The inquest into the death of William Murphy had been underway for some time when the coroner, Thomas Wilson, turned his attention to the occupants of Hall Farm. He asked Mary Chandler directly whether she had been in Mrs. Murphy’s house between eight o’clock in the morning and nine o’clock on the Tuesday morning of the 17th of May 1938, when Mr. Murphy died.

Never, she replied. Was the Hall Farm farmer there, so far as she knew? No. Could he have been there without her knowledge?

He could have been. Could she have been there without his knowledge? No, because she was in bed. The coroner pressed her: why did the fact that she was in bed make it impossible for her to be out without the farmer’s knowledge?

He knew she was in bed when he went out, she said, and she was still in bed at lunchtime. Could one of them have got up and gone out without the other knowing? No. Why not?

Because they were in each other’s rooms. The coroner repeated the phrase, puzzled. She clarified: he was in her room eventually. So it really came to this, the coroner said: neither the farmer could say what she was doing on Monday morning, nor could she say what the farmer was doing.

Yes. And the same applied to the afternoon? Yes. And concerning the night—were they sleeping in the same bed?

Yes, replied Mary Chandler. She was eager to establish an alibi for the night, not for the previous morning or afternoon. The police believed they knew why: they were convinced that the poison had been introduced to the salts during that earlier window, between eight in the evening and eight in the morning on the 16th and 17th of May. The inquest was adjourned until the 21st of July to give the police more time.

The story had begun on a Tuesday morning that seemed completely ordinary. William Murphy had been up since half past five, busy about the farm at Key’s Farm in the small village of Risby, Suffolk. He came in to breakfast at his usual hour of eight o’clock on the 17th of May 1938. He sat down at the dining room table to read his newspaper while the maid went to get his breakfast.

His wife, Gertrude, rose from the table to fetch his Finnan salts, which he took each morning for his health. Everything was quite normal, with one exception: he had less than an hour left to live. Mrs. Murphy took the lid off the tin of salts and noticed they looked brown.

She remarked to the farm secretary, Molly Target, who was sitting at the dining table: “Do you think there’s anything the matter with these salts? They look brown. ” She took a teaspoon and removed most of the brownish crystals from the top of the tin, then made up a tumbler of the salts for her husband. William Murphy drank off the glass and pulled a face.

“Are you sure these are salts? They taste funny,” he said. “Yes, of course,” she replied. “Same as usual.

” She showed him the salts, and he said they were damp. A couple of minutes later, William began to feel unwell. He stood up, clutched the table, and said, “I feel ill—fetch a doctor. ” He then collapsed to the floor, where cushions were placed under his head while Molly Target called for Dr.

Hubert Ware. Mrs. Murphy instructed the maids to tidy the dining room. Mr.

Murphy was unconscious when the doctor arrived but not for long. There had been little need for urgency. Dr. Ware said to Mrs.

Murphy, “I’m afraid your husband’s dead. ” He inquired about Mr. Murphy’s recent health, but Mrs. Murphy said he had been well.

He asked in particular what he had eaten for breakfast. Mrs. Murphy said he had not had breakfast and showed him the tin of Finnan salts, which she said they both took each morning. The doctor inquired whether she had taken any that morning, and she said she had not—she didn’t fancy them because when she opened the tin they looked brown.

The doctor sniffed the tin cautiously. The unmistakable aroma of bitter almonds came to him: the unique scent of potassium cyanide. The police were called, and Sergeant Clifford Bigmore cycled over to the house. Mrs.

Murphy was very upset, at times hysterical, and said, “I wish I had taken a dose as well. ”

Sergeant Bigmore looked around and inquired if anything in the dining room had been moved. Mrs. Murphy told him she had tidied it up in anticipation of the doctor’s arrival.

Having noted the circumstances, Bigmore arranged for the body of William Murphy to be taken to West Suffolk General Hospital and took possession of a glass tumbler and a teaspoon with powder on it, then locked the door to the dining room. A post-mortem was held that afternoon by Dr. Ware at West Suffolk Hospital. Various organs were removed and, along with the tin of Finnan salts, sent to the leading authority on poisons, the Home Office analyst Dr.

Roche Lynch, at St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, for examination. Although William Murphy was overweight, suffered with diabetes, and had an enlarged liver indicating previous alcohol abuse, the post-mortem found he was in reasonable health. He was a non-smoker and a non-drinker.

It was apparent even without Roche Lynch’s confirmation that William Murphy had been poisoned. Furthermore, the suspicion was that he had been murdered. To understand how such a thing could happen, one had to know the man. William Murphy was born in Wisbech, Cambridge, in 1882.

His father was a farmer, and William helped him on the farm as a young man, but he had an adventurous side. He joined the army and fought in the Boer War in 1901, where he was promoted to sergeant. He married Gertrude Elena Green in 1903, who bore him a son, Joseph Leslie, in 1904. Afterwards he traveled widely, working for a time in Australia.

Another son, Billy, was born in 1912. During the First World War, William Murphy established a business in washing and supplying vegetables to the London market, aided no doubt by the shortages created by wartime conditions. He prospered, and by 1932 he was able to take the lease on the thousand-acre Key’s Farm in the Suffolk village of Risby, which he shrewdly planted with crops best suited to the varying soil types there. Hard-working and determined, by the late 1930s he had invested in the most modern farm machinery and employed eighty workers.

