When Adelaide Bartlett discovered the body of her husband in their stylish residence in the heart of London on the morning of January 1, 1886, she immediately dispatched the maid to fetch the doctor. On hearing the news of Thomas Edwin Bartlett's death, Adelaide's father-in-law immediately suspected foul play. Not only was the dead man only 41 years old, but he had recently passed an insurance examination with flying colors and had been insured for the then-princely sum of four hundred pounds. Though he had been complaining of fatigue in the final weeks of 1885, there was nothing to suggest any cause of death. The first thing Edwin Bartlett Senior did when he came to examine the body was to smell his son's breath to see if he could detect any poisons. The second thing he did was to ask authorities to look into what happened, especially considering his suspicions concerning Adelaide.
In the subsequent autopsy conducted on Thomas Bartlett's body, his stomach was found to contain a lethal quantity of chloroform. Thomas had been suffering from various chronic illnesses, including rotting teeth, and was reportedly a fan of fad health remedies (such as animal magnetism) which he hoped would cure him once and for all. Though he had visited his dentist on the day before his death, the question of how such a large dose of chloroform should have been in his stomach immediately raised suspicions. His doctor, Alfred Leach, had admitted to prescribing chloroform for his patient but only in regulated doses. Which still raised the question of how he came to be poisoned. While police weren't prepared to rule out suicide, it was Adelaide's scandalous relationship with her tutor, the Reverend George Dyson, that led to an inquest returning a verdict of wilful murder. Adelaide and Dyson were both promptly arrested. And so began what would become known as the Pimlico Poisoning Mystery.
Thomas Bartlett had been a wealthy grocer and part of a very proper and close-knit English family. His marriage in 1875 to Adelaide Blanche de la Tremoile, who was both French and considerably younger than he was, caught everyone by surprise. Adelaide's father, who was never publicly named but rumored to be an English nobleman, had arranged the marriage to Thomas, apparently after only a single meeting. Since Adelaide was illegitimate, her father was desperate to arrange a good marriage for her. Not only would the marriage provide her with a legitimate name, but it would also ensure a respectable place in English society. As part of the agreement, the father gave Thomas a rather sizeable dowry (which was promptly invested in Thomas' grocery business). The arrangement also had Thomas agree to assume all responsibility for his young wife, including controlling her behavior, a major concern in Victorian times.
Thomas' father detested Adelaide from the beginning and often accused her of affairs, including one with Thomas' younger brother. Which seems ironic considering that Adelaide would later insist that her marriage to Thomas had been "platonic" from the very beginning. The accusations of infidelity and general animosity Adelaide received from her father-in-law caused her to run away from her home on several occasions (Edwin would then accuse her of running off with other men). Thomas eventually forced his father to apologize to Adelaide in writing, something Edwin would later claim he had only done to make peace with his son.
Though the accusations of infidelity stopped (at least for a while), Adelaide and Edwin continued to despise one another. When Adelaide became pregnant in 1881 (apparently after repeating begging Thomas for a child), things became even more nightmarish. The pregnancy was a difficult one from the beginning, especially since Thomas refused to allow anyone but female midwives to tend to his wife. Even when one of Adelaide's nurses pleaded with him to allow a male doctor to treat her, Thomas flatly refused to allow any man to "interfere with her." When the baby was stillborn, Adelaide was devastated. She would never become pregnant again, and they went back to their old "platonic" relationship.
Most of the details surrounding the later married life of Thomas and Adelaide would only come out in open court after his death. Edwin Bartlett would reluctantly testify that his son once told him that a man should have "two wives, one for companionship and one for work." Other people who knew Thomas would often hear him say the same thing, albeit more crudely. Another of Thomas' quirks was his reluctance to allow Adelaide to have any female friends or acquaintances visiting. Instead, oddly enough, he insisted on surrounding her with male acquaintances and often encouraging her to become physically intimate with them.
