The Press. — London, England, 1857-07-04 00:00:00

THE GLASGOW POISONING CASE. THE trial of Miss Madeline Smith for the murder, on the 23rd of March last, of her lover, Ensile L'An gelier, by poison, was opened at Edinburgh on Tuesday morning, and has every prospect of rival. ling in interest and length the greatest poisoning case of late years. It would be tedious and unnecessary to go at length into evidence so voluminous as that of thirty witnesses (out of eighty for the prosecution) must consist, and as there is no prospect of the case being concluded this week, we will endeavour to give a resume of the details already made public. It appears that Miss Smith, the daughter of a professional gentleman in Glasgow, about two years since secretly made the acquaintance of the deceased L'Angelier, who was a clerk in the employment of Messrs. Huggins, of Glasgow. Miss Smith is personally very attractive, and L'Angelier soon became infatuated with her. Their acquaint ance ripened into passionate affection, a secret correspondence was carried on without the knowledge of her father or mother, and it is believed that clandestine meetings at night frequently took place. A sl►ght clue to the extent to which this intimacy was carried is perhaps best found in the letters of Miss Smith, some two hundred of which were din covered among L'Angelier's effects. Many of them commence as follows :—" Monday, 3rd. My dearest Emile, bow I long to see you. It looks an age;" "Tuesday morning, Beloved Emile, I have dreamt all night of you ;" Wednesday morning, five o'clock, My own my beloved husband 1 trust to God ;" a letter, ou two pieces of paper, commencing "My own my darling husband. To-morrow night by this time ;" a letter, on three pieces of paper, com mencing " My own my dearest my kindest husband how I have reproached myself ;" a letter, t.n two pieces of paper, commencing, " Wednesday after noon, Beloved and ever dear Emile,—All by myself so I shall write to you dear husband ;" as also a letter commencing, " Wednesday night, eleven o'clock, Beloved husband,—This time last night you were with me." This intimacy appears to have lasted up to the beginning of this year, when it gradually got bruited about that Miss Smith was going to be married to a Mr. Minnock, a gentleman of property. In point of fact, Mr. Minnock had proposed to Miss smith in January and was accepted in March. Auguste de Mean, a friend of L'Angelier's, told him the news. L'Angelier said "it must surely be false, but that if it was to come to this he would forbid it, and that he had in his possession documents that would be sufficient to forbid the bans." Previously to this circumstance, about Feb.l2, L'Angelier, who was out late the previous night, and had specially asked the landlady for alatch -key, had been found by her at eight a.m. seriously ill. He said, "On the road coming home I was seized with a burning pain in my bowels and stomach, and when I was taking off my clothes I lay down on the carpet. I thought I should have died and no human eye seen me. I was not able to ring the bell." After a day's rest he got better. On the 23rd of February he experienced a precisely similar attack, but his landlady, so far as she can recollect, declares "that he was not out the previous night. The attack came on about four a.m., when he called her up. He was in great pain about the region of the stomach, was vomiting severely, and complained of thirst and cold." The attack was so severe as to confine him to his lodgings for nine or ten days. He then left Glasgow for Edinburgh. On the l'ith of March he came home, and on the lfith left for the Bridge of Allan. He was in the habit of receiving several letters, and directed that they should be forwarded to hlm at the Bridge of Allan. The letter arrived on the Saturday, and was for. warded at once. It is as follows : Why, my beloved, did you not come to me? Oh, beloved, are you ill? Come to me, sweet one. I waited and waited for you, but you came not. I shall wait again on you to morrow night, same hoer and arrangement. Do come, sweet love—my own sweet love of a sweetheart. Come, beloved, and clasp me to your heart; come, and we shall be h .ppy. A kiss, fond love. Adieu, with tender em braces. Ever believe me to be your dear fond Mtsr. He returned from the Bridge of Allan the next daf, on Sunday, the 22nd of March, asked his landlady for the latch-key, went out about nine p.m., and was seen no more, till at four o'clock on Monday morning his landlady was moused by the street•bell ringing with great violence : rose and called, " Who's there ?" He said, "It is I ; open the door." When I did so h e was stan di ng w i t h hi s arms across his stomach. He said, I'm very bad ; I'm going to have another vomiting of that bile. I thought would never have got home, I was so badly on the way." Water was the first thing he asked for. I held up the tumbler, and he drank the whole of it. He wished a little tea. Before I got it, and before he was half undressed, he commenced vomiting very severely. It was the same kind of matter he had vomited before. I said, "Have you not taken anything to disagree with your stomach ?" He said, " Oh, no ; and I never had better health than when I THE PRESS, JULY 4,1857. was at the coast," meaning, as I understood, the Bridge of Allan. I said, " You never took enough of medicine." He said he never approved of medicine. He was chilly and cold, and wished hot water to his feet and stomach. 