He paid good wages and worked hard himself, rising at half past five each morning. He played hard too. He was forthright, a bully, and sociable—a little too sociable, perhaps, with women, rather like a prized bull amongst his heifers. Although not quite the country gentleman, he rode to hounds, hunted, and shot almost anything which didn’t keep still for long enough.

He was not a cerebral man. His loves were farming, expensive cars, horse racing, and women, in no particular order. The Chief Constable of Suffolk realized immediately that this would require Scotland Yard’s assistance, and two experienced detectives from the CID were sent to lead the investigation: Detective Chief Inspector Leonard Burt and Detective Sergeant Reginald Spooner. They set about taking statements and making inquiries.

From their inquiries they learned that Mr. Murphy had spent most of the previous day at another of his farms in Norfolk, returning home sometime after seven in the evening. He then went out shooting until eight, when he returned and had supper with his wife. She retired at half past nine, and he a quarter of an hour later.

Dr. Roche Lynch’s tests confirmed that cyanide was indeed the poison which had killed William Murphy. From other tests he conducted, he discovered that when cyanide was added to Finnan salts, it turned them brown over the course of a few hours until they became virtually black after twelve hours. Those who had seen the salts on the morning of the 17th of May described their appearance as light brown.

Roche Lynch calculated that even if the degree to which air was excluded from the tin had inhibited the discoloration of the crystals, the cyanide must have been added no more than twelve hours prior to their being taken. This gave a twelve-hour window in which someone had added the cyanide: between eight in the evening and eight in the morning on the 16th and 17th of May. It was also clear to Chief Inspector Burt that the person who had done this must have known of the salts and of the habit of their being taken by the Murphys each morning. Furthermore, if Mrs.

Murphy was not the killer, then she must also have been an intended victim. Mrs. Murphy told the detectives that only a few people knew of the habits of those in the house, including Mr. Murphy, herself, the secretary, the maid, and the cook.

There were also four friends and neighbors who might know of the salts and who were familiar with the house. Considering who might have a motive for wishing William Murphy dead, the police discovered a gamekeeper who had quarreled with William over gaming rights on the estate and a shepherd whom Murphy had recently dismissed. But both were quickly exonerated from any involvement in the murder. The couple’s two sons, Leslie and Billy, were both absent from home: one lived in London, and the other was fourth engineer on a ship currently in the Mediterranean.

Of course, the inhabitants of the house itself knew of the Murphys’ habits, the salts, and so forth, but the maid, who had been there seven years; the cook, who had been there six years; and the secretary, for nine years, had no motive at all that could be discerned. Detectives made efforts to trace purchases of cyanide made in the area, particularly those made by any of the suspects. But this was no easy task, because it seemed at times as if everyone in Suffolk possessed cyanide as a means of destroying wasps’ nests. In fact, in the thirteen months prior to Murphy’s death, it was established that 425 purchases of cyanide had been made from five chemist shops in Bury St.

Edmunds alone. This was sufficient to kill something like 45,000 people—twice the town’s entire population. With regard to the death itself, detectives felt confident William Murphy had not committed suicide. There was nothing in his life or in his behavior the night before or on the morning of his death to indicate that this was anything other than a normal day.

To introduce cyanide into a tin for his wife to give to him would seem incredible as a means of suicide. This left five possible suspects: Mrs. Murphy and the four neighbors. These were a local farmer at Mosley’s Farm called Ripon Charles Brown and Elaine Brown, his wife, and another farmer, James Walker, and his housekeeper, Mary Chandler.

All were in a position to know of the habits of the Murphys, of the Finnan salts being kept on the sideboard in the dining room, and of the means of access to the house. One of these five people had, in the view of Chief Inspector Burt, murdered William Murphy. Prima facie, there was a strong case against Gertrude Murphy. She had endured many years of neglect by her husband and his many affairs, including with a gamekeeper’s daughter and his own niece.

And of course she had ample opportunity for poisoning him. And yet, in spite of the apparent evidence for this and after some initial suspicions, Detectives Burt and Spooner doubted she was her husband’s murderer. To begin with, she possessed a personal estate of a thousand pounds in her own right. Secondly, she had alluded to the strange color of the salts quite openly—to her husband, to the secretary, to the doctor, and to the police.

She had not attempted to conceal this. She said she didn’t fancy the salts herself because of their brown appearance, and she quite openly put them into the oven to dry them, in the apparent belief that they were brown because they were damp. And third, in spite of the fact that Murphy was serially unfaithful, she appeared to be genuinely devoted to him, tolerated his affairs, forgave easily, and held no grudges. It was entirely possible, though, the detectives thought, that one of the four friends and neighbors might have gained entry to the house by some means.

Detectives noted there were four doors to Key’s Farm: three rear doors whose keys were kept in the locks on the inside, two of which were usually kept locked during the day, and the front door, which was fitted with a Yale lock and an unused deadlock. The rear doors were observable from William Murphy’s office and also from other vantage points at the rear, business end of the house. To the right of the front door, however, immediately inside the hallway, was the door to the dining room, and here was a sideboard on which the Finnan salts were kept. The front door therefore seemed the most likely means of entry.