One particular favorite was Wesleyan minister George Dyson. Not only was Dyson a frequent visitor to the Bartlett home, but he was also hired to tutor Adelaide and act as a spiritual counselor to the couple. Thomas had so much confidence in Dyson that he even asked him to be the executor of the new will he had drawn up. The exact nature of the relationship that Adelaide, George, and Thomas actually had would become the fodder for lurid gossip during the criminal trial. According to witnesses, George Dyson often arrived as early in the morning after Thomas left for work and would stay for the rest of the day. He even kept his own coat and slippers at the house. Thomas also paid for George to accompany them when they went on vacation.
Though Thomas' father had no trouble accusing Adelaide and George of conspiring to poison his son, the testimony Adelaide would provide was much more lurid. Among other things, she testified that Thomas had openly encouraged George to become intimate with her and even asked them to kiss in his presence. "He seemed to enjoy it," she said. George Dyson was much more nervous testifying about his relationship with Adelaide. He admitted confessing to Thomas about his growing fondness for her. Thomas, for his part, seemed quite pleased and suggested that George and Adelaide write letters to each other. The letters themselves were never entered into evidence (assuming they hadn't already been burned) though Thomas did change his will shortly before his death.
This new will, with George Dyson as executor, was much the same as the previous one except for removing the sticky clause insisting that Adelaide not be allowed to remarry after his death. But there were far more lurid revelations to come in a murder trial that would have Londoners crowding into the courtroom and eagerly reading their evening paper for the latest details.
When the trial of Adelaide Bartlett and George Dyson opened on April 12, 1886, it was an immediate media sensation considering the lurid details. Not only was Adelaide accused of poisoning her husband with a fatal dose of chloroform, but the (ahem) unconventional aspects of her married life with Thomas Edwin Bartlett would become prime fodder for gossip on both sides of the Atlantic. Along with the titillating details of adultery, there was also the forensic evidence provided by the prosecution experts, which focused on one single question: how did Adelaide do it?
Ironically, while George and Adelaide went to trial together, the prosecution's only real interest was in building up their case against Adelaide. For that reason, the acting prosecutor in the case, Attorney General Sir Charles Russell, immediately asked that all charges be dropped against George Dyson, and he was promptly acquitted. This paved the way for George to be called as a prosecution witness (as a defendant, he wouldn't have been able to testify for himself). It was Adelaide alone who went on trial for murder (and faced a possible death sentence if convicted).
Defending Adelaide was prominent trial lawyer Sir George Clarke who, according to rumor, had been hired by her still-unnamed father. While Clarke would insist that Thomas had actually taken the chloroform to commit suicide, the defense and prosecution were both left with the problem of explaining exactly how the chloroform had entered the dead man's system. One major stumbling block for the prosecution's case was that there were no tell-tale traces of the chemical burns, which would certainly have been found in Thomas' mouth and esophagus if Adelaide had poisoned him. On the other hand, George Clarke argued that the lack of burns suggested he had gulped the chloroform down rather than drinking it unknowingly the way the prosecutor claimed.
Despite the mystery of how the chloroform had entered Thomas' system, the fact that Adelaide had several bottles of chloroform in her possession, which George Dyson had purchased for her, was certainly damning. What made things even more suspicious was Dyson's curious decision to purchase the chloroform in small amounts at different shops rather than in one large bottle (under British law at the time, purchasing large amounts of medical poison meant having to sign one's name in special register pharmacies were required to keep). George Dyson insisted that he had purchased the chloroform at Adelaide's request though he claimed not to have realized until later how suspicious his different purchases would have seemed to police.