1 got this for him. I got ajar of hot water to both. 1 threw three or four pairs of blankets and two mats over him. He became a little easier, but at four he got bad again. About seven he got black about the eyes and choked when he tried to drink. Dr. Steven, who had. previously attended him, was called in and prescribed, and remarked " He'd get over it the same as before." L'Angelier said to him, "This is the third attack I have had. The landlady says it is bile, but I never was subject to bile." About nine o'clock deceased got worse, and said he was far worse than the doctor thought : I went in about nine o'clock, and he looked very bad like. 1 said, "Is there nD one you would like to see ?" He said, " 1 would like to see Miss Perry, Renfield•street." I sent for her. After this he said, " Oh, if you please, draw the curtain; if I could get five minutes sleep I think I would be better." I left him, and was back in five or ten minutes. I came quietly out, thinking he was sleeping. The doctor came in, and I told him he had only newly fallen asleep. He wished to see him. He felt the pulse and raised the head. I said, "Is there anything wrong ?" He said, " Draw the curtains aside, the man is dead." Where he bad passed the night, at present does not appear. Miss Smith from the first denied that she had seen him the evening previous to his death. Her appointment was for Saturday evening, and she had not seen him on the Sunday. She repeats this in her declaration, and swears that, upon there being " no tapping at the window," she went to bed at eleven, and remained in bed till the usual time next morning. 'Mc circumstances of L'Angelier's death were suffi ciently suspicious. He might have committed suicide, but a post-mortem exami nation was made of the body, when an astonishing quantity of arsenic, nearly ninety grains, were detected ; " considerably more," observes Professor Penny, " than sufficient to de stroy life." His symptoms too, in each case of illness, were precisely those of a person poisoned by arsenic. " I have no doubt," observes Dr. Christison, " the cause of death was poisoning by arsenic, and that being the case, I should have entertained strong suspicion as to that being also the cause of his prior illness." Both medical men were also of opinion that so large a dose could easily be administered in a cup of cocoa or chocolate, if boiled with it before hand. The question, therefore, was by what process the poison bad been administered. Miss Smith admits that upon ono occasion, when conversing with him from her bedroom-window, which was on the ground-floor, she gave him a cup of cocoa which she had prepared herself, and was at the time drinking —L'Angelier scarcely tasted it. But at this time Miss Smith is known to have been in the habit of purchasing and possessing arsenic. She used it as a cosmetic. One of her young friends, Miss Buchanan, who was to be bridesmaid to her on her marriage with Mr. Minnock was with Miss Smith on ono occasion when she bought arsenic ; at another time her sister Bessie was with her. The purchase was openly made, there was no conceal ment, and in each case she signed the register with out hesitation. Apart from the symptoms L'Angelier experi• need at and previous to his death, it was elicited in evidence that, constitutionally or an irritable tem perament, he suffered much from Miss Smith's cold ness towards him of late. On her asking him for her letters, he was much affected, but refused to give them up, declared that she should never marry another man so long as be lived, end wished himself dead. He suffered frequently from bowel com plaint and cholera, and was in the habit of taking laudanum. "I have seen M. L'Angelier take laudanum several times," says M. Thuot, a brother clerk : I told him once that be took a good deal—that he took too much. He said he could not sleep wi►bout it. He once told me he had taken a great deal of laudanum. I have seen him take it f.)ur or rive times. By the COI:LIT : I ne►•er saw him take much laudanum, except may be when he was suffering a great deal. M. de Meau remembers L'Angelier telling how last year he had suffered Prom an attack of cholera. He told him also on another occasion, " how he had been attacked by a burning pain at the heart ;" and once, in the summer of 1855, a curious incident oc curred:— I lived at Helensburgh in the summer of 18.55. L'An gelier visited me there. He once came on a Saturday evening. We spent the whole evening together. On Sun• day we went a g 'od distance on the Glasgow-mad, and returned. L'Angelier, instead of following me, went down stairs, and in a short time I went down to inquire why he did not come to his dinner: but I met him returning, when I found him excessively pale. I asked him what had been the matter; and he told me he had been fright- fully sick, vomiting all the time downstairs. L'Angelier was a very vain person. One witness, Ste venson, remarks : "he