Who really did kill Katherine Armstrong??

 

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

Books to Look Forward to From Duckworth Overlook

Former homicide detective and CIA agent Lemuel Gunn left behind the Afghanistan battlefield for a trailer in New Mexico to forge a new career as a private investigator.  Out of nowhere comes Ornella Neppi, a woman making a mess of her uncle's bail bonds business.  She asks Gunn to track down the source of her troubles, a man named Emilio Gava, who has jumped bail after being arrested for buying cocaine.  But no photos of Gava seem to exist.  As Gunn begins his search for a man it seems that someone is protecting, hitting dead end after dead end, he starts to suspect that Gava might not exist at all - The grittiest novel yet from the masterful Robert Littell, A Nasty Piece of Work is unmissable, powerful reading.  As Gunn's game of cat and mouse unfolds - every step leading him closer to the truth - he draws ever closer to an unseen enemy's line of fire.  A Nasty Piece of Work is due to be published in March 2014

Dry Bones is the third book in Fintan Dunne trilogy by Peter Quinn and is due to be published in April 2014.  Fintan Dunne, the detective at the centre of The Man Who Never Returned and Hour of the Cat, is back in this spellbinding story of an ill-fated OSS mission into the heart of the Eastern front and its consequences more than a decade after the war's end.  As the Red Army continues its unstoppable march towards Berlin in the winter of 1945, Dunne and his fellow soldier Dick Van Hull volunteer for a dangerous drop behind enemy lines to rescue a team of OSS officers trying to abet the Czech resistance.  When the plan goes south, Dunne and Van Hull uncover a secret that will change both of their lives.  Years later, Dunne is drawn back into the shadowy realm of Cold War espionage in an effort to clear his friend's name and right an injustice so shocking that men would, quite literally, kill to keep it quiet.

In 1856, a baying crowd of over 30,000 people gathered outside Stafford prison to watch the execution of a village doctor from Staffordshire.  One of the last people to be publicly hanged, the 'Rugely Poisoner', the 'Prince of Poisoners', 'The greatest villain who ever stood trial at the Old Bailey,' as Charles Dickens described him, Dr William Palmer was convicted in 1855 of murdering his best friend, but was suspected of poisoning more than a dozen other people, including his wife, children, brother and mother-in-law - cashing in on their life insurance to fund his monstrously indebted gambling habit.  Highlighting Palmer's particularly gruesome penchant for strychnine, his trial made news across Europe: the most memorable in fifty years, according to the Old Bailey's presiding Lord Chief Justice.  He was a new kind of murderer - respectable, middle class, personable, and consequently more terrifying - and he became Britain's most infamous figure until the arrival of Jack the Ripper.  The first widely available account of one of the most notorious, yet lesser-known, mass-murderers in British history, The Poisoner takes a fresh look at Palmer's life and disputed crimes, ultimately asking 'just how evil was this man?’  With previously undiscovered letters from Palmer and new forensic examination of his victims, Stephen Bates presents not only an astonishing and controversial revision of Palmer's entire story, but takes the reader into the very psyche of a killer.  The Poisoner is due to be published in June 2014.

 In February 2014, Duckworth Overlook is due to publish The Miernik Dossier and The Last Supper by Charles McCarry.  In The Miernik Dossier Cool, urbane Paul Christopher is the perfect American agent, currently working in deep cover in the twilight world of international intrigue.  But now even he cannot tell good from bad in a maze of double and triple-crosses.  As a group of international agents embark on a trip in a Cadillac from Switzerland to the Sudan, Christopher knows that he has to find out which one is about to unleash bloody terrorism - and God help everyone if he makes a mistake.  In The Last Supper on a rainy night in Paris, Paul Christopher's lover Molly Benson falls victim to a vehicular homicide minutes after Christopher boards a jet bound for Vietnam.  To explain this senseless murder, The Last Supper goes back not only to the earliest days of Christopher's life, but also to the origins of the CIA.  Moving seamlessly from tales of refugee smuggling in Nazi Germany to OSS-coordinated guerrilla warfare in Burma and the confusion of the Vietnam War, McCarry creates an intimate history of this shadow-world of deceit and betrayal.