How Did She Kill Him?

But first: I built The Library for you with all of my 20 books inside — four are free, everything else for just €5/month. That's less than one ebook costs. Read at your own pace, cancel whenever. The Keeper of Pleas series comes with audio. The Library is also where The Silence Architect and any new book will drop months before it’s publicly available at retailers.

You can test it for free as long as you like:

In The Commons, we’ve been picking at the Adelaide Bartlett case for the past 2 weeks, and a recurring question was how she killed her husband and managed to get away with it.

But that’s putting the conviction before the postmortem.

A suspicious death is one point in a story that involves several characters. To ask "who did it" — or worse, "how did THAT person do it" — is to make assumptions before you've looked at any of the data.

But what’s the right question to ask, then?

That’s what we want to know and that’s what might allow us to figure out the who, when, and how. The why is, in my opinion, the most important question. It’s what I chase as a storyteller and what I used to chase in science.

So let's start at the centre.

At 4:10 in the morning, Adelaide Bartlett knocked on her landlord's door. ‘Come down. I think Mr Bartlett is dead.’

And dead he was. Edwin Bartlett, forty years old, husband of roughly a decade, was lying on his back in bed with his left hand on his breast, eyes closed, mouth open, and his body already cold.

The room smelled like chloric ether. A wine glass on the mantelpiece held dark fluid, brandy mixed with something chemical. A fire was burning, recently tended it seemed.

And when the doctors opened him up a couple of days later, they found chloroform in his stomach. Enough that the smell hit them like a freshly opened chloroform bottle.

Here's where it the strange begins.

Liquid chloroform burns everything it touches. Pour it down someone's throat and you can expect damage to the mouth, the tongue, the oesophagus, even the windpipe if they accidentially inhaled some of that stuff. You'd expect the victim to scream, choke, and fight.

But Edwin's mouth was fine. His tongue was white but undamaged. His throat was healthy. His windpipe and lungs clean. No froth on his lips, no sign of convulsion. The only damage was inside his stomach, where the chloroform had pooled while he lay on his back.

Every medical expert at the trial agreed: forced administration of liquid chloroform to a sleeping person was nearly impossible. You'd need to get past the gag reflex, avoid the windpipe, maintain the swallowing reflex in an unconscious body, and do it all without leaving a single mark. The window between "unconscious enough not to resist" and "conscious enough to swallow" requires medical precision that Adelaide — a grocer's wife with no medical training — didn't have, nor did the majority of the medical experts.

The surgeon who examined Edwin reportedly said, after Adelaide's acquittal: ‘Now that she's been let off, she should tell us how she did it. Because the doctors couldn't work it out.’

The jury said: ‘Although we think grave suspicion is attached to the prisoner, we do not think there is sufficient evidence to show how or by whom the chloroform was administered.’

So here we are, 140 years later, still asking how the bloody hell she managed to pull this off.

And I think that question is a trap.

Because once you ask "how did she do it," you've already decided she did. You've skipped over every other possibility, such as accident, suicide, self-dosing, a death that doesn't fit any clean category, and you locked yourself into a room holding the wrong key.

Next week, we step inside the house on Claverton Street. Because the Bartlett household was not what it appeared to be, and what was actually happening under that roof changes everything about this mysterious and tragic death.

You don't have to read everything — just the right thing. 1440's daily newsletter distills the day's biggest stories from 100+ sources into one quick, 5-minute read. It's the fastest way to stay sharp, sound informed, and actually understand what's happening in the world. Join 4.5 million readers who start their day the smart way.

Join for free today!