Generally, when we think of solicitors accused of murder we think of Harold Greenwood (not guilty) and Major Armstrong (hanged) in the 1920s. However, 75 years earlier, in Newent, Gloucestershire, Edmond Edmonds was charged with the murder of his wife.
Edmonds had married Anna Legge, a young widow, in October 1845, and was rumoured to have been the father of a child born four months after the death of her first husband, who had been suffering from hemiplegia. There were 13 children of the Edmonds’ marriage but by 1867 things had soured. At the same time a relationship was beginning between Matthew Bass Smith, the (married) family doctor, and Edmonds’ 17-year-old niece Janette, who had come to live with them.
On 25 February 1867, Anna died from a cause certified by Bass Smith as apoplexy. All was well until four years later when Edmonds discovered the Janette-Bass Smith relationship and hounded Bass Smith into leaving Newent. Poor Janette was dispatched to a Home for Fallen Women in Hammersmith, but on her return to Newent in 1872 she started rumours that Anna’s death was not all it seemed.
Gossip swelled to such an extent that in February 1872 there was an inquest at which Janette, backed by a maid, said she saw her uncle hit Anna who collapsed and died that night. Edmonds was committed for trial on a charge of manslaughter, quickly elevated to murder at committal proceedings.
At the Old Bailey in July 1872, the grand jury preferred a true bill of manslaughter. Edmonds was defended by John Huddleston QC, who set about discrediting Janette and the maid, claiming malice over the Bass Smith affair.
Edmonds was acquitted. The Gloucester Chronicle thought the police had ‘acted unwarrantably’.
Over the years, Edmonds’ legal practice declined. In 1881 he was struck off the roll for appropriating money from the sales of two farms. He probably died in a poorhouse in London.
James Morton is a writer and former criminal defence solicitor
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