Charles Dickens described William Palmer as “the greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey dock.” Other writers and journalists of the day awarded Palmer other monikers such as “the Rugeley Poisoner” and the almost-complimentary epithet “the Prince of Poisoners.” And then, when William Palmer was due to hang, over 35,000 people crowded the streets of Stafford to witness the grisly event, with some even camping overnight to find good spots as if they were attending a festival or waiting for the new pair of Jordans to drop.
So what did Palmer do to earn such a fearsome reputation? The crime that earned him a trip to the gallows was the murder of his friend John Cook with strychnine. However, looking back at his history, it was hard not to notice that so many other people in Palmer’s life died in suspicious circumstances, often with him profiting from their deaths.
Early Years
William Palmer was born on August 6, 1824, in the English town of Rugeley, in Staffordshire County, the fifth of seven children of Joseph Palmer and Sarah Bentley. The family was quite well-off. Joseph Palmer ran a successful business as a timber merchant, so when he died suddenly of apoplexy in 1837, he left behind a large fortune of £70,000 or about £6.5 million in modern currency that would ensure that his family was never left wanting. At least, in theory. As you will soon find out, William Palmer would develop expensive habits that no amount of money would suffice.
Since Joseph Palmer did not write a will, his oldest son, Joseph Jr., should have inherited the lot. However, he was one of the good ones, so instead of taking all the money, he distributed £7,000 to each sibling when they turned 21, including himself, and the remaining £25,000+ went to their mother, under the condition that she never marry again. That way, the money stayed in the family.
The guarantee of money when he entered adulthood, the lack of a stern father figure and the presence of an indulgent mother shaped William Palmer’s behavior and attitude as a teenager. Some said he was a bully and a cheat. Others that he always flashed money around which he stole from his mother and older sisters. And, most disturbingly, some reported that Palmer enjoyed being cruel to animals. In the words of one of his former classmates – he was “a thoroughly bad boy.”
When he was 17, William Palmer left school and went to Liverpool to find a trade, just like his older brother Joseph. He started out a a wholesale chemists’ company called Evans & Sons but got the sack after being caught embezzling money. Thanks to his mother’s money and influence, he avoided a prison sentence and a public scandal. Instead, Palmer returned to Rugeley where he apprenticed to a surgeon named Edward Tylecote. However, he came back with a nasty habit, one that would bring ruin to his life and death to those around him – gambling. Shortly before Palmer moved to Liverpool, the city had begun hosting the Grand National, one of the premiere horse races in the country, and he soon took a liking to betting on the ponies. It’s just a shame he wasn’t very good at it. Quite a few other people would have been spared a premature and painful demise.
Palmer apprenticed to Tylecote for about five years, but he was hardly what you would call a model employee. For starters, just like in Liverpool, money kept going missing, undoubtedly in Palmer’s pocket. But he also showed off his mean side after an argument with another apprentice named Peter Smirke who, one day, found his clothes and his new boots cut up into pieces and doused with acid.
But the dastardliest thing that Palmer did during this time happened to his almost-father-in-law, a gardener named George Vickerstaff. While in Liverpool, Palmer hooked up with a girl named Jane Widnall. Later, she relocated to Rugeley and the two resumed their dalliance. Vickerstaff, Jane’s stepfather, offered to lend Palmer £100 with the promise that he would marry his stepdaughter. You have to understand, for a working man like Vickerstaff, £100 represented his entire savings, all the money he managed to tuck away after a lifetime of hard work. For someone like Palmer, though, it was probably just a week’s worth of gambling at the races. And, of course, the marriage fell through and Palmer never repaid the debt.
Eventually, Tylecote the surgeon got fed up with his apprentice and kicked him out. It was up to Momma Palmer to save the day once again, and she paid to enroll her Willliam at Stafford Infirmary as a “walking pupil” i.e. a student who accompanied the doctors when they did their rounds. It was here that Palmer started to take an interest in poisons and he had a whole library to learn from.
That’s about all the learning he did there because, a year later, Palmer was in London, this time training at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. His mother had to pay a doctor named Stegall an extra 60 guineas to act as a tutor to her son and made sure he studied for his exams but, in the end, all the effort finally paid off – in August 1846, William Palmer received the title of MRCS: Member of the Royal College of Surgeons.