This had four keys: one which Murphy kept on a chain about him, one which Mrs. Murphy kept in a handbag, one which their son, who was away at sea, kept in his bedroom, and a fourth key which was missing. Of the four friends, each appeared to have a motive. Elaine Brown was a forty-one-year-old, tall, attractive woman, a modiste who owned a fashionable boutique in Bury St.

Edmunds and was a friend of Mrs. Murphy. She dressed stylishly, and she had caught the eye of William Murphy—not necessarily a difficult task. Although married to a Suffolk farmer herself, Ripon Charles Brown, who was seventeen years her senior, she and William Murphy had engaged upon an affair two years before the murder.

Elaine Brown had become pregnant by him and had an abortion. Mrs. Murphy became suspicious of the two. She wrote in her diary, which she volunteered to police, that she had hired a private detective to follow her husband and that he had obtained proof that the two were engaged upon an affair.

But she told the detectives she had only done this so that her husband would read the diary and end the affair. At length she had confronted William, and he denied it. So did Elaine. Then Mrs.

Murphy made an alarming suggestion to them: she said she would divorce William so the two could be together. They were aghast at her suggestion. Elaine had no desire to break up her own home, nor William his. They confessed all and agreed to end the affair.

Mrs. Murphy, rather sportingly, forgave her husband and remained good friends with Elaine. Elaine’s husband, Ripon Charles Brown, clearly had a strong motive for murdering Murphy, but he was apparently unaware of his wife’s infidelity until the police investigation obliged Elaine to inform him of it. In due course he was interviewed by Chief Inspector Burt, who asked him if he had never suspected his wife and William Murphy of having an affair, since many people in the small village of Risby appeared to know of it.

Brown told Inspector Burt that he had heard rumors but did not believe them. Was it possible that Brown had known and yet never challenged his wife over these stories? Did he know and choose not to confront the situation? Or did he know and choose to do something rather deadly about it?

If he did, he was good at concealing his animosity towards William Murphy, because he and Elaine spent most of the day with Murphy and his wife on a motor yacht at Horning on the Norfolk Broads just two days prior to the murder, and all had been well between them. In any case, Burt had difficulty in seeing Brown as the kind of man who would sneak into the Murphys’ house at night and poison the salts as a way of exacting revenge. It seemed unlikely, and there was no evidence whatsoever of this—just a strong motive which Brown claimed did not exist prior to Murphy’s death. It all seemed a little Sicilian rather than Suffolkan.

The remaining suspects—James Walker of Hall Farm, some three or four hundred yards away, and his housekeeper, Mary Chandler—quickly came sharply into focus during the investigation. James Walker had moved to Hall Farm in 1926, and no sooner had he done so than his wife, Minnie, died, somewhat lonely following her death. A short time afterwards, Mary Chandler arrived to keep house for him. Soon Walker was taking his housekeeper to social events, to neighbors’ houses for dinner.

Naturally, this raised eyebrows in a small village like Risby. It was certainly an unusual thing for a well-to-do widower to consort so openly with his housekeeper. Rumors abounded. It was said that the housekeeper did not rise before lunchtime each day, that she dressed rather fancily for a housekeeper and had too much money, and that Mr.

Walker seemed far too happy for a recent widower. When police went to interview Mr. Walker following the death of William Murphy, he said he would rather a solicitor was present for the interview. That struck police as being strange.

However, he did make a statement to say he had known his housekeeper since before his wife died in 1926. He also said he was born in Calcutta and was aged sixty. In Leonard Burt’s view, he was an educated and intelligent man. Police were interested to discover that William Murphy had earlier that year banished Mary Chandler from his house because he discovered her cheating at cards.

He also told his wife to have nothing further to do with her. But what drew their greatest interest to the occupants of Hall Farm was the matter of the fur coat. It seems that forty-one-year-old Mary Chandler had asked William Murphy if she could go to the Newmarket races with him in September 1937, and he had agreed. Apparently she won a great deal of money there, because a few days after her return she showed Gertrude Murphy an expensive mink coat which she said she was selling for a friend in Scotland.

Mrs. Murphy suggested she sell it to her furrier in London’s Regent Street. A couple of days afterwards, Mary Chandler told her that she had bought the coat herself but that she wished to sell it. Still, it was of course something of a surprise to find that a housekeeper could afford to buy such an expensive coat on a housekeeper’s salary.

In any case, Mary Chandler went with Mrs. Murphy to Regent Street and sold the coat, receiving £120 for it—that’s £8,000 in 2020 terms. Meanwhile, a few miles away in Newmarket, Mrs. Edith Warr, a haughty lady whose husband trained horses and at whose house James Walker and Mary Chandler had been visitors on a number of occasions, found she was missing a mink coat.

She was greatly upset, because she had bought the coat herself and it was her pride and joy. She called the police and demanded imperiously that they find her coat for her. They did. It was in an exclusive furrier shop in Regent Street in London.

It had been sold to the shop by Mrs. Mary Chandler. Questioned, Mary Chandler now said that she had bought the mink coat off a lady she met at Newmarket whilst there with William Murphy. She had no receipt for the coat and said it had been paid for out of her winnings on that day.

