Agatha Christie's True Crime Inspirations Read online

  After graduating from Canada’s McGill University, the notorious Dr Cream embarked upon a life of crime involving arson, blackmail, abortion and murder. While practicing as a physician in Chicago he was sentenced to life imprisonment for taking the life of the husband of his current mistress. Released on parole after ten years, he moved to London where he poisoned six prostitutes with strychnine-laced medication ostensibly administered to treat various ailments. Another would-be victim became suspicious and only pretended to swallow some poisoned pills given to her by Cream. She survived to tell the tale and gave vital evidence for the prosecution in the subsequent trial held in 1892.

  Like the killer in The ABC Murders and the Whitechapel Murders, Cream was an indulgent self-publicist who enjoyed drawing attention to his crimes. In fact, he was the architect of his own downfall in Chicago where his victim was buried, arousing no suspicion that he had died from poisoning until Cream wrote to the district attorney suggesting that the body should be exhumed. Likewise, in London, Cream made an offer to name the ‘Lambeth Murderer’ if Scotland Yard paid him a substantial reward. Sentenced to death, without admitting his guilt, he seemingly confessed to a string of earlier crimes on the scaffold. As the hangman drew the bolt, the condemned man declared with his last breath, ‘I am Jack the …’

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  LADY NANCY ASTOR

  Appointment with Death

  It was not often that Agatha Christie modelled a character on a recognisable person in real-life. However, you are tempted to identify Lady Westholme, the overbearing Member of Parliament in Appointment with Death who is ‘much respected and almost universally disliked’ with Lady Astor.

  Christie biographer Charles Osborne

  In the mystery novel Appointment With Death (1938), American Lady Mary Westholme is a domineering Member of Parliament married to a country squire. Although Agatha Christie claimed to have based the character on two women she had met in the Far East, readers could barely fail to notice the striking similarity with an American-born lady representing a Devon constituency, Lady Nancy Astor (1879-1964).

  The beautiful, vivacious southern belle was twenty-seven years old with one disastrous marriage behind her when she met wealthy socialite Waldorf Astor onboard a liner travelling to England. After a whirlwind courtship, the couple were wed in 1906. Her friend, American cowboy comic Will Rogers, later quipped: ‘Nancy, you sure out-married yourself’. She had a firm belief in the superiority of the female species and countered: ‘I married beneath me – all women do’.

  Waldorf had been born in New York on the same day as Nancy. His father, Viscount William Astor, had not endeared himself to his fellow countrymen when he moved his family to England in 1899, publicly stating: ‘America is not a fit place for a gentleman to live’. Becoming a British subject ten years later, he took a shortcut to a peerage by becoming a newspaper tycoon.

  In 1908, Waldorf entered politics. Refusing the offer of a safe seat, he became the Tory candidate for Plymouth Sutton, attracted by its historical association with the Pilgrim Fathers and America. Two years later, at the second attempt, he won the seat from the Liberals. During the First World War he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Prime Minister David Lloyd George before his career in the Commons came to end upon the death of his father in 1919. Waldorf inherited the peerage and was obliged to move to the House of Lords.

  The part played by women in British society while men were at war had finally won them the vote and the right to stand for Parliament. Lady Astor became the first woman to take her seat when she fought a by-election in the constituency vacated by her husband, which she was to hold for twenty-five years. In her maiden speech she requested: ‘I do not want you to look on your lady member as a fanatic or lunatic. I am simply trying to speak for the hundreds of women and children throughout the country who cannot speak for themselves’.

  Her plea fell on deaf ears; the ‘woman in the house’ was mocked relentlessly, her presence bitterly resented in a hitherto exclusive gentleman’s club with no facilities for women. Winston Churchill could not bring himself to speak to her in the Commons for years. When Nancy confronted him about his attitude, he replied, ‘Well, when you entered the House of Commons I felt as though some woman had entered my bathroom and I had nothing to protect myself with except a sponge’. In Appointment with Death, Dr Gerard remarks, ‘that woman should be poisoned… It is incredible to me that she has had a husband for many years and that he has not already done so’, drawing on the famous exchange between Astor and Churchill: ‘Winston, if you were my husband I should flavour your coffee with poison’, to which he replied, ‘Madam, if I were your husband, I should drink it’.