Dr. Palmer
So now Palmer was a doctor. Well, a surgeon if we’re being technical, which was a bit lower on the totem pole back then since they mostly just cut off limbs without anesthesia and flipped a coin whether the patient lived or died. But it appears he was skilled enough to be offered a position at St. Bartholomew’s, but instead, he elected to return to Rugeley and set up a practice there.
Palmer was also in the market for a wife, preferably one with a large inheritance. He found her in Annie Brookes, who also went by her mother’s maiden name of Thornton since her parents never married. She was the result of an affair between a retired army colonel and his housekeeper. Even though the pair weren’t married, the colonel left most of his fortune to Annie and her mom in his will. Annie and William Palmer tied the knot on October 7, 1847.
Rather predictably, Palmer and his new mother-in-law, Mary Thornton, did not get along. Despite that, she often lent him money, allegedly more out of fear than anything else. But even though Palmer never had any intentions of repaying his loans, it still was not enough for him. So on Christmas 1848, a year into the marriage, he persuaded Mary Thornton to move in with him and her daughter. In early January, she was dead.
Now, we can’t say for sure whether or not she was Palmer’s first victim. As we said at the beginning of the video, he was only ever convicted of one murder, and, after all, Mary Thornton was a lush who enjoyed her gin a bit too much and was already in poor health. So it is conceivable that she died of natural causes…but taking into account the timing of her death, who her son-in-law was, and that he stood to profit from her death, we’re leaning towards the murder column on this one.
If Palmer did do away with his mother-in-law, he received a nasty surprise following her death because not only did he not get his hands on the fortune he was expecting, he might have even lost money on the deal. Although he and Annie got some cash, most of the wealth left behind by the colonel was invested in real estate – real estate that Palmer had renovated using his own money in the hopes that he could flip it for a tidy profit once it became his. Unbeknownst to Palmer, though, following the colonel’s death, his will was contested by his closest male relative, a man named Shallcross, who argued that it was not legal for Colonel Brookes to leave his property to a woman he was not married to. The courts sided with Shallcross so the real estate went to him, meaning that Palmer wasted his money raising the value of somebody else’s property.
We are tempted to say “Karma’s a bitch,” but all this meant was that Palmer would find other people to target. It was either that or stop gambling, which apparently was never an option that Palmer considered.
The next person who was probably poisoned by Palmer was a fellow racing enthusiast named Leonard Bladen. In 1850, the two attended the Chester races together and Bladen hit a double-whammy in terms of becoming an enticing victim – not only did he win big, but Palmer owed him £600. Foolishly, he accepted the “gracious” invitation to stay with the doctor for a few days, probably waiting to get his money, but Bladen mysteriously fell ill and died. Then, when his widow came to see the body, the winnings had disappeared, as did Bladen’s betting book. Not only did Palmer insist that Bladen had lost it all gambling, but he had the audacity to claim that, in fact, Bladen owed him money. But being the generous man that he was, he was willing to forego the debt given the tragic circumstances. The grieving family let the matter go at the time and no investigation into Leonard Bladen’s death was made. It was only years later, during Palmer’s trial, that the relatives petitioned to have Bladen’s body exhumed and examined. However, given the limitations of mid-19th-century pathology, their request was rejected because it was doubtful that a solid case could have been built against the doctor.
In fact, once the trial had begun and the name William Palmer became known and despised throughout England, multiple people came forward with notions that the doctor might have killed their loved ones. All had similar stories – the victim was a friend or relative of Palmer and they either came into some cash or the doctor owed them money. They then fell ill and died suddenly but, at the time, their deaths were not suspicious enough to warrant further investigation. By now, it’s impossible to say how many of these claims were even real, let alone how many had any merit.
Family Tragedies
Without a doubt, the most sinister accusations thrown at Palmer involved the poisoning of his own children. William and Annie Palmer had five children together but only the eldest, William Jr., survived into adulthood. The other four all died as infants but since infant mortality was quite high in Victorian England, nobody saw anything dubious about it. Well…almost nobody. The Palmer’s nurse, Matilda Bradshaw, was convinced that her employer was responsible for the deaths. She said she overheard Palmer complain that the children were too much of a financial burden. She believed that the doctor would dip his finger in poison, then sugar or honey, and put it in the babies’ mouths. However, since she’d never actually seen him do it, her testimony was confined to the local pub and not the courthouse.
