Cambridgeshire Murders by Alison Bruce Page B

described Walter Horsford as ‘the greatest monster of our criminal annals’. It had not taken long for him to gain the soubriquet of ‘the St Neots Poisoner’ despite his never having lived in the town. Although he was arrested and convicted of just one murder, he was suspected of committing at least two more. Even before his arrest in 1897, there had been rumours that he was responsible for some sudden and unexplained deaths in the area.
    He was born in 1872 and as a teenager lived with his parents in Stow Longa, a small village situated just outside Spaldwick. By the early 1890s Horsford was described as ‘a respectable farmer’ who tilled land not far from his home. In 1897 he was having an affair with one of his first cousins, Mrs Annie Holmes, who was twelve years his senior. She had been married to a coal and corn merchant from a village just outside Thrapston in Northamptonshire, but was widowed in the mid-1880s at the age of 25. For two years, until October 1897, she lived in Stoney, near Kimbolton, Huntingdon-shire with her son Percy and daughter, also called Annie. While at Stoney she gave birth to another son but it is not known who his father was.
    Horsford was a fairly frequent visitor, but on 14 October Mrs Holmes moved her family to rented accommodation in East Street, St Neots. It is not known what prompted the move, but just twelve days later, on 26 October 1897, Horsford married a young woman named Bessie.

    A drawing of Annie Holmes. (St Neots Advertiser)
    The relationship between Holmes, now 38, and Horsford, was almost at an end, although he did make at least two visits to her at her new address. During December she wrote to inform him that she was pregnant. In his reply he advised her to see a Dr Mackenzie at Raunds. Although she wrote to this doctor she does not appear to have visited.
    At the turn of the year Horsford contacted her again, this time by letter, which she received on 5 January. He wrote:
    Dear Annie, Will come over Friday to see you if I can come to an arrangement of some sort or other, but you must remember that I paid you half a crown, so if I thought well not to give you anything you could not get it, but still, I don’t want to talk and hear that it is by me, if you really are so.
    Don’t write any more letters as I don’t want Bessie to know.
    On the day of the arranged meeting, 7 January 1898, Holmes seemed anxious. Her daughter said she seemed as though she were waiting for something, but instead of a visit from Horsford she received a letter. In the evening Holmes fed her children (Percy now aged 15, Annie 14 and the baby aged 1) and went to bed with the baby. As she had spent the day feeling unwell she took a glass of water with her.
    Mother, daughter, and baby shared a bed, and when young Annie joined her mother she noticed that the glass standing on the chest of drawers was virtually empty. Her mother still did not feel well and asked her daughter for a ‘sweetie’ which she sucked upon. A short time afterwards, probably within the next twenty minutes, Holmes’s daughter noticed that her mother was ill, ‘struggling and kicking as if suffering convulsions’. Firstly the neighbours, Mrs Fisher and Mrs Ashwell, were called and then Percy ran for the St Neots doctor, Joseph Herbert Anderson.
    Dr Anderson found Holmes suffering convulsions, with her face and lips livid and her eyes strained and rolled up towards the ceiling. Dr Anderson later explained that his instant assumption was that she had been poisoned and he therefore asked her what she had taken.
    She replied, ‘I have taken a powder to procure an abortion.’ She continued to reply to his questions between convulsions and despite her pain she was totally coherent and added: ‘I believe I am poisoned.’
    The doctor prepared an antidote but Holmes died before it could be administered. Although it was the first case of strychnine poisoning 1 he had seen