was vain of his personal ap pearance, very much so." Another, M. de Mean, believes his only fault to have been bragging, and 655 distinctly recollects a conversation he had with the deceased upon the possibility of taking arsenic with out bein ginjured by it : It was on a Sunday, I think in the winter of 1853 54 that we had a conversation about it, but I do not recollect how it arose. We had a long discussion on the possibility of a person taking arsenic without being injured by it. I ridiculed the idea of its being possible to take it without danger, while he maintained that it was possible to take it in a small quantity. But no trace of arsenic was discovered among his private effects. A little aconite only was found in a bottle, which if it had been full and all taken would not have destroyed life. _ _ _ With respect to Miss Smith's reasons for keeping up a correspondence with L'Angelier after she bsd become engaged to Mr. Minnock, Miss Smith, scxn after L'Angelier's death, in an interview with M. de Mean, declared that she did so " in order to try and get back her letters." At this stage the case rests at present. A vast number of witnesses for the Crown remain to be examined, not the least important among whom is Miss Penny, a most intimate friend of L'Angelier. The prisoner is described as a very young lady, of short stature and slight form, with features sharp and prominent, and restless and sparkling eye. On Tuesday morning she stepped up the stair into the dock with all the buoyancy with which she might have entered the box of a theatre. During the whole day she maintained a firm and unmoved appearance, her keen and animated expression and healthful complexion evincing how little, outwardly at least, she had suffered by the period of her im prisonment and the horror of her situation. Though on once looking round a dark veil was thrown over her face, the interest she took in the proceedings was yet evident. Her head never sank for a moment, and she even seemed to scan the witnesses with a scrutinising glance. Her perfect self-posses sion, indeed, could only be accounted for either by a proud consciousness of innocence, or by her possess-' ing an almost unparalleled amount of self-contro.. She even sometimes smiled with all the air and grace of a young lady in the drawing-room, as her agents came forward at intervals to communicate with her. She was dressed simply, yet elegantly. She wore a brown silk dress with black silk cloak, with a small straw bonnet trimmed with white riband of the fashionable shape exposing the whole front of the head. She also had lavender-coloured gloves, a white cambric handkercheif, a silver-topped smelling bottle in her hand, which she never used, and a wrapper thrown over her knee. Altogether she had a most attractive appearance, and her very aspect and demeanour seemed to advocate her cause. To the indictment, which charged her with the murder of Emile L'Angelier by arsenic or other poison unknown, in cocoa or coffee, or some ether article of food or drink, Miss Smith, in a firm subdued voice, pleaded " Not Guilty," and the jury were at once impannelled. COLONEL WAUGH, whose case was called on this week before the Bankruptcy Commissioner, put in an affidavit, dated " Marseilles, 23rd June, 1857," to the effect that he was so ill as to be utterly incapaci tated from surrendering to the Court of Bankruptcy. An enlargement of time was granted to the 18th of September. Mn. CAMERON, who, with Mr. Humphrey Brown, continues in the Queen's Bench Prison, was soindis creet last week as to permit his son to attempt to smuggle in a private stock of brandy, against the prison rules. Mr. Cameron, jun., was detected in flagrante delicti, handed over to the police, and fined 3/. and costs. A GOOD ANECDOTE IS GIVEN OF LORD JEFFREY In the present number of Fraser :—" It happened, one autumn, that the late Lord Jeffrey, after the rising of the Court of Session, came to spend the long vaca tion in the parish of L--. Soon after his arrival, the minister intimated from the pulpit that upon a certain day he would hold a diet of catechising' in the district which included the dwelling of the emi nent judge. True to his time, he appeared at Lord Jeffrey's. house, and requested that the entire establishment might be collected. This was readily done; for almost all Scotch clergymen, though the catechising process has become obsolete, still visit each house in the parish once a year, and collect the family to listen to a fireside lecture. But what was Lord Jeffrey's consternatio❑ when, the entire household being assembled in the drawing-room, the worthy minister said in a solemn voice, . My lord, I always begin my examination with the head of the family. Will you tell me, then—What is effectual calling ?' Never wes an Edinburgh reviewer more thoroughly nonplussed. After a pause, during which the ser vants looked on in horror at the thought that a judge should not know his Catechism, his lordship reco vered speech, and answered the question in terms which completely dumbfounded the minister—' Why, Mr. Smith, a man may be said to discharge the duties of his calling effectually, when he performs hem with ability and success.'