She had brought the coat back to Murphy’s car in his absence and placed it on the back seat. The police interviewed Murphy, and he said Mrs. Chandler had had no coat with her, and when they drove back from Newmarket she had not mentioned this in the car to him. He also said she could not have placed it on the back seat before his return to the car, because he had locked it.

He said he had dropped Mrs. Chandler with his chauffeur in his other car en route, and she had not had a second fur coat with her when she changed cars. The chauffeur also gave police a statement that Mrs. Chandler had not had a coat with her when she got into the car from Murphy’s Buick.

In fact, all she had in her hand was a racing card, he said. Interestingly, a front door key to Mrs. Edith Warr’s house was also missing after a visit by Mary Chandler and James Walker, and police believed she had used this to gain entry to steal the fur coat. Mrs.

Chandler was charged with the theft of the fur coat, and William Murphy and his wife informed James Walker that they intended to tell the truth to the police. Mrs. Chandler fled to Scotland. She was in a bad position, because it seemed she had been bound over for the theft of a fur coat once before, and that meant an inevitable prison sentence if convicted of this further offence.

Could this have been a motive for murder—to prevent the Murphys from giving evidence which looked set to send her to prison? James said he would stand by his housekeeper and dismissed the Murphys’ evidence to police. Mary Chandler was interviewed by detectives and gave the same account as James Walker. Both said they did not know about the Finnan salts.

They also hinted that they knew a great secret about Murphy and, encouraged separately by officers to divulge this, intimated that Murphy had committed suicide. Further inquiries into her background revealed Mrs. Chandler to be a fanciful woman. She told numerous people that her husband had been a doctor who had died on the polo field, her father a barrister, and her grandfather the Earl Marshal of Scotland.

She herself had been presented at court and owned property in India. But none of this was true. Mary Chandler was in fact born Mary Fernie Elizabeth Higgins in 1897 in Pittessie, Fife, Scotland, the daughter of a coal miner. When she left school at fourteen, she worked for a time in a culinary herself, but she soon went into domestic service, first with one family, then with another, then just a few months later for another family in Douglas Street, Kirkcaldy.

She was dismissed from this employment when they caught her stealing from them. But two years later, Mary used credit on their account to defraud them. They were about to prosecute her when she was taken on as a nurse to someone called Lord Beckenham. They demurred at this apparent change in her fortunes, and the police dropped charges.

Mary then traveled to India with Lord Beckenham—he may have been a figment of her imagination, as there seems to be no trace of him—and here she married the managing director of Mrs. J. H. Chandler and Co.

Limited, chemists of Calcutta. He was an older man who had a daughter, and for whatever reason the marriage quickly foundered, and Mary left India for England, arriving in April 1924. From here she went to live at Kingston-on-Thames. She received sums of money from her husband at intervals, often inventing pretexts for these which in due course he discovered to be false.

It was then, in October of 1924, that she was charged over the theft of a fur musquash coat valued at £96—that’s approximately £6,000 today—for which she was fined £50, approximately £3,000, and bound over for two years. It was not known where she was between 1924 and 1926, but according to Mr. Walker, in December 1926, six months after his wife’s death, she went to Hall Farm as his housekeeper. The maid at Hall Farm said that Mrs.

Chandler had written to her from Scotland in the previous summer and asked her to send a bottle from the left-hand corner of a bench in the cloakroom to her. When the maid went to look, she found a bottle marked “Poison—Potassium Cyanide. ” There it was, the only bottle in the cloakroom. She decided it could not possibly be this she wanted and wrote back to the housekeeper saying she could not find it.

Mrs. Chandler sent a postcard saying she would ask Mr. Walker to find it for her. A farm worker at Hall Farm said that on two occasions in the past two years he had destroyed wasps’ nests with Mr.

Walker using the same bottle described by the maid. Both Walker and Mrs. Chandler denied its existence. Mrs.

Chandler said the bottle she had requested the maid to send her was a lotion, and then, after consulting with a solicitor in private, said it was boracic crystals, which have the advantage of resembling potassium cyanide. But as these cost threepence per four ounces, the police thought it highly unlikely that she would send for this by post when it was such a commonly available commodity. The police asked James Walker again about the cyanide in front of the worker who had told them about destroying wasps’ nests with his employer. Now Walker recalled having purchased cyanide once in 1934, twice in 1936, and once in 1937.

He had not, he said as far as he could recall, sent his housekeeper any cyanide in Scotland. Police also learned that Mary Chandler had taken a cake to Key’s Farm the day after Murphy’s death. They asked her why she had done this, and she said she had made it from ingredients given her by Mrs. Murphy and had meant to take it over on the 16th of May but forgot.

But the maid at Hall Farm said she had made two cakes, neither of which were from Mrs. Murphy’s ingredients. Questioning both Walker and his housekeeper convinced police they were both compulsive liars. They changed their stories at will.

Walker often said one thing and then claimed another, then he would alter his story again or claim not to remember. Chief Inspector Burt’s view of Mrs. Chandler was that she was a woman of great cunning. In fact, the more he looked at Mary Chandler, the less he liked her.

Detectives were informed of a local scandal involving a betting scam. Mary Chandler had apparently placed bets on a number of horses in the same race in the names of a number of women in the district, including that of Elaine Brown, collecting only on the winning ticket and leaving the payment of the losing tickets to the women. When these women received bills for the failed bets, they knew nothing of them and refused to pay. The bookmaker became wary of taking any further bets by phone, and when a woman with a Scottish accent rang to place a bet, he refused it.

