In the autumn of 1855, Dr. William Palmer, a thirty-one-year-old physician who had long abandoned medicine for the racetrack, stood at the edge of ruin. Heavily in debt and gambling on credit, he faced a stream of demands from creditors and legal writs for the recovery of money he did not have. On Tuesday, November 13, he traveled with his friend and fellow betting man, twenty-eight-year-old John Parsons Cook, to the Rugeley handicap races.

Both owned horses running in the main event, but their fortunes diverged sharply. Cook’s horse, Polestar, won the race, earning its owner roughly two thousand pounds in prize money and bets, a sum worth about three hundred thousand pounds today. Palmer’s own horse, Chicken, lost. That evening, a delighted Cook hosted a small dinner party at the Railway Hotel in Shrewsbury, where the two friends were staying.

The following day, Palmer brought Cook a glass of brandy and water to his room. At Palmer’s urging, Cook drank nearly all of it, then cried out that there was something in it, that it burned his throat. Palmer tasted the residue and pronounced it harmless, but Cook was violently ill shortly afterward. As his companions helped him to bed, Cook said that Palmer had been dosing him.

On November 15, Palmer and Cook returned to Palmer’s hometown of Rugeley in Staffordshire. Cook took a room at the Talbot Arms, opposite Palmer’s house, and recovered reasonably well over the next two days. But on November 17, after sharing a drink with Palmer, he suffered a sudden and severe relapse. Palmer, still the doctor, thoughtfully sent over a bowl of soup to the ailing Cook.

The chambermaid, Elizabeth Mills, tasted it and promptly fell ill. Cook consumed the rest and his vomiting worsened. The next day, Palmer offered to collect Cook’s winning bets for him, amounting to some twelve hundred pounds, and he purchased three grains of strychnine from a local chemist, saying it was to kill a dog. He bought more strychnine and prussic acid from another chemist the following day.

On November 21, after Palmer administered two pills to him, Cook died in agony around one in the morning. As he lay dying, he told Elizabeth Mills that Palmer had poisoned him. Palmer’s life before this crime had prepared the ground for it. Born in Rugeley on August 6, 1824, he was the sixth of eighteen children of a wealthy timber merchant.

His father died when William was twelve, leaving his mother a fortune of seventy thousand pounds. Palmer was bright, charming, and deceitful. Apprenticed to a Liverpool chemist at seventeen, he was dismissed after three months when money went missing. He studied medicine in London and qualified as a doctor at St.

Bartholomew’s Hospital in August 1846. Soon after returning to Staffordshire, he struck up a friendship with a man named George Abley, who became ill and died in bed after the two drank together. Nothing was ever proved, but Palmer was known to be pursuing Abley’s attractive wife at the time. In October 1847, Palmer married Anne Thornton, whose mother had inherited a considerable fortune.

That mother-in-law came to stay with the couple in January 1849 and died two weeks later, after lending Palmer a large sum of money. The cause of death was recorded as apoplexy. In 1850, Palmer borrowed six hundred pounds from a man he met at the races, Leonard Bladen. Bladen died in agony at Palmer’s house in May of that year, apparently of an abscess of the pelvis.

His betting books were mysteriously missing, and there was no evidence he had ever lent Palmer anything. Palmer’s own children died in alarming succession: four of his five died in infancy between 1851 and 1854, deaths attributed at the time to the terrible misfortune of childhood mortality. His wife Anne died on September 29, 1854, at just twenty-seven, during a cholera epidemic. Palmer had taken out a life insurance policy on her with the Prince of Wales Insurance Company, paying a premium of seven hundred fifty pounds, and collected thirteen thousand pounds upon her death.

By 1855, his debts had swelled to an enormous scale. He resorted to forging his wealthy mother’s signature to raise credit, using an intermediary in London, and bribed the Rugeley postmaster, Samuel Cheshire, to intercept letters that might expose his fraud. He took out insurance on his brother Walter, a drunkard, for fourteen thousand pounds, and supplied him with as much liquor as he could drink. Walter died on August 16, 1855.

