Madeleine Smith
Madeleine Smith- A Famous Scottish Alleged Poisoner
"The beautiful poisoner"
Madeleine Hamilton Smith (1835-1928). Those were the days of capital punishment and public hangings, and Madeleine Smith, the daughter of James Smith, a well-to-do architect, and who lived with her family in middle-class Glasgow, ran a grave risk when she bought poison with the intent to kill ... rats, or one rat in particular. A vivacious society belle, Madeleine became enamoured of a Channel Islands-born seedsman's clerk, Pierre Emile L'Angelier, in 1855 and a passionate affair commenced. Despite her father forbidding any further contact with L'Angelier Madeleine continued to see him and a correspondence of almost 200 uninhibited love letters ensued. L'Angelier seduced a very willing Madeleine in the woods outside her father's country house at Rowaleyn, in Rhu. However, the rich William Minnoch - a friend of her father's - appeared on the scene and paid court to Madeleine; in time her passion for L'Angelier dimmed, but she kept up a 'double wooing' of L'Angelier and Minnoch.
On 28 January 1857 Madeleine accepted Minnoch's proposal of marriage while she was still 'engaged' to L'Angelier, whom she referred to as 'husband' in her correspondence. Hugely jealous, L'Angelier threatened to tell Madeleine's father of their 'engagement' and show him the passionate letters if she did not break with Minnoch. Trying to extract herself from an embarrassing situation with charm, Madeleine sent the family pageboy, William Murray, to buy 'a small phial of prussic acid'; the dealer would not make the sale. She now affected a reconciliation with L'Angelier, and making love to him in her own bedroom, with the connivance of her sister and maid, began to dose him with arsenic in cocoa. L'Angelier, a devout hypochondriac, began to feel genuinely unwell but went about his business for some time, even visiting friends in Edinburgh, but he died a few weeks after the supposed reconciliation.
L'Angelier was buried in due course but through the testimony of a workmate the authorities began to doubt the cause of his death and his body was exhumed on 31 March 1857. A post mortem revealed arsenical poisoning to an extent far above what the hypochondriacal L'Angelier would have ingested from the arsenic-based patent medicines of the time. Madeleine Smith was promptly arrested for his murder. Her trial was held at the High Court of Judiciary, Edinburgh, and lasted for nine days; she pleaded not guilty to L'Angelier's murder by poisoning. The evidence was painstakingly gone through and Madeleine's passionate letters were read in court. The jury retired and returned a verdict of 'Not Guilty' of attempted murder and the peculiarly Scottish verdict of 'Not Proven' for the two charges of purchasing poison with intent to murder. As with the trial evidence she received the verdicts with complete composure. Since then historians have examined the case minutely. L'Angelier's suicide has been ruled out, and the passage of time has come down on the side of her guilt.
After the trial Madeleine lived for a while in London and Plymouth, marrying a drawing teacher called George Wardle in 1861; she took the name of Lena Wardle. Now she devoted much time to socialist causes. She bore a son, Tom, and emigrated to the United States in 1916. She further married a man called Sheehy, but died in New York. Her mortified family passed into obscurity but the Madeleine Smith case remains one of the most notorious in Scottish law.
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