But minutes later a woman entered the betting shop and tried to place a bet. He recognized her voice and accused Mary Chandler of fraud. She denied it. He was prepared to go to the police, but James Walker begged him not to and promised to pay him £40.

The betting manager received only £15 of this. It seems there was another unusual and suggestive peccadillo. Mary Chandler had a habit of being discovered in places where she shouldn’t have been. Gertrude Murphy told police that on one occasion she had discovered Mary Chandler in her bedroom, and when found, Mary had simply said, “Sorry, I rang the bell and couldn’t make the maids hear.

I’ve got a car outside and wondered if you would like to come up to town with me. ” Gertrude said that this could not have been true, because the doorbell battery had recently been changed. On another occasion, Mrs. Chandler had been at Key’s Farm for supper.

She excused herself at some point and was gone for a long time, so Mrs. Murphy went to find her. She found Mary Chandler in her bedroom standing beside a wardrobe. Mrs.

Chandler said she had rung for her maid for assistance, but the maid had not heard the bell. Mrs. Murphy did not, of course, believe her. Her sister, Mrs.

Kate Ruston, entertained James Walker and Mary Chandler. Mrs. Chandler excused herself at some point and was subsequently found by Mrs. Ruston in an upstairs bedroom.

Mrs. Chandler said she was looking for a needle and thread to mend a ladder in her stocking. Afterwards, a nitrous was found to be missing. Another time, Mrs.

Ruston discovered £5 was missing from her handbag after Mrs. Chandler had been alone with it in the dining room. Numerous other thefts were associated with Mary Chandler too, including an ermine coat from the Farmers’ Benevolent Ball in February 1937, which a maid at Hall Farm said she had subsequently seen in Mrs. Chandler’s wardrobe.

Mrs. Elaine Brown had lost an evening dress, Mrs. Murphy a gold lighter—and subsequently saw Mary Chandler with an identical one—and a local golf club suspected her of several thefts. There seemed to be no end to Mary Chandler’s larcenous enterprise.

But there was an even more suggestive incident: that of the fire at Hall Farm. Every year, James Walker’s wealthy mother came to stay with her son for three months. Mary Chandler did not get on with her, and there was clearly a mutual dislike between the two women. Mary left on the occasion of one of these visits, refusing to be in the same house as her employer’s mother.

Mrs. Walker was in the habit of buying her son a new car every couple of years or so. On one such occasion, Mary had refused to accompany mother and son when they went to buy a car. James Walker returned from this shopping trip with a brand new Triumph sports car.

Mary Chandler told a neighboring couple she hated the car, that she loathed everything about it. They then reported to James Walker and his mother that they had seen the housekeeper slashing the tires with a pair of scissors. The next day, the car had mechanical problems and had, according to the garage, been tampered with. The nuts on the wheels were also found to have been loosened.

After this, the car was left in the garage at Hall Farm. Then one evening, the fire brigade was called to Hall Farm. It seems the garage had caught fire and destroyed both the garage and the new Triumph car it housed. On being told of the faults with the car on a previous occasion, the fire brigade decided that it had been caused by faulty wiring in the car.

The insurance company paid out £200 to James Walker for his loss. But insurance officials told police there was disquiet over this. Concerning the murder at Key’s Farm, Detectives Burt and Spooner learned that Mary Chandler was seen by two witnesses—the chauffeur and a maid—outside the farm four days before the murder, on the evening of the 12th of May. Of course, when asked about this, she denied it.

The inquest into the death of William Murphy under the Bury St. Edmunds coroner, Thomas Wilson, was opened and adjourned the day after Murphy’s death, and his funeral took place on the 20th of May, from which Mrs. Murphy had to be led away before its conclusion because she was said to be prostrate with grief. The inquest was tricky for Thomas Wilson, the coroner, because the trial of Mary Chandler concerning the theft of the fur coat was impending.

The outcome of this case would clearly impact on any case against Chandler in respect of the murder of William Murphy, because it would furnish motive. If she was acquitted, then a mainstay of the prosecution case against Mary Chandler for the murder would disappear. The inquest was thus delayed to allow the fur coat case to run to completion. In this regard, Mary Chandler appeared before the justices at Newmarket Petty Sessions on the 16th of June 1938.

There were two charges against her: the first was of theft of the fur coat from the home of Mrs. Edith Warr; the second was of receiving stolen goods. There was sufficient evidence for the theft of the mink coat—Mary Chandler had quite surely stolen it, and her story of buying it from an unknown lady at Newmarket races was clearly a fabrication, rebutted by Murphy’s evidence that he had locked the car at Newmarket so she could not have put the coat in there as she claimed, and by the fact she had neither spoken of it to him on the return journey nor removed it from the car when she changed cars. But with Murphy’s death, his evidence could not now be heard.

The larceny charge was dismissed. But Mary Chandler was committed for trial for receiving stolen goods. The receiving charge still stood, and although weakened by the absence of Murphy’s evidence, the prosecution looked likely to succeed, because it could be proved that she was in possession of a stolen coat and could offer no reasonable account of how this was so. But it wasn’t enough.