Palmer hurriedly claimed the insurance, but the company dispatched former detective inspectors to investigate. They found that Palmer had also tried to insure the life of his stable manager, George Bates, for ten thousand pounds, an application that had been refused. They recommended that the claim on Walter’s death not be paid, and that further inquiry be made into the circumstances. At the same time, Palmer’s housemaid had given birth to his illegitimate son in June 1855.

The child died in November and was buried, coincidentally, on the same day John Parsons Cook died. Cook’s death seemed to Palmer a solution. Broke on his return from Shrewsbury, he had collected Cook’s winnings, worth several thousand pounds, and began repaying his debts. On November 23, Cook’s stepfather arrived in Rugeley to settle affairs.

Palmer claimed Cook owed him four thousand pounds and produced a note bearing Cook’s signature. The postmaster, Cheshire, refused to witness it, and the signature was presumed forged. When Cook’s betting books and financial papers were requested from his room, they were found missing. Palmer had been seen searching the dead man’s pockets immediately after his death.

Palmer obtained a death certificate from an elderly doctor, recording the cause as apoplexy, but Cook’s stepfather demanded a postmortem. The examination took place at the Talbot Arms on November 26. Palmer was present throughout and interfered with the proceedings, taking away a jar containing the stomach contents. When a furious doctor demanded its return, Palmer complied, but two slits had been made in the parchment seal.

The jar was sent to Guy’s Hospital in London, and Palmer tried to persuade the post boy to overturn the carriage and break it. The post boy refused. The leading toxicologist of the day found the contents in such poor condition they were useless, so a second postmortem was held on November 29. Although no strychnine was found in the tissue samples, the toxicologist concluded that Cook had been poisoned by it, given the characteristic symptoms he had suffered.

Palmer’s efforts to obstruct justice continued. He intercepted letters addressed to the coroner, tried to bribe him with a note of four hundred pounds for a verdict of natural causes, and even wrote to the coroner himself requesting a benign ruling. The bribes were refused. The inquest jury, meeting in early December, delivered its verdict on December 15: Cook had died of poison willfully administered by William Palmer.

That same day, Palmer was arrested and charged with murder and forgery. The arrest caused a sensation. Newspapers and pamphlets poured over Palmer’s life, real and imagined. It became clear that a fair trial in Staffordshire would be impossible, so the trial was moved to the Central Criminal Court in London.

An Act of Parliament, known popularly as Palmer’s Act, was passed to accomplish this. The bodies of Palmer’s wife Anne and brother Walter were exhumed. Anne’s organs contained antimony; Walter’s body was too decomposed to yield results. The trial opened at the Old Bailey on May 14, 1856, before Lord Chief Justice John Campbell.

Crowds gathered outside, and the great and good filled the gallery. The prosecution’s case was circumstantial but powerful. Palmer faced ruin; Cook’s death offered him a way to cancel debts and gain money. He had been seen removing papers from Cook’s room.

He began repaying debts immediately after Cook’s death. Cook became ill following visits from Palmer. The soup Palmer supplied made the chambermaid equally ill. Palmer had interfered with the postmortem.

Cook’s symptoms were those of strychnine poisoning. Cook himself told three people Palmer had poisoned him. Palmer had bought strychnine before the death and tried to conceal the purchases. He had attempted to bribe the coroner.

Throughout the trial, Palmer remained calm, scribbling notes to his counsel. The defense argued that no poison had been found, and that opportunity and motive were not enough. On May 27, the jury retired and returned after an hour and seventeen minutes with a verdict of guilty. Palmer, said to have expressed his view of the prosecution in a racing metaphor, the riding, he said, was what did it, was sentenced to death.

He was returned to Stafford Prison. On June 14, 1856, before a crowd of some thirty thousand people, he was publicly hanged. As he stepped onto the gallows, he is said to have looked dubiously at the trapdoor and asked, are you sure this is safe. Just before being led out, the governor asked if he wished to confess.

Palmer replied that Cook did not die from strychnine poisoning, and when pressed, said merely that the Lord Chief Justice had summed up for poisoning by strychnine. His mother, told of her son’s death, remarked, they have hanged my saintly Billy.