any previous health problems, his death was officially dismissed as being due to a combination of "intestinal catarrh," heart failure, and simple old age.

William's son James took over his father's job as castle custodian. In July, he invited his half-sister Margaret to live with him as housekeeper. Within days of her arrival at Lancaster, she too suddenly died. Despite the recent alarming propensity of the Binghams to unexpectedly drop dead, her death was also ruled as natural.

James was once again in need of household help, and the only available Bingham still above ground was his 29-year-old sister Edith. Unfortunately, Edith was a quarrelsome, dishonest, and generally unstable person who had been on bad terms with her family for some years. However, James, feeling he had no other choice, asked her to take Margaret's place.

He soon wished he had coughed up the money for a good domestic agency. Edith neglected her work in favor of nights on the town with her boyfriend, Charlie Emerson, and, on the rare occasions when she was at the castle, spent much of her time bickering with James. Edith wrote to her sister Nellie complaining about how she was forced to take "a back place" in the household, and hinting she might kill herself if the situation did not improve. By August, James had had enough. He hired a Mrs. Cox Walker to manage his household, and informed his sister that her free room and board at the castle was coming to an end.

On August 12--just two days before Mrs. Walker was to move into the castle and Edith was to move out--James fell ill, with the same sudden and agonizing symptoms suffered by his father. And, tragically, they led to the same result. James Bingham died on August 15.

It finally began to dawn on people that Lancaster Castle was compiling a quite unusual body count. James' doctor, J.W. McIntosh, had a hunch his patient died of arsenic poisoning--a diagnosis that was confirmed by the post-mortem examination.

The inquest revealed that just before he became ill, James had eaten a steak cooked for him by Edith. Although Edith usually took meals with her brother, on this occasion James ate alone. Cans of weed-killer containing high levels of arsenic were found hidden near the entrance to the castle. The suspicion grew that Edith, seeking revenge for her imminent eviction from the castle, poisoned her brother. When the bodies of the three other dead Binghams were exhumed, it was discovered that William and Margaret had also succumbed from arsenic poisoning. Only Annie appeared to have died a natural death. It was looking as if Edith had been systematically wiping out most of her family. Chief among her accusers was her sole surviving brother, William. Edith was arrested on August 30. It was considered ominously significant that when she was taken into custody, she blurted out that she never went near the weed-killer.

No one had mentioned to her that the pesticide was the suspected murder weapon.

The cook is always the logical suspect when diners begin dropping like flies, but other than Edith's long-term difficulties with her family, the case against her proved to be astonishingly weak. A charwoman who had been in the kitchen when Edith cooked James' steak testified that she had not seen anything unusual. Edith did not profit financially from the demise of her relatives--indeed, the deaths of her father and brother only insured that she would lose her home at Lancaster Castle. As Margaret Bingham had eaten the same food as the rest of the family just before she was taken ill, it was hard to explain how Edith could have poisoned her. Edith's father had not eaten anything prepared by the defendant before his fatal collapse. Numerous witnesses attested to Edith's apparently genuine shock and grief at the loss of her relatives. In short, while the three Binghams died from arsenic poisoning, there was no hard evidence to say how this had happened. During the trial, Edith had several fits of hysteria and nervous collapse, necessitating her removal from the courtroom.

The judge's summing-up was heavily in the defendant's favor, and the jury agreed. After a brief deliberation, they had little trouble in delivering an acquittal. There was, however, no happy ending for Edith Bingham. In 1914 her grandparents placed her in a mental asylum, where she remained until her death in 1945. Despite many promptings, Edith never spoke about the poisonings, leaving the deaths of William, Margaret, and James Bingham a mystery that will almost certainly go forever unsolved.