Book 21 toppled – a true story of greed, desperation and murder

I very much enjoy reading true crime. This is not because I am a particularly bloodthirsty person, at least I don’t think that I am, but is because they tell us something about what people at the edge of our understanding think and do. Because our crimes are most often, although not always, perpetuated by and upon those at the bottom of our society they are also an insight into social history. The Poisoner by Stephen Bates illustrates this well. I own a hardbacked copy of this book which I picked up in a charity shop. It is in a good condition and has plenty of illustrations sprinkled through the text.

John Parsons Cook died in 1856 at a hotel near Shrewsbury after winning a large sum of money betting on a horserace. His father did not accept the view of the doctors that he had died from natural causes and pursued the matter with the police. William Palmer, a failed doctor and a man significantly in debt to some rather nasty and persistent creditors, was eventually charged with killing his friend by poison and died by public hanging.

The author starts this book by describing the hanging and then the events that led up to it. He shows how Palmer was desperate and the full extent of his indebtedness and also how what he did directly after the death indicated that he had killed his friend for his money. The author shows that the press of the time published many facts and rumours and that they suggested that Palmer was also responsible for a number of deaths in his immediate family. This gives us an insight into the world of horseracing, money lending, the insurance industry and life in a small market town at this period of time.

The author then goes on to retell the events but from a legal perspective and to show us what was revealed in court, how the legal system worked, the personalities involved and how the decision was reached. This portion of the book revisits quite a lot of information given in the first section and occasionally feels repetitive. The narrative finishes with an update on what happened to the characters in this story and accounts by medical and legal experts about what they think would happen if the case came to trial today.

The events of this book are fascinating and so is the legal process and how the press dealt with the matter. I thought that the way that the book was structured was unhelpful as the author addressed each event twice. On occasion I found my attention wandering. On the whole, however, this was an interesting telling of a crime that was famous in its day and which just might be a miscarriage of justice, although it also might have been one of a number of crimes committed by the same man.

I shall add this volume to my small, but growing, collection of historical true crime books.