How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is To have a thankless child.
Quote from King Lear used in Ordeal by Innocence
In Agatha Christie’s novel Ordeal by Innocence (1958), there are two references to ‘the Borden case’. For, like the crime in Christie’s book, the real-life murders of Andrew and Abbey Borden appeared to have been committed by someone in the household. In August 1892, thirty-two-year-old Lizzie Borden raised the alarm after discovering the bodies of her father and stepmother at their home in Fall River, Massachusetts. The victims had been savagely attacked and killed with several blows from a freshly-cleaned axe that was found lying nearby. Police discovered that the day before the murders, two drugstores had refused to sell prussic acid to Lizzie, who claimed she required the preparation to mothball a fur cape. It also emerged that she had a clear motive for the crime, as she made no secret of the fact that she hated her stepmother whom she feared would inherit her father’s considerable wealth. The only other person in the house at the time of the crime was a sleeping maidservant; therefore, Lizzie was the obvious suspect and was charged with murder after she was seen burning a dress, which she claimed, was ‘stained’. A tidal wave of public opinion mounted against her, but by the time her trial was heard, sympathy had swung in her favour and there were joyous scenes in court when the jury announced ‘not guilty’. The Illustrated Police News reported that ‘the liberated prisoner fell into her seat as if shot when the verdict was announced’.
However, people in her hometown were far from convinced by her plea of innocence. Lizzie was ostracised by the community but continued to live in Fall River until her death in 1927. Her body was then laid to rest alongside the graves of her murdered parents. One of the most famous unsolved crimes in America, a theory has been advanced that Lizzie Borden could have wielded the axe while having an epileptic fit from which she emerged with no memory of the atrocity. Agatha Christie mentioned the crime on other occasions: the Borden case is recalled by characters in And Then There Were None (1939) and Sleeping Murder (1976), and a famous contemporary nursery rhyme is quoted in After the Funeral (1953):’Lizzie Borden with an axe gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done she gave her father forty-one’.
Another real-life case that developed ‘after the funeral’ was the case of Sarah Anne Hearn, whose alleged method of poisoning was alluded to in Sad Cypress (1940). The middle-aged widow lived at Lewannick, Cornwall, where she cared for her invalid sister Lydia Everard until her death in 1930. Sarah’s immediate neighbours were a kindly farmer and his wife, William and Annie Thomas, who showed concern for the bereaved woman living on her own and went out of their way to be helpful and friendly. In October 1930, the Thomas’s offered to take Sarah on an afternoon drive to Bude and she made some salmon paste sandwiches that were consumed by all three people during the outing. On the way home Annie Thomas became ill and was later admitted to Plymouth Hospital, where she died two weeks later. When a post-mortem revealed arsenic in the dead woman’s body, pointed remarks were made at the funeral by the victim’s brother, who was convinced that there was poison in the sandwiches prepared by Sarah Hearn.
In response to these comments, the accused woman disappeared and there were concerns for her safety when items of her clothing were found on a cliff top at Looe. A letter posted to William Thomas suggested that she had committed suicide: ‘Goodbye… I cannot forget that awful man and the things he said. I am innocent, innocent. But she is dead and it was my lunch she ate… When I am dead they will be sure I am guilty and you at least will be clear’. Far from being dead, however, Mrs Hearn had carefully planned her flight and journeyed from Looe to Torquay, where she obtained a job as a housekeeper using the assumed name of ‘Annie Faithful’. Meanwhile, an inquest found that Annie Thomas had been poisoned by arsenic and an exhumation of Sarah Hearn’s recently deceased sister also revealed levels of the poison in her body.
Alerted to her presence in Torquay by her suspicious employer, the police arrested Sarah Hearn, who stood trial for murder at Bodmin Assizes in June 1931. The prisoner impressed the jury by taking the witness stand and calmly denying that she had poisoned anyone. Furthermore, her defence counsel contended that arsenic found in Cornish soil had penetrated the coffins of the dead women and Sarah Hearn walked free, acquitted of double murder.
Agatha Christie visited Iran many times when it was known as Persia and chose the location for a short story featuring Parker Pyne in ‘The House of Shiraz’ (1934). In May 2009, Iranian police arrested the country’s first female serial killer and disclosed that the murderer’s methods were inspired by the works of ‘The Queen of Crime’.
The thirty-two-year-old suspect, named only as Mahin, was accused of killing six people in the city of Qazvin, about 100 miles north-west of Tehran. The prosecutor told Iranian journalists: ‘Mahin in her confessions has said that she has been taking patterns from Agatha Christie books and has been trying not to leave any trace of herself’. Police said the accused confessed to killing four women in Qazvin, driven by a desperate need for money to pay her debts. Carefully choosing her victims, Mahin targeted elderly and middle-aged women by offering them lifts home from shrines in the city where they had been praying. After picking them up, the killer allegedly gave them fruit juice which she had spiked with an anaesthetic to knock them out. She would then suffocate her victims before stealing their jewellery and other possessions, then dump the bodies in secluded spots. One victim was beaten to death with an iron bar after regaining consciousness. Mahin also admitted committing the earlier murders of her former landlord and an aunt. Qazvin’s police chief said that the accused was afflicted by a mental disorder. She would draw her chosen victims into conversation by telling them that they reminded her of her mother – who had deprived her daughter of love.
Mahin’s killing spree was ended by a mundane traffic violation. A sixtyyear-old woman reported that she had escaped from a light-coloured Renault car after becoming suspicious of the female driver. After checking vehicles matching that description, police attention was drawn to the possible identity of the suspect by records showing that she had been fined following a recent road accident.