Phillipsburg herald. [volume] (Phillipsburg, Kan.) 1882-1905, 1884-04-17
SECRET POISONING.
A Crime of Very Remote Advantageous
Famous Murders with Poison.
London Telegraph,

Famous Murders with Poison.
London Telegraph,
! Although the crime of secret poisoning
is not so old as the deed of Cain, it is still
one of very remote antiquity. The old
Greek and Roman writer's abound in
mention of poisoning and PRISONERS, but
the first habitual murderess- of this class
who appeared in the theater of crime was
! the Infamous LOcusta. Poisoning was
her profession. Nero had become &C
quainted with her through her having
given evidence against other persons &C
cused of like practices, and when she
had done his bloodthirsty business for
him by poisoning Britannicus he re-
warded her with large estate, placing
some disciples with her to be instructed
in her trade. Fortunately for humanity,
the Emperor Golba subsequently caused
LOcusta to be put to death with other
malefactors of Nero's reign. In really
extraordinary manner has history re-
peated itself in the type of the female
poisoner. A Locusta was hOurishing at
Naples so recently as the first decade of
the eighteenth century. This was the
notorious TOfana or Tophiania, who came
from Palermo to continental Italy, and
realized large sums by the sale of poison
Gus drops inclOsed i'll glass phials bearing
the inscription, "Manna ofSt. Nicholas of
Bari" and bearing the image of that
saint. The pretended sanctity of her lit
tie assassination bottles was the most art
full of subterfuges on the part of La Tofa-
ma; and it was for long time successful,
the custom-hOuse officials having too
deep a generation for st. Nicholas Of Bari
to examine his Ostensible products very
closely. The death dealing drops, how
ever, soon came to be known as "acquetta
di Napoi," and ultimately as "aqua Tofa-
na," and the poison was distributed by
the inventress on the speciOus plea that
it was only intended for the use of mar
ried ladies who were DESTROYS of chang
ing old husbands for new ones. From
four to six drops were suf6cientto destroy
life, but it was asserted that the dose
could be so prOpOrtioned as only to oper-
ate fatally within a certain time. At
length La Tofana, finding that she was
watched by the Government, took sanct-
uary in anunnery; and the German travel
er Keysler, who visited Naples in 1870
states that in that year she was still liv-
ing, and visited by many strangers out of
curiosity" But, according to another
traveller, Labat, it was as early as 1909
that La TOfana was torn from her mon
aStlc asylum and thrown into prison.
The clergy and the lazzaroni were much
incensed by this violation of sanctuary
but the latter were appeased by an
official assertion that La TOfana had poi
soned all wells the in the city. She made
a full confession under the pressure of tor
ture, and was afterwards strangled, al
though characteristic enough, the Govern
ment, to appease the bishop of Ma
pies, who was still indignant at the dis
respect shown to the right Of sanctuary
caused the prisoners corpse to be flung
at night into the courtyard of the con-
vent from which she had been taken.
There had been, however, many other
criminals in league with her, and the
"aqua Tofana" continued to be main
tanned at Naples and distributed through
out Italy for many years after her death.
She must have been a very aged woman
when she fell into the hands fjustice, for,
so early as 1859, in the papacy of Alex
ander VII, an old fortune-teller named
Hieronyma Spara was discovered to be
President of a society of young mar
ried women, whose diversion it was
to poison their own and other Women's
husbands. La Spara, after undergoing all
the refnements of judicial torture, was
hanged, together with one of Gratiosa, her
assistant, and three other females. It is
said that La Spara was Sicilian, and had
acquired her knowledge of pOisOns from
Larofana at Palermo.
The Ingredients of the poisons used by
La Spara and La Tofana, and of their
too celebrated French precursor, the
Marquise de Brinvilliers, were for a long
time, in what was believed to be the COM
mon interest, kept a profound secret by
the judges who condemned the criminals
Pope Alexander VII. caused all in the
recipes of Hieronyma Spara to be put
away in the vaults of the castle of St.
Angelo; and the murderous formulas of
the Marquise de Brinvilliers were, it is
said, burned in the same fire that con-
sumed her own body to ashes. In Paris
it was long believed that BrinVilliers' IA
vored powder was diamond dust, a theo-
~ too harshly ridiculed by Voltaire,
who declared the dust of diamonds to be
as harmless as the dust of coral. Had the
French skeptic ever visited India he
would have found reason to alter his
opinion. It was known, however, that
in the casket of Sainte- Croix, who had
been the instructor of the Marchioness
in that art of poisoning which he had
himself learned from an Italian named
E Exili, there had been found corrosive
sublimate, opium, reguluS of anthony,
and Vitriol. But there was a large quanti-
, ty of poison ready for use, the cOmpO-
nents of which the unskillful analysis of
the time was unable to detect Many af-
firmed that sugar of lead was the chief
ingredient in this mysterious prepare
ton, but the consequences of the poison
did not seem to indicate the presence of
, the metal. Another theory was that the
Brinvilliers poison was distilled from a
bitter and astTingent plant growing On
old walls, called 'cymbalaria." Marie de
! BrinVilliers, however, had been dead
nearly fifty years when the Emperor
) Charles vi, who had been king of the
Two Sicilies when La Tofana was arrest
! ed, told his physician, Garrelli, that the
poison of the SIcilian Medea was nothing
, more than calx, or oxide of arsenic dis
solved, for what purpose the analyst
could not discover, in ''aqua cymbalaria,"
: is certainly not poisonous. 1T Is thus
! very probable that Hieronyma Spara's
! IonIllu r,nison was ike that of q T0fana