Berry Elizabeth - There must be evil: the life and murderous career of Elizabeth Berry

There Must Be Evil

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

NOVELS

The Godsend

Sweetheart, Sweetheart

The Reaping

The Moorstone Sickness

The Kindness of Strangers

Madeleine

Mothers Boys

Charmed Life

Since Ruby

NON-FICTION

Cruelly Murdered: Constance Kent and the Killing at Road Hill House

Perfect Murder: A Century of Unsolved Homicides (with Stephen Knight)

Winner of CWA Gold Dagger Award 1987 Murder at the Priory: The Mysterious Poisoning of Charles Bravo (with Kate Clarke)

There Must Be Evil

The Life and Murderous
Career of Elizabeth Berry

Bernard Taylor

DUCKWORTH OVERLOOK

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2015 by Bernard Taylor

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This is for Jackie and Trevor

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all those who have helped me in the writing of this book. They have been unstinting in giving me their assistance. I must name among them Frank French, Dave Thomas, Mary Danby, Carolyn Caughey, Donald Rumbelow and Colin Crowe. My thanks also go to Sean Prins of HMP Liverpool, Debbie Brown of the Blue Pits Inn, Castleton, and those dedicated officers who staff the Oldham Archives, the General Record Office and the National Archives at Kew. I am also grateful to Stewart P. Evans; if he had not given me a copy of his excellent book, Executioner , this book would never have been written. In respect of certain illustrations used I have been unable to trace the author Jack Doughty, so if anyone could kindly help in this direction I would be most grateful. To anyone I have neglected to acknowledge, I offer my most grateful thanks now.

Bernard Taylor
2015

Where there is mystery, it is generally supposed there must be evil.

Lord Byron

Introduction

Since the middle of the last century, known instances of poisoning in Britain have almost disappeared. Indeed, we would be surprised to find a case of murder by poison reported in our newspapers today. Only a century ago, however, such cases were not rare, while further back, in ancient times, poison was one of the most common means of disposing of another human being for reasons domestic, political and even military.

The fact is, murder by poisoning was relatively easy to get away with. While it would be hard not to notice an arrow in the chest or a knife in the back, when death was due to a little antimony in a glass of sherry or arsenic in a cup of cocoa it was a different matter. With poison easy to come by, and the victims death often put down to natural causes, it was a situation that more or less continued until advances in medicine and forensic science made it all but impossible for a poisoner to escape detection.

Poison, it is said, is primarily a womans weapon. Certainly it is the most secretive. Not for the poisoner a lashing out with the poker or a shot to the heart. Murder by poison does not require energy or strength; in fact it might require nothing more than stealth and trust.

These qualities, along with a cool detachment, were owned in good measure by the attractive young widow Elizabeth Berry, a nurse who, over the bitter winter of 1886-1887, found notoriety, first in the northern town of Oldham and then throughout the nation. In her hitherto little-told story, much of the drama was played out within the bleak and banal walls of a Victorian workhouse. Here it was that the death of her daughter occurred, an act perceived by many to be the cruellest of murders, performed with an ice-cold callousness that was almost beyond belief.

The tale that began to emerge of Elizabeth Berrys progress was, of course, meat and drink to the newspapers, and to some papers in particular. Telling her story would have been much more difficult for me without reference to the local Oldham papers, especially the Oldham Chronicle , the Oldham Evening Chronicle and the Oldham Standard . I am indebted to them, and impressed by the high quality of their journalism and their sheer, unwavering focus on their project all the resulting coverage, unlike in todays papers, appearing without the reporters being named.

In addition to the invaluable newspaper reports of the time, I have also been allowed to study the Home Office file relating to the case, the dreadful murder that brought Elizabeth Berrys name to the fore. And in doing so I have been able to discover the most fascinating information from previously unpublished documents, documents that shone new light on the crime, and into the heart and mind of the victims mother.

There were of course those faithful individuals who vociferously protested Mrs Berrys innocence in the affair, but the constabulary were convinced that they had their woman. As it turned out, however, their work was by no means over. In the pursuit of their inquiries they heard murmured suspicions surrounding another death and suddenly the investigators were faced with the possibility that the childs murder if such it was was not a one-off, isolated killing. Elizabeth Berrys dark story was beginning to appear darker still. Had there in fact been an earlier murder committed on her route into the dock?

The question would soon have an answer. And this answer in its turn raised further questions, gave rise to further suspicions. What, one feels compelled to ask, of those deaths that had occurred earlier, the deaths of those others in Mrs Berrys immediate family her loving husband and her two other young children? These deaths, I discovered, had all been accepted as due to natural causes. But were they indeed? I do not believe so. My investigations have convinced me that although Elizabeth Berry was indicted for one single, diabolical murder, she was in fact a cold-blooded serial killer of the cruellest kind.

A Grave Suspicion

The thick, smoky fog that had wrapped the town throughout the night had lifted by the afternoon, but the wind was still bitingly keen as the two men emerged from the main block of the workhouse into the bitter air. Curious inmates, peering out through the frost-etched windows, might have watched the mens careful progress as they carried the pallet across the frozen yard. Perhaps they wondered at its burden; they could see that it was not a heavy one, for it took up little space under its cheap covering. It was in fact the body of a child, a girl.

Just a few yards on and the men were out of the wind and entering the block that housed the small mortuary known in the workhouse as the dead room. Once inside, they laid the small body down and then went away to resume their usual duties.

By their very nature the nations workhouses were frequently the scene of death, of the young and old alike, and the Oldham Union Workhouse in 1887 was no different from the rest. That week it had been home to over a thousand inmates, of whom nine had died, the little girl being the last to go. And while the deaths of the other eight might have brought varying degrees of grief, they had not caused any great surprise or given rise to untoward comment.