Mary Chandler was acquitted on this charge also. Police were surprised, especially as both James Walker and his housekeeper had done rather badly under cross-examination. It was a blow, not just to the detectives who had brought the case of the theft against Mary Chandler, but to Burt and Spooner. A major plank of their case against Mary Chandler, by which they were hoping to establish motive at the inquest, was swept aside.

Police noted that had Mrs. Murphy also died, no prosecution would have been attempted in respect of the fur coat at all. As it was, the absence of Murphy’s testimony had caused the prosecution to fail. The inquest into Murphy’s death resumed on the 24th of June.

A carefully briefed coroner did his best to place the facts of the murder and the suspected role of Mary Chandler in this under maximum scrutiny. It was at this session that Mary Chandler gave her strange testimony about her sleeping arrangements with James Walker. The inquest was adjourned until the 21st of July 1938 to give police more time to carry out inquiries. Under apparent great mental strain, James Walker went to see Chief Inspector Leonard Burt on the 7th of July.

He had split up with Mary Chandler. He told them he had been a fool and wanted to be open and frank. But he told detectives nothing further and remained obscure concerning the cyanide and other matters pertaining to the murder. He was careful to tell them that he had asked the housekeeper to leave, and that he was concerned she might take her own life.

He seemed to be hedging his bets. Mary Chandler saw her solicitor and then went into a nursing home in Cambridge that same day. The police went to see Walker five days later, on the 12th of July, hoping that now Chandler had gone he might be more forthcoming. He said he was a fool and had been blind, but he gave no further useful intelligence on anything at all.

Police began to treat him rather cautiously. They knew him to be a very intelligent man and an unmitigated liar. The police thought it incredible that a man of the farmer’s intelligence could be deceived by the woman. They simply did not believe him.

On the 21st of July, the inquest resumed. The coroner noted Walker and Mary Chandler had been unreliable witnesses and also noted Chandler’s acquittal over the fur coat. The jury was absent for thirty minutes before giving its verdict: murder by a person or persons unknown. Mary Chandler was not named.

It was a victory of sorts for her. Burt did everything he could to find new evidence. He even walked from Hall Farm to Key’s Farm at night to see if it could be done without being seen. He recorded that it had taken him ten minutes round trip and that he was seen by no one.

He reinterviewed Walker, but he said nothing which incriminated Mary Chandler. Throughout, his main interest seemed to be in ensuring that he did not himself go to prison by proving an accessory after the fact. For Chief Inspector Burt, there was nowhere left to go. The investigation had failed, and he and Sergeant Spooner returned to London.

The case failed for three reasons. Firstly, the lack of evidence. There was nothing to prove that Mary Chandler had been at Key’s Farm between 8 pm and 8 am on the 16th and 17th of May—the crucial window of opportunity at which the killer must have entered the house and added cyanide to the salts. There was a great deal of anecdotal evidence to support the theory, but without a single proof of her being there, it amounted to nothing more than a reasonable suspicion.

Secondly, there were a number of other people who had motive sufficient to murder William Murphy. Mrs. Murphy resented her husband’s affairs and therefore might wish to exact her revenge on him; in addition, she had given him the cyanide in the salts, abstaining from taking any herself. Mr.

Brown surely must have known of his wife’s affair with Murphy if the whole village knew, and he admitted to having heard such rumors—had he really not taken steps to verify them? If he did know, his own motive was a powerful one indeed. He knew the habits of the Murphys and could easily have taken steps to procure the missing key. Elaine Brown too, jilted by Murphy, jealous of his other affairs, may have wished to prevent her husband from finding out about Murphy; the fact that he learned of this as a consequence of Murphy’s death could have been an unforeseen consequence.

And there were surely other men whose wives had succumbed to Murphy’s ebullient charm. Too many suspects had the effect of removing the focus from the most probable one. Even if a prosecution had been brought, a jury would very quickly have been distracted by such possibilities by an adept lawyer. Thirdly, the reason for the failure of the case was the support given by Walker to the chief suspect, Mary Chandler.

Much of the anecdotal evidence gathered could have been supported by him had he so wished. He tacked in the course of his evidence outrageously, and yet its effect was to undermine the case against Mary Chandler. It was surely Mary Chandler who killed William Murphy. She was a cunning and spiteful woman.

She was slighted by the cheating accusation, and she was a woman who would slash the tires of her lover and sabotage his car, rendering it dangerous to drive, without compunction, and ultimately was prepared to burn the garage to the ground to remove the object of her annoyance. Although the motive for Mary Chandler to commit murder was lightweight, for her it was sufficient. She feared the testimony of the Murphys concerning the fur coat, which would probably have sent her to jail, and moreover she resented their willingness to give such testimony against her, additional to their previous offence of accusing her of cheating and ostracizing her. She was an ingenious woman, endlessly inventive and drawn to criminality in all its manifestations, often merely for the sake of it.

And more than this, she had astonishing nerve. She had what Burt characterized as effrontery. When police spoke to Mary Chandler’s mother in Scotland during the course of their investigations, she told them that Mary had fallen on her head as a child and was not right again afterwards. Perhaps that may provide an explanation.

