Stephen Bates - The Poisonous Solicitor: The True Story of a 1920s Murder Mystery

Ill build a stairway to Paradise,
With a new step every day.

L yrics by I ra G ershwin,
a hit for the P aul W hiteman B and in 1922

O n a bleak Tuesday morning in February 1921, a middle-aged woman named Katharine Armstrong died in her bedroom on the first floor of an imposing Edwardian villa overlooking the green fields and rolling hills of the isolated borderlands between Wales and England. Her last coherent words as she lay paralysed and terrified, five hours before her death, according to the nurse looking after her, were: I am not going to die, am I, because I have everything to live for my children and my husband.

It was a sad end for a woman who was only 48 years old, apparently happily married and with three school-aged children, but no more remarkable, seemingly, or tragic than the recent deaths of hundreds of thousands of young men in the trenches of the First World War which had ended a little over two years earlier, or thousands more men, women and children who had died in the influenza pandemic which had followed. It was a tragedy only for her children and her husband, who had just gone to work, cadging a lift with the local doctor who had been treating her for gastritis, inflammation of the kidneys and possible heart problems all manageable conditions for the previous eighteen months or so.

Within three days she was buried in the local churchyard at Cusop, the hamlet just outside Hay-on-Wye where the couple lived, and where her husband Herbert was a long-established and well-liked solicitor, magistrates clerk, a churchwarden and a pillar of the local Freemasons lodge: the very definition of respectability.

The best and truest wife has gone to the Great Beyond and I am left without a partner and without a friend, he allegedly wailed to an acquaintance. But despite an obituary in the local Brecon and Radnor Express under the headline A Popular Hay Lady, there were few mourners: Herbert and the Chicks, as it said on the card attached to the familys wreath; Dr Tom Hincks, the local GP and his wife; Mrs Griffiths and her son Trevor from the rival solicitors firm in the town and Emily Pearce, the Armstrongs housekeeper. Few other people in Hay paid much attention.

Yet, within fifteen months of such a sad domestic tragedy, Herbert Rowse Armstrong would be arrested, tried and hanged for her murder, the only solicitor ever to be executed in England, certainly in modern times. The domestic tragedy in a remote corner of the country became an international media sensation and a distraction from the worlds other news. The loving husband would become a villain of the age, one of the most notorious figures of the 1920s. A dapper, punctilious, little man with a waxed moustache who usually wore gilt-rimmed pince-nez spectacles, he would become more than a murderer at the centre of a case that the judge at his trial described in strangulated judicial syntax as so deeply interesting that I doubt whether any of us have in recollection a case so remarkable. He would, in fact, become an archetype: a member of the professional classes who had unaccountably turned bad and been caught out by a simple slip.