Lamson was born in 1849, and
from an early age exhibited an adventurous spirit. At the age of eighteen
he chose to study medicine in Paris. On the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian War he volunteered for the French Ambulance Corps and served
with distinction. After qualifying in 1874, he worked for two years in a
Paris hospital before volunteering again for active service in the Balkans.
For this effort he was decorated both by the Serbian and the Romanian
governments. In 1878, he elected to return to England and in the same year
married a wealthy ward of Chancery, Kate John, and in the process inherited
£1,500.
Unfortunately, while in the Balkans Lamson had developed an addiction to
morphine. He invested his wife's money into a series of medical practices,
each of which failed, eating up more and more of his capital. He had also
begun to develop a dishonest streak in his character as his financial
difficulties became more desperate. In Brighton he falsely added the name
of a popular doctor to his brass plate, and in London he hired locals to call at
his surgery to make it seem more successful when he was trying to sell the
practice. By 1881 he was in a dire position, with no capital and no
practice, and had resorted to issuing false cheques to tide himself over.
He was badly in need of some new source of finance, and he found one readily at
hand.
Mrs Lamson's mother, the widow of a Manchester merchant, had left her fortune in
trust to her three sons and two daughters until they reached the age of twenty
one. One son, Herbert, had already died, and in 1879 the second son, Henry
would also die of a mysterious stomach complaint. This left the two daughters -
Kate, Lamson's wife, and a married sister, Margaret Chapman and the youngest
son, Percy. Percy John was only fifteen in 1878 and was crippled with a
curvature of the spine and paralysis of the lower limbs. If he, too, were
to die, Lamson would immediately inherit over
£700 through his wife's interest.
Percy, who hero-worshipped Henry Lamson, was invited, with Margaret Chapman and
her husband, to spend the summer holiday with the Lamsons on the Isle of Wight.
Before they arrived Lamson bought quinine sulphate powder and one grain of
aconitine, a highly toxic irritant vegetable poison, from a local Ventnor
pharmacist. Lamson then announced to Percy and the Chapmans that he must
leave the same evening on a trip to America in search of new employment.
During the course of the afternoon he administered the quinine sulphate powder
to Percy, saying that he didn't look well. That evening, when Lamson was
well on his way out of the country, Percy was taken ill with severe vomiting and
did not recover until the next morning.
Returning to England after a fortnight, Lamson continued to run up further debts
to the point where another attempt on his nephew's life seemed the only
solution. Lamson wrote to Percy John at Belnheim Special School,
Wimbledon, where he was a pupil, to inform the boy that he wished to pay him a
visit before travelling to Paris on business. The following day, 3rd
December 1881, he arrived at 7pm and was shown up to see the headmaster, Mr
William Bedbrook. Percy was carried into the room and Mr Bedbrook offered
Lamson a glass of sherry. Lamson inexplicably asked to have sugar in it,
and a bowl of caster sugar was brought to the room. From his black bag
Lamson now produced three slices of Dundee cake, and selected on each for
Bedbrook and Percy; he then turned the conversation to some empty gelatine
capsules which he had discovered while in America. Filing one with the
harmless caster sugar, he offered it to Percy saying 'Percy, you are a champion
pill-taker, take this. Show Mr Bedbrook how easy it is to swallow.'
He then quickly took his leave, stating that he had to catch a train for London
Bridge to get to Paris that night. On the way out, he remarked to Bedbrook
on how ill Percy was looking and how he might not last long.
Later that evening Percy was taken by a violent spasm of vomiting and after
lapsing into a coma died at twenty past eleven, despite all the efforts of the
school physician. Next morning the police were called and, the local
doctors being unable to ascertain a cause of death, Dr Thomas Stevenson, the
premier toxicologist of the day, was brought in to perform an autopsy and test
various substances found at the school. Grey patches on the stomach
suggested the presence of a vegetable alkaloid poison and a raisin in the
stomach contained traces of aconite, as did a powder sent to Percy from Ventnor.
At the inquest Lamson was mentioned by named and this jogged the memory of an
assistant at Allen & Hanbury's, a pharmacy in the City of London, who recalled
selling aconite to a Dr Lamson on 2nd November.
From the safety of Paris, Lamson had obviously decided that his crime was
un-provable and that he could brazen the matter out. After writing a
letter protesting his innocence, he set out for London, arriving at Scotland
Yard in the company of his wife to discuss any misconception the police might
have. To his chagrin, he was immediately arrested and lodged in Wandsworth
Prison.
The trial opened at the Old Bailey on 8th March 1882 and lasted six days.
The defence counsel, Mr Montagu Williams, claimed that nobody knew the exact
effects of aconite poisoning or how it had been administered, and cited Lamson's
good relationship with the victim and his family as shedding doubt on any evil
intention, but the circumstantial evidence was so strong that it only took the
jury thirty minutes to reach a verdict of guilty.
Lamson's demeanour deteriorated considerably in prison, probably partly due to
the withdrawal from morphine, and, towards the end, he confessed to the cold
blooded crime he had committed. On 18th April 1882, he was led in
considerable trepidation from his cell in Wandsworth Prison to face righteous
retribution at the hand of Marwood, the hangman.
