The Sun.
London, England, 1863-01-12 00:00:00

THE LINCOLNSHIRE POISONINGS.

The inquiry into the circumstances attending the death
of Hannah Garner, the first wife of John Garner, who has
been committed for trial, together with his second wife, on
a charge of poisoning his mother, will be proceeded with
to-day. The investigation will not, however, take the form
of an inquest, such an inquiry having been held on the body
of the deceased in March, 1861; but it will be conducted by
the magistrates, and a gentleman will be in attendance to
watch the proceedings on behalf of the Home-office, Sir
George Grey having resolved that the facts shall be fully
sifted. Professor Taylor will state the result of his analysis
of the viscera taken from the body of the deceased. Several
additional circumstances may be stated with reference to
the first case, in which the accused is charged with causing
the death of his mother. It appears that while the in-
quiry was proceeding before Mr. Clegg, the coroner,
the prisoner wrote a letter from Spilsby gaol, where he was
confiaed, to Mr. Ellwood, the foreman of the jury. Mr.
Phillips, the governor of the gaol, however, considered that
a prisoner ought not to be allowed to send a private com-
munication to a juryman, and the letter was consequently
not forwarded to its intended destination. It was in the fol-
lowing terms :—Mr. Ellwood—Sir, I shall not be permitted
to attend the adjourned inquest, so I take this opportunity
to address a line or two to you. As to mother having poison
there appears to be no question by Dr. Taylor's analysis,
but how she came by it I solemnly declare that I know
no mere than you do ; she was always as welccme at my
table as I were myself, and her death not desired. By Mrs.
Bell and the neighbours in the green you will be able to
prove that years before her home was broken sip she was
nearly all her time at my house. I think that vouches for
my not being so bad as my inveterate enemies would like to
make it appear. A word on Mrs. Jenkinson's perjured
calumny. She says I only went to see my mother, to swear
at her ; but in her conversation she admits I went into the
shop and brought out the drawer of arrowroot, that they
might make her a little. I very well remember offering her
an orange about an hour before her death—that is as near
as my memory will serve me—but she was so weak that she
could not take it; but quite sensible. The next time I
visited her she was not dead, but unconscious. I think Mrs.
Metcalf and Mrs. Roberts visited her.—Yours very truly,
JOHN GARNER." It appears that the prisoner has been in
a pretty good way of business as a small shopkeeper a t
Mareham-le-Fen, and that a considerable quantity of
arsenic was found in his shop. This by itself would not
be a fact of much importance, as he would sell poison
in the course of his trade for agricultural purposes; but it
appears that the brown paper of several of the packets in
which the arsenic wee wrapped has been pinched at the
corners, as if small quantities of the drug had been ab-
stracted from. them. The poisoning must have been con-
tinued by some one almost up to the last day of the de-
ceased's existence, as particles of solid white arsenic were
found adhering to the coats of the stomach ; and after
taking a few spoonfuls of a basin of arrowroot which both
prisoners assisted in making, shortly before her death, she
was in dreadful pain, and her retching could be heard over
the whole house. The viscera of the deceased when she
was disinterred were in a singular good state of preserva-
tion, an indication of the presence of arsenic, the adminis-
tration of which, as if by a special interposition of Provi-
dence, has thus a tendency to involve its own proofs. All
the internal organs, the muscular substance of the heart,
and even the muscular tissues of the spine exterior to the
viscera altogether, were found to be saturated with absorbed
arsenic, proving that not a single or accidental dose had
been administered, but that poison must have been intro-
duced into the system in repeated doses, probably extend
ing over several days, as it could not otherwise have been
deposited by the circulation of the blood in the substance of
the tissue of the body. With reference to John Garner's
denial that he had been guilty of cruelty to his mother, it
is important to recall the fact that the poor old
woman
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dreadful goings on there, and she could not live there any
loneer ; while the female prisoner, who, since the death of
the two deceased women, has married Garner, is also shown
to have said, when the corpse was lying in the house," She
is better dead than alive ; what did an old thing like that
want to live for." It is stated that Professor Taylor has
discovered arsenic in the viscera of the second woman ex-
humed.