By 1854, Palmer’s debts were spiraling out of control. In order to cope, he needed a big payday and there was only one person who could give him that – his wife. In April he took out a life insurance policy for Annie worth £13,000. It was a massive sum at the time; so large, in fact, that a single insurance company would not take on the risk alone and, instead, offloaded part of the costs onto two other insurers. The first premium alone was a staggering £760. Who knows where Palmer got it from but, as you will soon find out, he only ever intended to pay it once.
In September, Annie Palmer was staying with her sister in Liverpool when she fell ill. Back home, she was confined to bed rest and, of course, her dutiful husband was right by her side, ready to nurse her back to health. Except that Annie’s condition got worse and worse and, in a few days, she was dead. Her official cause of death was cholera. There was an outbreak at the time so, theoretically, this could be true. However, given the circumstances, it is more likely that Palmer simply waited for the first occasion when his wife fell ill and poisoned her under the pretense of trying to make her better. If that was his game, it was good enough to fool three other physicians who all signed the death certificate. The insurance companies scowled and grumbled, but they had to pay out and Palmer played the role of the grieving widower all the way to the bank.
Of course, for a guy like Palmer, no amount of money would have been enough. Even after cashing out his wife’s insurance policy, he was still in debt, so the good doctor looked for a new target just a few months after Annie’s death. This time, he set his sights on his brother Walter, and, get this, Palmer initially wanted a policy worth the gigantic sum of £84,000. Maybe that would have worked if his brother happened to be some long-lost duke or Queen Victoria’s nephew but, no, Walter Palmer was a 31-year-old former corn merchant who went bankrupt and spent the days drowning his sorrows in gin. No company in England would accept such a policy but, shockingly enough, after much finagling, Palmer still managed to insure Walter for £13,000, the same as his wife, and even with the same company – the Prince of Wales Insurance Office. With William Palmer as the beneficiary, of course, no point in going through all of this if Walter’s wife got the money.
This time, poison was probably not necessary. Given Walter’s precarious condition, alcohol alone should have done the trick. So the doc simply bought his brother all the booze he wanted. A few months and 19 gallons of gin later, Walter Palmer died with William by his side. Immediately after leaving his dearly departed brother, William Palmer rushed to the nearest hotel to send a message by telegraph. It wasn’t to alert Walter’s widow that her husband had passed away. It was to place a £50 bet on the horse Lurley to win that afternoon’s race. Palmer received a tip that it was a sure thing…he lost.
The End of the Rope
Palmer might have thought that he had a good thing going but, eventually, one of two things had to happen – he’d either get caught or run out of people to poison. Fortunately, it was the former, but not until one more person died in his company. The man’s name was John Parsons Cook and he had the misfortune of being a “friend” of William Palmer.
The story was a familiar one – in November 1855, the two attended the races together. Cook won; Palmer lost. Afterward, the two had drinks and Cook fell ill. Palmer attended to his sickly friend and, a few days later, Cook was dead, and his money and betting books mysteriously vanished. The ending, however, was different this time. Even though Palmer, once again, persuaded a doctor to sign the death certificate as “natural causes,” Cook’s father-in-law wasn’t convinced, and he made enough of a fuss that an inquest was held.
During the post-mortem examination, Palmer tried to sabotage the proceedings by bumping into one of the physicians carrying the stomach contents and causing them to spill to the floor. Obviously, he was feeling quite clumsy that day because later someone “accidentally” broke the seal on the jar containing the stomach samples to be analyzed.
The tests were carried out by Dr. Alfred Swaine Taylor, a pioneer in toxicology hailed as the “father of British forensic medicine.” Although he considered the samples too degraded to yield any definitive results, he nevertheless claimed that the circumstances of Cook’s death and the reported symptoms were enough to conclude that the man had been poisoned by strychnine. That was good enough for the authorities, so William Palmer was indicted for murder.
The trial, even though it only lasted for 12 days, became a massive media circus and the most talked about event in the country. It took place at the Old Bailey, in London, as opposed to Palmer’s native Staffordshire, and Parliament actually had to pass an act for this to happen – the Trial of Offences Act 1856, better known as Palmer’s Act, which said that a person could be tried at the central criminal court of London even if their crime occurred outside this jurisdiction, in order to prevent local prejudice hurting their case. In other words, Palmer successfully argued that the people of Staffordshire hated his guts so much that a jury there would never be impartial.
