Murder number two is rather an
interesting tale. Did one of Glasgow’s most desirable young women kill her
lowly lover? She was a wealthy, attractive, 18 year old society beauty. He was
a clerk 10 years her senior, earning ten shillings a week. Was she enticing him
with her womanly wiles? With promises of marriage then murdering him when somebody
better came along? Or was he planning her social downfall? Or did he commit
suicide, hoping she would hang?
Madeline at the time of her trial
It’s either an affair of Taylor/Burton
proportions with arsenic poisoning thrown in. Or maybe just one of them was a murdering
schemer.
In Jack House’s book, A Square
Mile of Murder, the chapter about this case is full of great little snippets;
Madeline Smith was 18, small, plump, dark and pretty. She had been educated in
England and hated Glasgow (therefore a woman not to be trusted in my opinion!).
She kept herself busy by going to parties and balls, five in one night on one
occasion. Pierre Emile L’Angelier, her lover, pretended to be French. (He was a
Jerseyman). He was a dandified little fellow, with a pointed moustache and he
was ‘very proud of his small feet.’ He boasted of being related to nobles with chateaus
and castles. To the jurors at Madeline’s trial, he was not only a penniless
clerk who had mercilessly seduced an innocent young girl...but a foreigner as
well—shock horror!! These were the days when a glimpse of a female ankle
frightened the horses and the sun could not set on the empire without asking
permission from the queen first.
It was definitely Emile who set the
chain of disastrous events in motion. In February 1855 he made sure he and his friend
‘accidently bumped’ into Madeleine and her friend as they paraded Sauchiehall Street
of an afternoon. He had a history of ‘bumping’ into rich young ladies and using
all his Gallic charm on them. Turns out he also had a record of histrionics
whenever a lady friend threatened to dump him. The histrionics involved talking
about poisoning himself with arsenic with a view to killing himself thus making
her feel guilty. But the outcome of
that meeting in early February was a single red rose being delivered to the
Smith House in India Road, addressed to Madeline, but anonymous. On Valentine’s
Day.
The affair between the two was secretive,
with letters being passed via Madeleine’s servants to Emile. Emile kept most of
them – 198 were found at his lodgings when he died, over 60 of them read out at
court. Later, as her passion faded, or as she saw sense depending on your point
of view, she begged him to destroy the letters. The result of that was he
started to keep draft copies of the letters he was composing to her. Were his
true colours coming to light? Was he getting ready to blackmail the young
innocent girl he had deflowered? Or was he just heartbroken and using any ploy
to keep her in his life? The letters contained very shocking physical details
of their passion, they proved that Madeleine was enjoying her sexual encounters
with him, they were all about nudity and body parts and all that stuff they get
up to in Mykonos. Although this was Glasgow and there were probably less
bikinis and more thermal underwear involved.
Maddy’s sister knew about the
affair and helped keep her sister’s secret. By the time of the trial though she
had developed some kind of retro grade sleeping sickness and claimed she must
have slept all the way through two years of her sister sneaking in and out the bedroom
window, shinning up and down drainpipes and generally warbling on about the
size of her lover’s feet. When her dad, a very wealthy architect, found out he
forbade his daughter to see Emile again. He forbade her many times but the
letters would always start again. Madeleine would make her way to Emile’s
lodgings where his landlady would quietly slip away so they could be alone and
sip tea and look at etchings and water the aspidistra. Even moving to the Smith’s
holiday house in Rhu didn’t deter them, Emile just followed to steal kisses
from her under the apple tree.
the holiday house at Rhu, designed by Madeline's Dad
The letters are interesting. At
times she is talking of marriage, leading him on and he is saying it will never
work as she needs her family, her position and her money. Then she agrees with
him, trying to cool it off and Emile starts pursuing her with even greater
vigour.
Then Maddy’s dad made a clever move - he introduced Maddy to a
very rich young man of her own age and
from that point Emile was doomed - either by his own hand or by Madeline’s.
Madeline wrote to Emile telling him that although she loved him, her father
would never accept it and that they would be better apart. Emile replied with
the Victorian equivalent of ‘stuff that for a game of soldiers’ and vowed never
to let Madeline go.
Airth Castle, a popular wedding venue today, also designed by Madeline's dad.
At this point the tooing and
frooing was nothing new. The new angle was that Maddy now had two men on the go.
All kinds of furtive and passionate goings on with Emile and a very proper and
public courtship with William Minnoch. In January 1857 Minnoch proposed and Maddy
accepted. She tried to say goodbye to Emile by letter. He threatened to go to
her father which would mean the end of her betrothal, her
reputation...everything that was valued in Victorian Britain.
Then Madeline was seen buying arsenic,
signing the poison register in her own name. She did it more than once, saying
it was needed to kill vermin. Emile started to get sick at this time. His
friends testified that he had his suspicions he was being poisoned even before
it was shown Madeline had bought the stuff. Was he leaving a trail for the
authorities to follow the minute he realised that Madeline’s attentions were
drifting elsewhere?
Was he just carrying out his threat? And was that in an effort to get back into
her affections or was that so she would be hung for his murder? Was he taking
the stuff himself and she was innocent? Or were they both at it? Did Emile
think that he was taking a dose of arsenic that would make him ill but not kill
him, not knowing that Madeline was dosing his cocoa with a lethal amount. There
is evidence both ways and the arguments rage on.
She was put on trial ( in Edinburgh not Glasgow, a decision
that might have gone in her favour) and
the case was found Not Proven. It’s the ‘we know you did it but can’t
prove it verdict’- often called ‘the cruel verdict’.
Madeline’s defence council has the last word. He was asked
at a dinner party if he thought she was guilty of the murder of Emile, he
replied. “I would have rather danced than supped with her.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-W1BtL7K3yE is a wee ten minute film about Madeline in court- it captures the tedious nature of the proceedings very well. However it does give an idea of the sensation of the trial, they sent out a lookalike once the verdict was given. Madeline herself was sneaked out a side door.
Caro GB 16/08/1013
