GCZRHG Madeleine Smith (Traditional Cache) in Southern Scotland, United Kingdom created by big rab

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A cache by big rab Message this owner

Hidden : 12/11/2006

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Geocache Description:

Cache site is located accross the road from where she lived and where the alleged poisoning took place. There is a plaque on the wall of 7 Blythswood Square. Sorry about the long blurb.

Please note this is a 'Traditional' cache and therefore anyone claiming this cache MUST sign the logbook. Any further claims without signing the logbook will be deleted.

To her American family in the Twenties the venerable woman was just Grandma Wardle, an ever-present rock in their lives; if she had a few eccentricities, then they were the entitlement of old age. Her grandfather had been Scotland's most famous architect, yet for all the years she had lived in the United States she never mentioned his name.

She had mixed with the cream of British society and danced at society balls in the Great Hall of Edinburgh Castle, but she did not speak of Scotland, preferring her role as the humble matriarch of a working family. When talk turned to times past in the old country she invariably left the room. It was just her way. And it was to be her way until she died at the age of 93.

She died on 12 April, 1928. A headstone in Mount Hope cemetery in New York records the passing not just of Grandma Wardle, but the most famous woman in the annals of Scottish crime. It would be decades before her American relatives would learn that Grandma was, in fact, Madeleine Smith, the rich man's daughter who in Scottish folklore, is forever the over-sexed psychopath who got away with murder thanks to Scotland's Not Proven verdict.

Everyone from the Lord Provost of Glasgow to the streetmongers knew Smith did it. Children made up poems; raddled hags in spit and sawdust pubs sang songs of the society princess who killed in that most calculating of ways, with poison. She was the monster who bought arsenic and poisoned her French lover, whose only crime was to have fallen in love with a rich girl, because she feared he would expose their two-year affair of lurid letters and secret trysts thereby wrecking her chance of "good marriage" and sullying her name in Glasgow society.

Even her counsel, Dean of Faculty John Inglis, who defended her life for nine days during the trial at Edinburgh High Court, in July 1857, thought she was guilty. The jury failed to establish that guilt once the dean had sown seeds of doubt but the "murderess" label stuck and her reputation was ruined.

Now new evidence reveals that one of Scotland's most-hated women might have been completely innocent, the victim of a set-up by a cruel and manipulative lover.

As writer Elsie Campbell and her musician son, Jimmy, from Stirlingshire, researched Smith's life for a musical and audio-book presentation, they uncovered a string of unanswered questions. The dean had forced the court to meet his demand that a notebook-diary written by her lover, Emile L'Angelier, in which he expressed the fear that he was being poisoned, should be kept from the jury. He believed it reinforced her guilt. But this very book might have saved Smith years of suffering.

The Campbells wondered about several details in particular:

• Why would a man who believed he was being poisoned accept hot chocolate and coffee from the person he believed was trying to poison him?

• How could anyone drink half an ounce of powdered arsenic from a single cup without noticing it? It would have been akin to finding ten spoonsful of sugar in your tea.

• More significantly, why was the arsenic which killed the Frenchman, apparently a penniless innocent abroad, pure white, when the small packets of the poison legally purchased by Smith had been coloured with soot or indigo as required by law?

Ironically, the scribblings in the dark red diary, which the dean was determined the jury would never see, revealed a glaring inaccuracy in the case against Smith. Emile L'Angelier claimed that on 19 February, 1857, he "saw Mimi [Smith] a few moments. Was very ill during the night."

The diary is littered with such heavy-handed references. But according to the Glasgow Poisons Register it was another two days before Smith bought her first batch of arsenic from Murdoch's, the druggist in Sauchiehall Street. On 6 and 18 March, she bought more arsenic from Currie, the pharmacist, while in the company of a friend. Why would a poisoner take a witness along?

"It just didn't sit right," said Jimmy. They dug deeper into the contents of 248 letters the lovestruck Smith had written to the Frenchman, the contents of the previously unseen diary and sheaves of contemporary testimonies, which were not used in the trial, all of which have languished for 140 years in the Glasgow city archives.

"A very, very different picture emerged," says Elsie. "The classic portraits, which have endured since the 1850s, are of Madeleine, the compassionless killer and Emile, the gentle lover who was robbed of his life. The evidence points to a different pair - Madeleine as a flighty young thing, who was in love with the idea of love itself, a girl who could never have escaped from the duties of future wife and mother, but was captivated by her continental admirer and the thrill of their hurried assignations."

However, it is the metamorphosis L'Angelier undergoes that is startling. The innocent abroad is painted as a control freak, an arsenic addict who scoured Scotland in search of a rich wife and a vindictive psychopath who plotted the downfall of his former lover by getting her hanged for attempting to murder him. He even had the temerity to blame her for losing her virginity - to him.