Fair enough. It’s not like Londoners were too fond of him, either. With the power of hindsight, investigators looked into Palmer’s past, saw just how many other relatives and acquaintances died under suspicious circumstances that always benefited the doctor financially, and realized that John Cook was not his first victim.
They dug up the graves of Annie and Walter Palmer since they were the doctor’s most recent suspected victims. Walter was a bloated, rotting mess that made everyone who got within a hundred feet of him wretch. This was especially bad news for William Williss, the owner of the Talbot pub that had been requisitioned to be used for the coroner’s inquest. He complained that nobody would come in to eat or drink anymore because of the smell which took months to dissipate. Once again, Dr. Taylor gave his professional opinion that, although the body was way too degraded to tell for sure, he believed that Walter died of poisoning. This was good enough for the coroner’s jury which returned a verdict of willful murder, later overturned by a grand jury.
Annie Palmer was much better preserved and even her original physician, who initially gave cholera as cause of death, changed his mind and said that she had been poisoned. Once again, the coroner’s jury said it was willful murder and, if William Palmer had somehow been found innocent in the Cook trial, he would have surely been indicted in his wife’s death, as well. Inquests into older victims such as Leonard Bladen and Mary Thornton were not held because they were deemed unnecessary. The prosecution was confident that William Palmer was going to hang.
The trial began on May 14, 1856, five months after Palmer had been arrested. Both sides brought in multiple experts to offer testimony and to discredit each other. The scientific evidence alone probably would not have been enough to convict. Palmer’s defense team was correct in asserting that strychnine could not be detected in Cook’s body. Whether or not this was because Palmer destroyed the samples was another matter. But the prosecution was able to bring everything out in the open – Palmer’s insurmountable debts, his medical expertise that allowed him to kill with poison while making it look like natural causes, that all the mysterious deaths benefited him financially. Oh, and the fact that he bought strychnine the day before Cook’s death also didn’t hurt.
Despite the prosecution painting a vivid picture of guilt and murder, Palmer remained optimistic and liked his chances. But don’t take our word for it. Here is Charles Dickens with a firsthand account since he attended the trial to write about it. He said:
“The Poisoner had a confident expectation of acquittal. We doubt as little that he really had some considerable hope of it, as we do that he made a pretense of having more than he really had…He had poisoned his victims according to his carefully laid plans; he had got them buried out of his way; he had murdered, and forged, and yet kept his place as a good fellow, and a sporting character; he had made a capital friend of the coroner and a serviceable traitor of the postmaster; he was a great public character, with a special Act of Parliament for his trial; the choice spirits of the Stock Exchange were offering long odds in his favor, and, to wind up all, here was a tip-top Counsellor bursting into tears for him, saying to the jury, three times over, ” You dare not, you dare not, you dare not!” and bolting clean out of the course to declare his belief that he was innocent.
…But, why should he have professed himself to have more hope of escape than he really entertained? The answer is because it belongs to that extremity that the villain in it should not only declare a strong expectation of acquittal himself but should try to infect all the people about him with it. Besides having an artful fancy, not wholly without foundation, he disseminates by that means an impression that he is innocent; to surround himself in his narrowed world with this fiction is, for the time being, to fill the jail with a faintly rose-colored atmosphere, and to remove the gallows to a more agreeable distance.”
As it turned out, Palmer’s confidence was misplaced because it only took the jury an hour to find him guilty and for the judges to sentence him to death. As a London newspaper put it: “Link by link an irresistible chain of evidence wound round Palmer…[and] indisputably it was proved that Palmer was the man who poisoned his friend…Never was a foul murder more conclusively bought home to any murderer.”
William Palmer was executed a month after the trial, on June 14, 1856, in front of tens of thousands of people. Many of them were journalists so, again, we can give you a firsthand account of the proceedings. Here’s the Manchester Guardian:
“[Palmer] looked round, taking in as much of the scene as was possible without turning his head…The bolt was drawn and with a terrific twang and strain upon the rope, the culprit’s body fell two feet and a half and remained for an instant motionless. Death must have been immediate for there appeared no room to doubt that the neck was effectually dislocated. The body slowly turned completely round, then there came a strong convulsive start of the arms and legs; afterward, a few slight tremors ran through the trunk and legs and all was still save that the fresh breeze swayed the body to and fro.”
