On Monday the 15th of March 1824, 25 year old John Smith climbed the steps of Lincoln Castle’s Cobb Tower to the gallows erected on the flat roof.
He was to hang for the murder of 24-year-old Sarah Arrowsmith, who was his fiancée. A large crowd had assembled to watch the execution.
Sarah and Smith had been in a long term relationship and had a three year old son together. Sarah was pregnant again in 1823.
On the 4th of December 1823, Smith purchased arsenic on the pretext of using it as a sheep wash. (A not uncommon practice at the time).
He mixed some of this into flour and gave it to Sarah, which she used to make some cakes. These she served to some friends and family members who became ill soon afterwards, with violent stomach cramps and burning in the throat.
It appears that the doctors who attended them suspected arsenic poisoning and were able to save everyone except Sarah.
Before she died, she was able to give a statement to a magistrate in which she mentioned Smith giving her the flour.
He was arrested at his cottage in Little Steeping near Alford in Lincolnshire and detained while the flour and Sarah’s stomach contents were examined.
Up to 1836 there was no reliable means of detecting arsenic.
In this year James Marsh who was a chemist at the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich published a paper giving a detailed methodology for testing for traces of arsenic and for measuring the actual quantity found.
He had been involved with the case of James Boodle in 1832 and Boodle was acquitted due to lack of good forensic evidence, although he later admitted poisoning his grandfather’s coffee.
There had been previous test methods, the earliest invented in 1775 by Carl Scheele and others devised by Johann Metzger, Valentin Rose and Samuel Harnemann, but these were not ideal.
The Marsh Test soon became the standard forensic procedure and samples of food, drink, stomach contents and tissue were examined using it.
The process was very sensitive and could detect as little as a fiftieth of a milligram of the substance.
Smith was charged with murder and came to trial at Lincoln on Friday the 12th of March 1824 before Mr.
Justice Hullock. Under the terms of the Murder Act of 1751 that were still in force in 1824, he was to be hanged within 48 hours of his sentence and kept in irons and given only bread and water in the meantime.
His body was sent for dissection afterwards. On Sunday the 14th of March he reportedly made a full confession to the crime in Lincoln Castle, describing how he committed the murder.
It is not clear whether Smith had simply gone off Sarah or could not handle/support another child.
He was a farm labourer and as such would have only made a low income.
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