Cambridgeshire Murders Read Free Page A

corrosive medicine taken inwardly.
    The said liquor and mucus we immediately gave to a dog kept him confined and he expired about seven hours after.
    The next day upon opening the dog found his stomach much in the same manner as the deceased John Hutchinson’s and caused as we believe by the liquor out of his stomach.
    The ensuing inquest heard statements from a variety of Whittlesey residents. One of the statements, which was to lead to Amy’s arrest, came from shopkeeper William Hawkins, who testified that he had sold Amy Hutchinson an ounce of white arsenick 4 ( sic ) on Thursday 13 October. He said that she had wanted it to poison rats but could not say what use she had actually put it to.
    By Tuesday 18 October Amy was under arrest and being held at the house of John Stona. A villager named Mary Addison, who asked her whether she had any poison in her house, visited her. Amy told her about the rat poison, saying that she had mixed it up with oatmeal and placed it under the floorboards. Mary went to the Hutchinson house the following morning where she found a broken pot containing the mixture Amy had described. Unfortunately for Amy, instead of retrieving it so that an attempt could be made to gauge the amount of arsenic it contained, Mary covered it with hay and left it there.
    Most of the witness statements did not help Amy’s situation. Even though Mary Watson said that John Hutchinson did not think he had been poisoned, telling the jury it was the beer that had made him worse would have weighed heav-ily against Amy. Even when John Hutchinson was portrayed at the inquest as a brutal man, the evidence did not lean in Amy’s favour.
    An example of John Hutchinson’s violence was relayed to the inquest jury by Prudence Watson of Whittlesey, who testified on 20 October. About three weeks earlier she had been at John and Amy’s house. She and Amy had been drinking tea and decided to try reading their tea leaves when John returned home. After an angry exchange with his wife, John turned on Prudence and kicked her down the stairs. Prudence explained to the inquest that soon after this assault she had received a visit from Amy, who suggested that, as she was pregnant, she should press charges. Amy also stated that she feared that her husband ‘would knock her on the head’. However, instead of winning any sympathy for Amy, Prudence’s disclosure was seen as a sign of Amy’s faithlessness and willingness to betray her husband.

    Prudence Watson’s statement
    Many of the statements were little more than hearsay and gossip, including accounts of tea-leaf reading from Alice Hardley (the mother of Amy’s sister-in-law Ann) who said that Amy had seen a man’s coffin and a child’s coffin in her cup. There was a questionable statement from Alice Oldfield, who claimed that Prudence Watson had talked about an unnamed man who had died and whose wife was under suspicion; Alice suspected this to be Amy.
    Statements such as this offered little in the way of evidence but they do show the weight given to rumour. It is possible that many of the friends, neighbours and even relatives who gave evidence against Amy at the inquest and the trial did not distinguish between scandal-mongering among themselves and testifying under oath. Unfortunately for Amy, when the inquest jury returned its verdict on Monday 7 November, the opening words demonstrated the damage that had been done: the said John Hutchinson was wilfully and maliciously murdered by poison of which the said John on Fryday the fourteenth day of October last languished and dyed that it does not appear to them who were the person or persons that committed the said murder but that they have just reason to suspect that the same was committed and done by Amey the wife of the said John.
    On 12 November summons were issued for witnesses to appear at the next Ely Assize or General Gaol Delivery. Records exist showing that among those to