  Nancy gradually overcame male bias. As a spirited opponent of socialism, a champion of women’s rights and children’s welfare, she won popularity as one of the most flamboyant personalities in British public life. When Nancy retired from politics at the end of the Second World War, the Astors had served the people of Plymouth for thirty-five years. Waldorf died in 1952, having supervised the reconstruction plans for the war-ravaged city. On her eightieth birthday in 1959, Nancy became the only woman to be honoured with the Freedom of Plymouth. She died on 2 May 1964 after a stroke. During Nancy’s lifetime, the Astor family had been closely involved in two of the most sensational events of the twentieth century – the Titanic tragedy and the Profumo Affair. Coincidentally, both stories also had criminal links to Agatha Christie’s hometown of Torquay.

  In 1912 an inquiry into the maritime disaster which claimed the lives of 1,500 people was convened at a New York hotel owned by Waldorf, whose cousin John Jacob Astor was the ‘unsinkable’ luxury liner’s wealthiest victim. The multi-millionaire’s body was found floating in the water with $2,500 on his person. Giving crucial evidence to the inquiry was the helmsman at the moment of impact with the iceberg, Robert Hichens. Some twenty years later, he was the debt-ridden owner of a Torquay pleasure boat that was repossessed. After drinking heavily and brooding about his problems, he bought a revolver and shot the man who had sold him the vessel. Luckily, the bullet only grazed the skull of the blameless victim and Hichens was sentenced to five years imprisonment for attempted murder in November 1933.

  Dr Stephen Ward, a central figure in the explosive 1963 political scandal, opened his first osteopathic practice in Torquay, where his father was the vicar of St Matthias Church from 1922-1940. After wartime service, Ward resided in London and treated the rich and famous, including Winston Churchill, Elizabeth Taylor and Frank Sinatra. He moved in high circles and, as a talented artist, was invited to sketch members of the royal family at Buckingham Palace. In 1956 he leased a cottage from Waldorf and Nancy’s son, Lord William Astor, on the family estate at Cliveden. It was there at a party that Ward introduced married government minister John Profumo to showgirl Christine Keeler. She was also sleeping with a known Soviet spy, causing the society doctor to observe there was the potential to start ‘World War Three’. Profumo was forced to resign after lying about his fling with Keeler. Stephen Ward was then made the scapegoat for the sordid affair that had deeply embarrassed the government. Having supplied members of the social elite with a string of girls for sexual purposes, he was charged with living off immoral earnings. As the jury delivered a guilty verdict, the prisoner lay in a coma from which he never recovered, having taken a lethal dose of sleeping pills.

  The most memorable moment of Stephen Ward’s trial at the Old Bailey came when his former mistress, Mandy Rice-Davis, gave evidence. When told that Lord Astor had denied paying her for sex, she replied disarmingly, ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

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  LIZZIE BORDEN

  After the Funeral

  How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child.

  Quote from King Lear used in Ordeal by Innocence

  In Agatha Christie’s novel Ordeal by Innocence (1958), there are two references to ‘the Borden case’. For, like the crime in Christie’s book, the real-l
ife murders of Andrew and Abbey Borden appeared to have been committed by someone in the household. In August 1892, thirty-two-year-old Lizzie Borden raised the alarm after discovering the bodies of her father and stepmother at their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. The victims had been savagely attacked and killed with several blows from a freshly-cleaned axe that was found lying nearby. Police discovered that the day before the murders, two drugstores had refused to sell prussic acid to Lizzie, who claimed she required the preparation to mothball a fur cape. It also emerged that she had a clear motive for the crime, as she made no secret of the fact that she hated her stepmother whom she feared would inherit her father’s considerable wealth. The only other person in the house at the time of the crime was a sleeping maidservant; therefore, Lizzie was the obvious suspect and was charged with murder after she was seen burning a dress, which she claimed, was ‘stained’. A tidal wave of public opinion mounted against her, but by the time her trial was heard, sympathy had swung in her favour and there were joyous scenes in court when the jury announced ‘not guilty’. The Illustrated Police News reported that ‘the liberated prisoner fell into her seat as if shot when the verdict was announced’.

