The Poisoner

British author Stephen Bates’s history book, The Poisoner: The Life and Times of Victorian England's Most Notorious Doctor (2014), tells the story of Dr. William Palmer, who in 1856 was hanged for poisoning his gambling companion John Cook in order to steal his winnings. Evidence suggested that Palmer had also murdered several other friends and family members (after first taking out life insurance policies on them), and his case was a press sensation. Bates tells the story of the man known as the “Prince of Poisoners” by drawing on the historical record and contemporary accounts of the psychology of serial killers. The Poisoner has been described as a “pleasantly instructive social history” (Kirkus Reviews).

Bates opens his narrative at the end. On June 14, 1856, Dr. William Palmer was hanged outside Stafford Prison. Over 30,000 people flocked into town to watch, such was the sensation Dr. Palmer’s case had caused in the Victorian press.

The story moves back in time to 1855, finding Palmer and his friend John Cook at a race meeting at Shrewsbury. The two men drank and gambled for a day and a night, at the end of which Cook was up by the enormous sum of £3,000 (nearly half a million in today’s money). Palmer, however, had lost, and the money he had lost had been borrowed from unscrupulous moneylenders. Palmer had nothing left with which to pay them.



The two men traveled homewards together, and Cook decided to rest awhile in Palmer’s hometown of Rugeley, Staffordshire, in the English industrial area of the Midlands. Soon, Cook was ill. Five days later he died, writhing and shrieking in pain.

Cook’s stepfather—who knew Palmer and didn’t trust him—hurried to Rugeley and found that Cook’s betting book and financial paperwork were missing. He raised the alarm. The housemaid at Cook’s lodgings told investigators that Palmer had sent pills and a broth for Cook. She had tasted the broth with a finger and it had made her violently ill.

Local people were not surprised. Palmer’s wife, Annie, four of their children, and Palmer’s alcoholic older brother, Walter, had all died suddenly in recent years. Annie and Walter had recently acquired life insurance policies: only one of Annie’s premiums had been paid, and the Prince of Wales Insurance Office had refused to pay out on Walter’s, threatening a murder investigation should there be any complaint.



Meanwhile, Palmer had claimed Cook’s £3,000 winnings as his own. A Rugeley native, Palmer had trained as a surgeon, but he had never been fond of work, and when he came into his inheritance, he dropped medicine in favor of a career as a horse owner, gambler, and general rascal. He was known as a heavy drinker, a seducer of reputable young ladies, and a keeper of bad company. Nevertheless, he was a gentleman, a man of independent wealth, and for many Victorians the idea that such a person could be a cold-blooded serial murderer was fantastical. So far, the evidence against him was circumstantial.

At Cook’s post-mortem, the contents of the corpse’s stomach were spilled when a doctor was barged from behind—witnesses later fingered Palmer as the culprit. Palmer also tried to bribe the boy who transported post-mortem samples for analysis to overturn his cart. When this failed, he tried to persuade the postmaster to turn over the results of the analysis as they were en route to the county coroner’s office.

Investigators found a chemist’s assistant who admitted selling Palmer strychnine the week before Cook’s death. Annie and Walter’s bodies were exhumed, and evidence of strychnine poisoning found. Palmer was arrested in December 1855, but he protested his innocence, and the evidence against him remained circumstantial.



He was tried at the Old Bailey in 1856, one of the first trials to be relocated to the central London court rather than tried locally, on the grounds that Palmer could not receive an impartial trial in his native Staffordshire. The case was a sensation for several reasons. Strychnine was a newly discovered poison, and there was widespread panic about its use. Fear of poisoning had become endemic in the mid-Victorian era after several highly publicized cases of arsenic poisoning. Palmer’s bourgeois social status also made him an especially intriguing—and appalling—villain.

Every major newspaper reported the trial in detail. Queen Victoria mentioned “this horrid Dr. Palmer” in her journal, songs were written about him, and his likeness was sold in the pottery for which Staffordshire was famous (although many of these were simply stock models of a man labeled “Palmer” at the base). Bates reports that one print seller, unable to commission a portrait of the poisoner, sold ten-year-old prints of the politician Richard Cobden under Palmer’s name, and made a small fortune.

Palmer was found guilty. He did not confess to Cook’s murder or any other, and no evidence of strychnine was found in Cook’s body (probably due to poor analysis). Despite the overwhelming circumstantial evidence, some doubted the doctor’s guilt. Bates himself concurs with writers of the time that Palmer was a man “brought low by his own venality.”