Samuel Tucker of Bradford-on-Avon had originally worked as a weaver, but by 1811 he had been practising medicine and calling himself Dr Tucker for some time.
Samuel was married to Ann, a widow with children, who was twenty-five years his senior. It is not known whether he simply tired of living with his wife or whether he found another, possibly younger, woman, but at the end of 1810 Samuel Tucker devised a fiendish plan to rid himself of Ann forever, while making it seem as though she had actually died from natural causes.
From New Year’s Day 1811, Tucker kept Ann confined to her bedroom. She was not allowed to receive any visitors and was fed only occasionally by her husband on small quantities of half-boiled potatoes, barley bread and sips of water. Tucker intended not to starve Ann to death but to keep her alive, although in such a severely weakened condition that she would fall prey to the slightest illness.
Several times, Tucker’s work took him away from home for a couple of days. Whenever that happened, he would simply lock the door and windows of his wife’s bedroom, forcing her to lie in her own urine and excrement, in the closed, airless room. A broadsheet published at the time described the atmosphere in the room as ‘nearly sufficient to create putridity’.
Ann slowly became weaker and more emaciated until 8 March, when she finally succumbed to the effects of the starvation diet enforced on her by her husband. A surgeon who examined her shortly after her death described her body as ‘nothing but skin and bone’.
Tucker stood trial for the wilful murder of his wife at the Wiltshire Assizes held at Salisbury on 31 July 1811. The trial lasted for seven hours in total and the main witnesses for the prosecution were Ann’s children from her previous marriage.
In his defence, Samuel Tucker claimed that his wife suffered from a serious disease of the bowels, which prevented him from sleeping with her or associating with her in any way. He ridiculed the idea that he had starved her to death, telling the court that Ann had a voracious appetite and ate insatiably. Her death, he maintained, was entirely down to the medical problem with her bowels.
The jury chose to disbelieve him and, having heard all the evidence against him, almost immediately returned a verdict of ‘Guilty of wilful murder’. The judge ordered his execution, stating that his body should afterwards be passed to the surgeons for dissection.
Samuel Tucker received the verdict with the same lack of emotion that he had displayed throughout the trial. However, while at chapel on the day before his scheduled execution, he apparently prepared for his death by making a full confession to the murder of his wife.
He was executed at Fisherton Anger Gaol in Salisbury on Friday 2 August 1811.