  However, people in her hometown were far from convinced by her plea of innocence. Lizzie was ostracised by the community but continued to live in Fall River until her death in 1927. Her body was then laid to rest alongside the graves of her murdered parents. One of the most famous unsolved crimes in America, a theory has been advanced that Lizzie Borden could have wielded the axe while having an epileptic fit from which she emerged with no memory of the atrocity. Agatha Christie mentioned the crime on other occasions: the Borden case is recalled by characters in And Then There Were None (1939) and Sleeping Murder (1976), and a famous contemporary nursery rhyme is quoted in After the Funeral (1953):’Lizzie Borden with an axe gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done she gave her father forty-one’.

  Another real-life case that developed ‘after the funeral’ was the case of Sarah Anne Hearn, whose alleged method of poisoning was alluded to in Sad Cypress (1940). The middle-aged widow lived at Lewannick, Cornwall, where she cared for her invalid sister Lydia Everard until her death in 1930. Sarah’s immediate neighbours were a kindly farmer and his wife, William and Annie Thomas, who showed concern for the bereaved woman living on her own and went out of their way to be helpful and friendly. In October 1930, the Thomas’s offered to take Sarah on an afternoon drive to Bude and she made some salmon paste sandwiches that were consumed by all three people during the outing. On the way home Annie Thomas became ill and was later admitted to Plymouth Hospital, where she died two weeks later. When a post-mortem revealed arsenic in the dead woman’s body, pointed remarks were made at the funeral by the victim’s brother, who was convinced that there was poison in the sandwiches prepared by Sarah Hearn.

  In response to these comments, the accused woman disappeared and there were concerns for her safety when items of her clothing were found on a cliff top at Looe. A letter posted to William Thomas suggested that she had committed suicide: ‘Goodbye… I cannot forget that awful man and the things he said. I am innocent, innocent. But she is dead and it was my lunch she ate… When I am dead they will be sure I am guilty and you at least will be clear’. Far from being dead, however, Mrs Hearn had carefully planned her flight and journeyed from Looe to Torquay, where she obtained a job as a housekeeper using the assumed name of ‘Annie Faithful’. Meanwhile, an inquest found that Annie Thomas had been poisoned by arsenic and an exhumation of Sarah Hearn’s recently deceased sister also revealed levels of the poison in her body.

  Alerted to her presence in Torquay by her suspicious employer, the police arrested Sarah Hearn, who stood trial for murder at Bodmin Assizes in June 1931. The prisoner impressed the jury by taking the witness stand and calmly denying that she had poisoned anyone. Furthermore, her defence counsel contended that arsenic found in Cornish soil had penetrated the coffins of the dead women and Sarah Hearn walked free, acquitted of double murder.

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  STRANGER THAN FICTION

  * * *

  Agatha Christie visited Iran many times when it was known as Persia and chose the location for a short story featuring Parker Pyne in ‘The House of Shiraz’ (1934). In May 2009, Iranian police arrested the country’s first female serial killer and disclosed that the murderer’s methods were inspired by the works of ‘The Queen of Crime’.

