GEORGE HUTCHINSON

Elizabeth Berry sported the same short hairstyle with fringe as Adelaide Bartlett. Like her, she was a poisoner, and
she killed with an ice-cold callousness that was almost beyond belief. The last five years of 31-year-old Elizabeth Berry’s
life had been damned by misfortune, although it was later suspected that it was a misfortune of her own making. Her
mother, husband and her son had all died. A life insurance payment had in each case made the tragedy a little easier
to bear, but a widow with a daughter, 11-year old Edith Annie, and half the wages she earned as a nurse at Oldham
Workhouse being paid to her sister-in--law for looking after Edith, life wasn’t easy.
At the end of 1886 Edith and one of her friends went to spend a few days with Elizabeth at the workhouse, where
they arrived on Wednesday, 29 December 1886. By 1 January 1887 Edith, up until then a healthy child and full of
energy, began vomiting severely. She was seen by Dr Thomas Patterson, the workhouse doctor, who accepted Elizabeth’s
suggestion that Edith was ill because of something she had eaten at breakfast that morning. By the following day she
was bringing up blood as well as vomit, and Dr Patterson smelt something acidic coming from a towel containing stains
of both. By Sunday evening red marks had appeared around Edith’s mouth and her condition was clearly worsening. Dr
Patterson and another doctor whose opinion he had sought began to suspect that Edith had ingested a corrosive poison,
but there was little they could do, and Edith began to deteriorate, eventually passing away in the early hours of Tuesday.
Dr Patterson refused to sign a death certificate and requested a post mortem, suspecting that Edith may have been
poisoned with medical liquid creosote which he’d noted had been depleted. The post mortem confirmed his suspicions
and Elizabeth was arrested. She was tried before Mr Justice Hawkins at Liverpool Assizes at the end of February 1887,
where it was learned that an insurance policy would pay out £100. Expert medical evidence also proved that Edith had
been poisoned. Elizabeth was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to be hanged. The possibility of a reprieve lay in
the hands of the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, who was some 18-months away from having Hell break over his head
when Jack the Ripper began stalking the streets of Whitechapel. He saw no reason to alter the decision of the court and
on the morning of Monday, 14 March 1887, she came face to face with executioner James Berry. She was the first woman
to be executed at Walton Prison in Liverpool.
S O F T WA R E
Speech Recognition
Dragon For Mac
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz or faster processor - Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 recommended
Free hard disk space: 8GB. Supported Operating Systems: OS X Mavericks (10.9) or OS X Yosemite
(10.10) or OS X El Capitan (10.11)
£139.99
There’s a lot of software available to help researchers and writers collect, store, access, share, and use the fruit of
our labours. Over the coming months we’ll be taking a look at what’s available and how it can help. One of the tasks we
all face is getting our research filed and findable, and for many that means getting the physical data - the information -
transferred to our computer. There are lots of ways to do this. You can scan it and use OCR (Optical Character Recognition)
software to convert it into editable and searchable text. We’ll take a look at OCR software in a later Ripperologist,
but sometimes what we need to OCR is too degraded for the software to work or can’t be photocopied or scanned.
Newspapers are particularly problematical. They are easy enough to scan or to copy from a newspaper database such
as The British Newspaper Archive (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk), but 19th century newspapers can be tough
Ripperologist 146 October 2015 91