James Walker was a weak man enthralled to her and surely an accessory after the fact. He found Mary Chandler exciting. He thrilled to her ingenuity, her lack of fear, and the complete absence of anything moral in her makeup. He lacked her nerve, her criminal resolution, and he had the natural fear all normal people have when confronted by the police.

He was stressed to the point of collapse when interviewed on one occasion—prostrate, according to Burt, eyes closed, under great mental strain. The two were soul mates of a kind. Perhaps they fell out because James Walker could not stand the stress he was under as a result of the inquiry. He did what he could to extricate himself from police pressure, distancing himself from Mary Chandler, but he could not bring himself to go further.

He did not incriminate her, and it may be that the split between them was in any case contrived. They were such a devious pair that nothing can be ruled out in their case. Mary Chandler had had enough of the Murphys by May 1938, and she decided to remove them, just as she had done with the Triumph sports car. She had the missing key.

Just as she had almost certainly stolen the key of Mrs. Warr’s house for the purpose of stealing her fur coat, she probably stole the Murphys’ key at an earlier opportunistic date, simply with the intention of perpetrating a robbery in the future. It is simply a likelihood based on her previous form and on the congruity of events which suggest this. She walked under cover of darkness that evening to Key’s Farm.

Darkness because she was seen by two people when it was dark four days earlier. On that occasion it may have been, as Burt suspected, a reconnaissance mission, or it could have been that she intended to poison Murphy and his wife on that occasion but was thwarted by being seen. And darkness because she would prefer the twilight, as there would be some visibility to make her way down the unlit lane or across the adjacent field. The morning light would not be her friend for the journey, because farmers rise early.

She did it with her customary nerve, that effrontery which had served her so well over the years and which had brought her to the verge of ruin, and which had now brought her to murder. This enterprise was one requiring the greatest nerve of all. She had an excuse at the ready—she always did. When she was caught somewhere she shouldn’t be, caught almost in the very act of theft, she explained it with the most trifling, the most improbable of excuses.

It didn’t matter that she was not believed, only that she had an explanation which could not be disproved. Perhaps she had a cake with her, or something she wanted to drop off with her neighbor, perhaps it was a peace offering on account of the soured relations of late. Whatever it was, she was prepared. Mary had in her possession the bottle of cyanide.

There was a surfeit of cyanide in Suffolk in 1938. Her purpose was clear: she was going to kill the Murphys, and she would do it by the same means by which she undertook all her dishonest undertakings—by stealth and by casual effrontery. She walked the three or four hundred yards to Key’s Farm on the evening of the 16th of May 1938. The sun set at 8:46 pm.

After 9 pm, Risby was dark and deserted. Had she been observed, it would have been necessary to abort the enterprise a second time. But this time she arrived at the front door unseen, and she unlocked the door and entered. It would seem to a normal person to be dangerous and incriminating to be caught inside a locked house in the evening at twilight, after being banished from the house.

It was reckless, of course. But that was the secret of her success. Like a magician, only hesitation and guilt would betray her, and as she did not possess these adversaries to action and enterprise, Mary Chandler would have been ready with an unfaltering explanation. The key was in the door; she had thought it odd and came in to check.

She found it lying in the road outside, perhaps, and thought not to disturb anyone. “Here is a lovely cake I made for you. ”

Only Mary Chandler knew what was in her mind. If Mrs.

Murphy or anyone else were uncomfortable, disconcerted by her discovery, what did their suspicion amount to? Could they call the police and tell them that their neighbor had entered the property and left a cake with them? The sheer nerve of Mary Chandler outwitted normal people because it defied normal behavior. In any case, Mary Chandler was not seen entering the house.

She turned right into the dining room and, without any difficulty, located the salts on the sideboard where the tin was always kept. She poured in the grains of cyanide and left the house by the same means. She returned to Hall Farm. What did Walker know of this?

He knew of it. Mrs. Chandler reveled in all things illicit. She was a most thrilling companion for Mr.

Walker. He dared what he would not do himself, the things with equanimity that caused him to falter. Walker knew that she had murdered Murphy. If he had not known of it beforehand, then he certainly did after its commission.

He was an accessory after the fact, but quite probably before it also. He was with her during countless thefts when fur coats, ermine no less, materialized magically in her possession; gold lighters, money, jewels. She requested a bottle of cyanide of him. He knew better than anyone her inexplicable but timely absences during dinner at someone’s house.

He knew she had slashed the tires of the car he drove his mother in, knew she had interfered with the mechanics, and of course knew she had burnt the garage to the ground and the car within it. He had no qualms about claiming the insurance on this and other property. He knew she had stolen Mrs. Warr’s fur coat, and he knew a great deal more than the police and others ever discovered.

And before William Murphy’s murder, when being questioned about the fur coat, he said to detectives: “Mark my words, both of you, before this case is over there will be another strange coincidence and there won’t be any collusion. ” He had known there would be a murder. Mary Chandler was already aggrieved over the cheating accusation and her banishment from the Murphys, from all of the society in the area as a result, from the rumors now spreading openly about her. She was a spiteful and vindictive woman.

There would be a reckoning. He knew this because he knew Mary Chandler as no one else did, and he had something dark in his own personality, a deep dishonesty at least, and probably much more. Remember, he said to a startled Mrs. Murphy, tapping her on the shoulder significantly, the day of her husband’s death: “We never let our friends down.