  The thirty-two-year-old suspect, named only as Mahin, was accused of killing six people in the city of Qazvin, about 100 miles north-west of Tehran. The prosecutor told Iranian journalists: ‘Mahin in her confessions has said that she has been taking patterns from Agatha Christie books and has been trying not to leave any trace of herself’. Police said the accused confessed to killing four women in Qazvin, driven by a desperate need for money to pay her debts. Carefully choosing her victims, Mahin targeted elderly and middle-aged women by offering them lifts home from shrines in the city where they had been praying. After picking them up, the killer allegedly gave them fruit juice which she had spiked with an anaesthetic to knock them out. She would then suffocate her victims before stealing their jewellery and other possessions, then dump the bodies in secluded spots. One victim was beaten to death with an iron bar after regaining consciousness. Mahin also admitted committing the earlier murders of her former landlord and an aunt. Qazvin’s police chief said that the accused was afflicted by a mental disorder. She would draw her chosen victims into conversation by telling them that they reminded her of her mother – who had deprived her daughter of love.

  Mahin’s killing spree was ended by a mundane traffic violation. A sixtyyear-old woman reported that she had escaped from a light-coloured Renault car after becoming suspicious of the female driver. After checking vehicles matching that description, police attention was drawn to the possible identity of the suspect by records showing that she had been fined following a recent road accident.

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  SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

  The Hound of Death

  You know my methods in such cases, Watson: I put myself in the man’s place, and having first gauged the man’s intelligence, I try to imagine how I should proceed under the same circumstances.

  Sherlock Holmes (The Adventures of the Musgrave Ritual, 1893)

  Agatha Christie always felt a keen sense of rivalry with the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author she revered and succeeded as the world’s most popular crime writer, for he had set a high standard by which all authors must be judged.

  Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Edinburgh, grew up in the city and studied medicine before moving to Plymouth for a short time in 1882. He briefly joined the practice of Dr George Budd, but resigned after observing the eccentric practices of his employer, who on one occasion insisted that he and Doyle throw plates of food at each other to cure a patient of lockjaw by making the sufferer laugh!

  Setting up his own practice in Portsmouth, Doyle created Sherlock Holmes in 1887. The following year he applied a combination of his own medical knowledge and the cool logic of his fictional detective to a shocking real-life case in Whitechapel. In a letter published in The Times, Doyle suggested that Jack the Ripper might be a man disguised as a midwife who was able to commit the murders and walk through the district in a bloodstained apron without attracting undue suspicion. Doyle himself has been named as a possible suspect in the hunt for the perpetrator of the East End atrocities, possessing the necessary medical and criminological skills to fit the profile of Jack the Ripper. The novelist has also been implicated in the alleged poisoning of two well-known personalities. The first case occurred shortly after Doyle returned from medical service in the Boer War, for which he was awarded a knighthood in 1902. Tired of the effect that crime fiction was having on his ambition to become an historical novelist, Doyle had killed off Sherlock Holmes in 1893 before bowing to public pressure to revive the detective hero in his best-known case, The Houn
d of the Baskervilles, written while he was staying on Dartmoor at the Duchy Hotel, Princetown, in 1901. In the book’s dedication, the author faithfully acknowledged that, ‘This story owes its inception to my friend, Mr Fletcher Robinson, who has helped me both in the general plot and in the local details’.

  Journalist Bertram Fletcher Robinson, who later became editor of Vanity Fair, lived on the edge of the moor at Ipplepen and regaled Doyle with local legends of spectral demon hounds. The coachman who drove the pair around the district was the man whose name inspired the title, Harry Baskerville, who later claimed that Robinson had not received the credit he deserved for co-writing the story with Doyle. In 2003, author Rodger Garrick-Steele went further and presented a theory that Robinson was the sole author of the book and had been murdered at the insistence of Doyle, who was having an affair with his wife Gladys, whom he persuaded to administer lethal doses of laudanum to her husband. The symptoms of laudanum poisoning are similar to typhoid, which was the official cause of death when Robinson passed away aged thirty-six in 1907. Doyle, however, curiously contended that his friend, who had dabbled in Egyptology, was a victim of selective poisoning through the same so-called ‘Mummy’s Curse’ that killed Tutankhamun-discoverer Lord Carnavon.