When Katharine Armstrong, a 48 year-old mother of three, died in her bed one morning in February 1921 no one thought other than that she had died of natural causes. Yet, within 15 months, her husband Herbert, would be arrested, tried for murdering her and attempting to poison a rival, at a sensational trial. The proceedings were reported all over the western world as he was found guilty and executed exactly one hundred years ago – the only British solicitor ever to be hanged for murder.
The case was extraordinary because it was on the surface so ordinary: a tale arising out of small town professional rivalries in remote Hay-on-Wye on the English-Welsh border. But the twists and turns of the story could have been written by any of the then fashionable crime writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers or Anthony Berkeley who were just starting their careers and who would all reference the Armstrong case in one way or another in their stories over the coming years.
The tale, so famous at the time, has long fascinated me, not just because of the social milieu, ripe in period detail, in which it took place just after the First World War, but because its outcome remains contested. Much remains to be unravelled. Only two full length books have been published in the last fifty years: one convinced that Armstrong was guilty and the other that he was innocent and should never have been hanged. On the centenary of his trial I took up the very cold case and discovered not only poignant details about what happened, but also a previously overlooked witness whose evidence casts a new light on the story.
Katharine was more highly strung and nervous. She became delusional and depressive, worried that she was letting the family down, to such an extent that in 1920 she was committed to an asylum for six months. After she came home in January 1921 she was clearly not cured and went rapidly down hill, dying a month later. Within months Herbert was getting entangled with the town’s rival solicitor Oswald Martin over a land sale which was proving difficult to resolve and becoming acrimonious. One afternoon that October they met for tea at Herbert’s house, during the course of which he handed Oswald a scone, apparently with the words: “’scuse fingers”. After he got home later that evening Oswald fell violently ill, though he soon recovered.
His father-in-law, the local chemist Fred Davies, remembered selling Herbert Armstrong arsenic over the counter (as you could in those days) to make weedkiller to tackle the dandelions in his lawn. It was Davies who suggested his son-in-law might have been poisoned. They remembered that the Martins had received an anonymous box of chocolates shortly before, one of which had made Oswald’s sister-in-law ill.
The local doctor, Tom Hincks, who had treated Katharine and Oswald without any suspicions of foul play, was convinced now that they might both have been poisoned. The Home Office and Scotland Yard were surreptitiously called in and on New Year’s Eve, Herbert Armstrong was arrested in his office. A small, lethal dose of arsenic was found in one of his pockets. Charged with the attempted poisoning of Oswald, Armstrong was in custody when his wife’s body was exhumed from the local churchyard. It was found to contain a large amount of arsenic.
Herbert was tried at Hereford Assizes before Mr Justice Darling, a hanging judge who seems to have set out to find him guilty from the start. In summing up he ignored most of the evidence in Armstrong’s favour – which was quite substantial – and pressed for his conviction. The jury of local famers duly obliged, taking just 48 minutes to reach a verdict. Herbert was hanged at Gloucester prison five months to the day after his arrest. The hangman claimed to have heard him mutter: “I’m coming Kate!” as the trapdoor opened beneath his feet.
Was he guilty? As one reviewer has said of my book: “It’s for you to decide.” And there’s a twist on the very last page.
The Poisoner Solicitor: The True Story of a 1920s Murder Mystery by Stephen Bates.(Icon Books) Out Now
A brilliant narrative investigation into the 1920s case that inspired Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers and Margery Allingham. On a bleak Tuesday morning in February 1921, 48-year-old Katharine Armstrong died in her bedroom on the first floor of an imposing Edwardian villa overlooking the rolling hills of the isolated borderlands between Wales and England. Within fifteen months of such a sad domestic tragedy, her husband, Herbert Rowse Armstrong, would be arrested, tried and hanged for poisoning her with arsenic, the only solicitor ever to be executed in England. Armstrong's story was retold again and again, decade after decade, in a thousand newspaper articles across the world, and may have also inspired the new breed of popular detective writers seeking to create a cunning criminal at the centre of their thrillers. With all the ingredients of a classic murder mystery, the case is a near-perfect whodunnit. But who, in fact, did it? Was Armstrong really a murderer? One hundred years after the execution, Stephen Bates examines and retells the story of the case, evoking the period and atmosphere of the early 1920s, and questioning the fatal judgement.
More information about Stephen Bates can be found on his website. You can find him on Facebook and you can also follow him on Twitter @StephenBatesEsq
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