”

As for Mary, she had no such difficulty with detectives. She lied with confidence and ease. The practiced liar does not blink to an honest man. At the inquest, her solicitor asked the coroner if Mary Chandler might be excused due to her incapacitation in a nursing home.

The coroner remarked acidly that she had been known to have left the hospital in the past few days, and so she could remain for the inquest. In the event, she was not called. The police pinned their hopes on Walker. They thought he might have feared being himself exposed by his involvement in her other depredations.

It was a reasonable supposition that he had been involved in Mary’s thefts in some capacity. He was not merely her defender; he was her confederate. Of course, none of this could ever be used in evidence against Mary Chandler. It was merely anecdotal evidence which the police could use privately to obtain a full picture of their suspect.

And therein lay a problem for the police. Mary Chandler had motive. She fitted the bill perfectly from several points of view. But there was no proof at all, and certainly nothing which could be brought before a court of law in a murder case.

She may have had a grudge against the Murphys. She may have obtained a key. She may have obtained cyanide from Hall Farm. She may have known of the Murphys’ habit of taking Finnan salts each morning.

And she may have entered the house on the 16th of May and added cyanide to the salts. But there was no proof whatsoever that this is what occurred. And the proof required by a court of law is not a reasonable suspicion but conviction beyond a reasonable doubt. That standard of proof was not met.

All that was required was that Mary Chandler was seen by someone entering Key’s Farm. But she was not. There is a final possibility which might explain the curious relationship existing between Walker and Chandler. This concerns the matter of his wife Minnie Walker’s death in June of 1926.

Mary Chandler’s arrival as a housekeeper occurred six months after this. The police looked at this because Walker’s first wife’s family had grave suspicions concerning her death. She died of cerebral hemorrhage and Raynaud’s disease. The symptoms were vague and ambiguous.

The local doctor wrote out a death certificate and gave Minnie’s cause of death based on the descriptions given of symptoms by her husband. Minnie was forty-seven years old at the time and in good health. There was no post-mortem and no inquest. The way in which the death had been dealt with was clearly unsatisfactory.

But it was now twelve years on. There was no prospect of finding poison in a body in 1938 after such a lapse of time, and the doctor concerned was now dead. Police could find no evidence of Mary Chandler’s whereabouts during 1926, but nor could they find any evidence that she had been at the farm prior to December 1926. The only reason for demurring was that Walker, in his various accounts of his relationship with Mrs.

Chandler, had said he had known Mary Chandler twenty years, fifteen years, and ten years respectively, before settling on the convenient date of December 1926. There was nothing to contradict this. In spite of the family’s misgivings concerning Minnie’s death, there was nothing that could be done about it. It gives rise to a surmise, and if it is a wild one, then that is because the circumstances invited it: that Mary Chandler, or James Walker, or both, killed Minnie Walker in June 1926.

The vague symptoms, the untimeliness, the after-events, and the character of those involved suggest it, merely. There is little else to recommend it without further proofs. Its advantage is that it offers a psychological affirmative of the candid and a moral relationship that subsisted in this pair—a relationship founded on a kind of anti-social glee, a united front against society founded in its breach of taboos. When the inquest returned a verdict of murder against an unknown person, it was as good as an acquittal for Mary Chandler.

The police still had murder on its hands, albeit one which they had already investigated to exhaustion. Without fresh evidence, the suspicion of police and the public would remain fixed on Mary Chandler. But beyond that, there really was nothing further that could be done. War was coming.

Resources were required elsewhere. The police force would be pared to the bone by the need for manpower resources to counter the subversions that become a society’s priority during time of war. Mrs. Gertrude Murphy, distraught initially at her husband’s death, seemed quickly to arrive at a point of apathy.

Perhaps it was depression. In truth, he was no saint. Murphy left his wife £23,000 in his will—that’s about one and a half million pounds—and a sale of the farm, livestock, and machinery realized £1,600. On the 10th of June, Mrs.

Murphy was a well-off woman, but she lived modestly thereafter. She went to live with her sister Kate Ruston at 10 North Brink, Wisbech, for a while, and then lived at 13 All Saints Road, Ipswich. And it was here she lived until 1973, when she died. Mrs.

Elaine Brown, Murphy’s paramour, whose affair caused her husband and Mrs. Murphy such distress in 1938 and brought titillation and disapprobation in equal measure to the residents of Risby, never really recovered from the scandal and died in 1947 at the age of fifty-one. James Walker was himself finished in Risby. He sold up and left Hall Farm.

But within a few months he had reunited quietly with Mary Chandler, and the two set up home together in Hawley in Surrey as Mr. and Mrs. Frank Walker. They ran the Cambridge Hotel in Gatwick for a time and then retired to a house in the 1960s at St.

Leonards-on-Sea, near Hastings. James Walker died in 1971. And Mary Chandler, now Fernie Walker, continued in the house, still fond of baking cakes, unknown in her community except as being a rather eccentric elderly woman and a teller of fantastic tales involving herself and her elevated status.

She died here on August 19, 1994, at the age of ninety-seven, leaving £660,000 to her niece, and was cremated at Hastings Cemetery a few days later, on the 2nd of September.