As for Adelaide, her reason for purchasing the chloroform helped add to the sense of scandal surrounding the case. Since Adelaide was prevented by law from testifying on her own behalf, it was left up to her family doctor, George Dyson, and Thomas' father to share the bizarre details of the case. According to Dr. Leach, Adelaide had told him that she purchased the chloroform to curb her husband's "sexual passion." While she and Thomas had apparently decided to refrain from sex following the stillbirth of her only child, Adelaide was disturbed to discover that her husband "manifested some desire to renew sexual intercourse with her." Since she and George Dyson were already involved, she decided to purchase the chloroform so that she could wave it under Thomas' nose, "lulling him into a kind of stupor, and so prevent him giving effect to his sexual passion."
But this was only one of the lurid revelations that came out during the trial. People in attendance audibly gasped at hearing that no less than six condoms were found in Thomas Bartlett's pocket. Also, known as "French letters," condoms were fairly crude affairs in those days, but the fact that Thomas Bartlett had them at all was considered horrifying. Then there was the discovery of a "marriage manual" in the Bartletts' apartment. Though tame by modern standards, any book containing explicit references to sexuality and birth control was deemed pornographic in Victorian times, and the presiding judge, Sir Alfred Wills, devoted considerable time during his final summation about the dangers of such a book for women (he described it as "reading which helped to unsex them.") Judge Wills also insisted that the jury would have to pity Adelaide considering her husband "could throw such literature her way and encourage her to read it" and that "One has learned to-day what is the natural and to be expected consequence of indulgence in literature of that kind."
Since Thomas Bartlett was, like all Victorian gentlemen, expected to protect his wife from corrupting influences, the presence of the book, as well as the condoms in his pocket, cast serious doubt on Adelaide's description of her "platonic" marriage. Abandoning any claim to being objective, the judge seemed determined to sway the jury to find Adelaide Bartlett guilty. He ended his summation by stating: "When a young wife and a younger male friend get discussing, in or out of the presence of the husband, the possibilities of his decease within measurable time and of the friend succeeding to the husband's place, according to all experience of human life, the life of the husband was one that an insurance office would not like to take."
But the jury was less impressed by the available evidence than the judge and prosecutor had hoped. It only took them two hours of deliberation to find Adelaide not guilty. On hearing the verdict, the people in the courtroom and the corridors outside promptly started cheering, something that Judge Wills, who was likely disappointed at the trial's outcome, regarded as an "outrage." Still, Adelaide was free to go.
Despite the evidence presented during the trial, public sympathy had largely turned against Thomas Bartlett, who was regarded as the chief villain in the case. As the husband, it had been his responsibility to protect his wife from corrupting influences and to maintain a normal household, children and all. Though the prosecution tried to present Adelaide as a scheming adulteress who had poisoned her husband to be with her lover, Adelaide's lawyer convinced the jury (and the public) that his client was incapable of murder. Simply by saying nothing (she never gave any statement regarding her guilt or innocence), Adelaide's meek appearance helped win the sympathy of everyone associated with the case.
There were still a few people convinced that Adelaide had gotten away with murder, however. One skeptic, famous surgeon Sir James Paget, greeted the verdict with his now famous quip: "Now that she has been acquitted for murder and cannot be tried again, she should tell us in the interest of science how she did it!"
But Adelaide continued to stay silent about the case and her life with Thomas. After her acquittal, she managed to disappear from public notice completely (probably with her father's help), and nothing was ever heard about her again. As for George Dyson, the notoriety surrounding the case and his unconventional relationship with Adelaide forced him to leave Great Britain. Despite conflicting stories over whether he had emigrated to Australia or the United States, nothing more was really heard about him either.
But the case of the Pimlico Poisoning would continue to fascinate true crime buffs well into the present day. Transcripts of the case are still available online, and there have been various attempts at solving the mystery of Thomas' death once and for all. Along with books and radio programs describing the case, there were at least two notable attempts to bring the story to life on the silver screen. Alfred Hitchcock once stated that he had planned to make a movie about the case but had ultimately decided against it. The 1986 movie My Letter to George, starring Jodie Foster, was loosely based on Adelaide Bartlett's story.
So, did Adelaide Bartlett kill her husband? You be the judge.
