On July 26, 1815, 21-year-old Elizabeth Fenning was taken from her cell in a London gaol for the final time. Wearing a muslin dress and a snow-white cap, she was led to the gallows and stood silently as the executioner bound her hands. Many of the people present were in tears including one of her defenders, who asked her to proclaim her innocence one last time. She replied simply, "Before the just and almighty God, and by the faith of the holy sacrament I have taken, I am innocent of the offence with which I am charged." before being hanged. To add to the indignity, her father had to pay an "executioner's fee" to have her body released to him for burial.
The funeral, held just five days after the execution, was held at a London church. Police had to maintain a barricade around the church as there wasn't enough room for everyone who wanted to enter. The procession accompanying the coffin to the cemetery where she was to be buried quickly became a public spectacle with thousands of people marching in the procession accompanying the coffin to her grave. Countless other spectators lined the streets and many storefronts put up ceremonial mourning displays to show there respect to the dead woman.
So, who was Elizabeth Fenning and why did her case arouse consternation across much of Europe? To understand the full circumstances of the case, and why so many people were convinced of her innocence, I'll need to provide a little backstory.
Born in 1792, little is really known about her early childhood except that she was too poor to attend school and, as was common at the time, went to work in domestic service at the age of fourteen. By all accounts, she didn't let her lack of education stop her from expanding her education as much as possible. She was also an excellent cook and served in many households without any problems. That all changed in January 1815 when she went to work at the home of Robert Gregson Turner of 68 Chancery Lane, London. The household consisted Robert Gregson, his wife Charlotte, his father Olibar, and several clerks who worked for them. As the family cook, Elizabeth basically answered to Charlotte Turner who was, by all accounts, a ruthless taskmaster who was constantly attacking all of the staff for various offenses, real and imagined. The adjustment probably came as a shock to Elizabeth who had previously gotten along well with all of her employers.
Despite the friction between Elizabeth and Charlotte, no real problems developed until March of that same year. This was when Elizabeth finally got permission from Charlotte Turner to prepare the apple dumplings that she regarded as being her best dish. Up to that point, Charlotte had been opposed to Elizabeth serving anything outside of the ordinary. Thrilled to have a chance to prove herself, Elizabeth personally purchased all of the necessary ingredients and went to work. Unfortunately, the dumplings failed to turn out the way she had hoped but Charlotte, who refused to waste food for any reason, ordered them to be served up anyway.
After a dinner of steak and potatoes, everything seemed fine until the Turner family actually tried the dumplings Elizabeth had prepared. According to one newspaper account, Olibar Turner "reared up and yelled, and bit a piece out of the back
of his chair and then began rolling around on the floor." The other Turners, while not as dramatic, also began rolling on the floor as well. Terrified about what was happening, the Turners sent for local medical doctors and apothecaries to try to find out what was causing their symptoms. Unfortunately, these various sages all concluded that the symptoms they observed in their patients were due to arsenic poisoning.
Bear in mind that there were no reliable tests for arsenic at the time so, in the absence of actual evidence aside from what the doctors reported, Elizabeth Fenning was immediately arrested for attempted murder. That she had also eaten the dumplings and became sick as the others seemed almost irrelevant. While in jail, police quickly built a case against her which seems ludicrous by modern standards. Not only were there no real proof that the Turners had been poisoned, but all of the evidence they did present was circumstantial in nature.
For example, Charlotte Turner was absolutely convinced that Elizabeth had attempted to murder them all and argued that Elizabeth's repeated requests to be allowed to make apple dumplings proved that she had been intending to poison the family for weeks. Charlotte also insisted that there had been a small supply of arsenic in one of the drawers of the kitchen table which had mysteriously gone missing (it was commonly used in many homes of that era to poison rats). As far as the police and the jury were concerned, this was damning evidence though at least one clerk testified that the arsenic had been missing since long before Elizabeth began working at the Turner home.
Elizabeth never really had a chance given that the court and the judge were completely biased against her. As a domestic on trial for poisoning her employers, her case quickly became political although her parents had largely bankrupted themselvesent to hire a lawyer. Charlotte Turner, who seemed completely convinced about Elizabeth's guilt, testified at length about her suspicions and her animosity towards the hapless cook. When her lawyer tried to bring in witnesses to testify in favour of his client's character, their testimony was largely struck from the record for some reason or other. Ultimately, the jury ruled against Elizabeth despite massive popular support for her innocence. When the jury found her guilty, the judge then sentenced her to death. She reportedly fainted on hearing this and had to be carried out of the courtroom.
Despite numerous pleas for mercy, the British government refused to change the execution date. Orlibar Turner himself tried to sign a petition on the cook's behalf but the court recorder personally intimidated him into recanting by threatening to investigate the rest of the Turner family for the crime. A last minute meeting ordered by the Lord Chancellor concluded that there was no grounds for staying the execution and Elizabeth went to the gallows as planned. Almost immediately after the execution, an enraged crowd gathered outside the Turner home and threatened to burn it down. Police managed to disperse the crowd but needed to keep watch on the house for days afterward to protect the Turner family. Eventually, public outrage died down but the case of Elizabeth Fenning would continue to haunt legislators for decades.
That same year, prominent writers John Watkins and William Hone came out with an extensive review of the case titled "The Important Results of an Elaborate Investigation into the Mysterious Case of Eliza Fenning" (available online). Now considered an early classic in investigative journalism, the book completely shredded the prosecution's case and concluded that the poor cook had been made an example of to show other domestics what would happen if they did anything to harm their employers. Other prominent writers who later weighed in on the case included Charles Dickens and Samuel Parr. Many of these writers came out with their own theories about what really happened, and whether there Sincehad ever been arsenic in the dumplings, but the lack of physical evidence makes any real solution to the mystery impossible.
Postscript. It was the Fenning case, as well as many later cases involving suspected arsenic poisoning, that helped spur the introduction of forensic science into the courtroom. During the 1830s, only twenty years after Elizabeth Fenning's hanging and in response to yet another arsenic poisoning case, chemist James Marsh came out with the first true chemical test for detecting arsenic in even minute doses. Since then, Marsh's test has been used in countless police investigations and criminal trials (not to mention many classic murder mysteries). Elizabeth Fenning would have thoroughly approved.
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