"He was a monster," says Jimmy. "I believe he was poisoning himself with arsenic and leaving over-the-top hints, in his diary and in the minds of friends, in an attempt to bring about the Glasgow society girl's downfall.

There is overwhelming evidence that he was a vain maniac and habitual liar but he miscalculated. In his massive pride, he took too much of the drug and, in a bizarre twist of fate, the person he had arranged to find him in his extremity was delayed. He died.

"Poetic justice, really, but if Scotland had not had a Not Proven verdict, the jury would have found her guilty and Madeleine Smith's execution would have become a great miscarriage of justice. As it was, her life was ruined and she fled to London and then the United States to escape her reputation. She became part of a whole new family and we have been in close touch with her surviving relatives in America, who only learned two years ago who their great-grandmother really was. They are delighted that Madeleine's story can finally have a different ending."

It is to 1853 that we must return for the beginning of Smith's story, when at 18, she lived in luxury at number seven Blythswood Square, today an office complex, as the daughter of a rich businessman. Forty-five miles away, in Edinburgh, the newly arrived Emile L'Angelier was staying in the Rainbow Tavern. The gigolo entranced Edinburgh women with his Gallic charm and tales of derring-do as a sailor.

A contemporary, Edward Vokes MacKay, from Dublin, said: "I considered him a vain, lying fellow. He was very boastful of his appearance and ladies admiring him. He spoke of high, titled connections. I did not believe a word he said."

L'Angelier tried unsuccessfully to ingratiate himself into Edinburgh society via his conquests and eventually left for Dundee. It was in that city that the arsenic connection was first revealed. At the time, arsenic taken in small quantities was used by ladies and dandies to heighten the complexion.

David Hill, a market gardener, at the place where the Frenchman was working, found a packet of poison. "He (Emile) told me that it was nothing strange and that he used it regularly. He said it had no bad effect and improved the complexion. He also said it helped the pain in his back."

The Frenchman decided his future lay in Glasgow, then the second city of the empire. Armed with an introduction from a middle-aged lady he had seduced, he arrived in the city and took a room in the city centre. He told his landlady, Elizabeth Wallace, that he had been a lieutenant in the navy. He made the acquaintance of the French Consul, Auguste De Mean, who recalled a conversation about arsenic. De Mean said at the time: "I don't know how it arose, but its purport was how much arsenic a person could take without being injured by it. He maintained that it was possible to do it by taking small quantities."

The Frenchman took a job as a packing clerk in a warehouse but immediately began the search for a vulnerable, well-off woman. He discovered a fellow worker had a relative in the wealthy Smith family. The young Madeleine sounded perfect - pretty and recently returned from finishing school. He orchestrated a meeting in Sauchiehall Street. The girl, used to the stolid men of the city, was captivated.

Within weeks they were writing long, passionate letters to each other, expressing undying love and planning a future of marriage and undiluted happiness.

In the letters the Frenchman constantly tries to control the girl's attitudes and behaviour and even blaming her for their first lovemaking. He writes: "I have been wretchedly sad. Why, Mimi, did you give way after your promises? It is a pity. We have loved blindly. It is your parents' fault."

As time passed, the Frenchman developed a friendship with Miss Mary Perry, who was to become a major element in his deadly game. Meanwhile, a suitor had been found for Madeleine. William Minnoch was from a good family and earned œ4,000 a year. L'Angelier had to make do with œ52 a year.

The Frenchman was insanely jealous, but the supercilious Madeleine Smith dismissed his fears in letters which she signed: "Mimi, your wife!"

When Minnoch proposed she accepted and all hell broke loose. She told her lover by letter and he returned it. She was aghast that he could be offended. She wrote to L'Angelier requesting the return of her "letters and likeness". He refused and threatened to expose their affair to her father. Smith was distraught. Her future depended on a blameless reputation. "I trust to your honour as a gentleman that you will not reveal anything that may have passed between us."

The Frenchman, according to his colleague, Thomas Kennedy, said: "She shall never marry another man as long as I live." He pressurised the girl into a series of meetings and began, for the first time, making notes in his diary. He told anyone who would listen that he was spending time with his "Mimi" and was feeling ill after drinking coffee and chocolate. He told friends: "I think I'm being poisoned."

His landlady called the doctor one evening but the medical man was given no hint of what was going on and did not administer an antidote -also part of the plan.

On Sunday 22 March, 1857, the Frenchman had arranged to be visited by his friend, Miss Perry. Elsie Campbell says: "He knew he could rely on her to put two and two together and come up with the poisoning line he wanted. The doctor would be called. He'd be saved and Madeleine would be implicated in attempted murder. It's on record that Miss Perry was delayed and Emile died. The rest as they say ..."

Smith fled to London after the trial and married designer George Wardle. Their marriage collapsed and she followed her grown-up son, Tom, to New York. There, she buried the past.

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Additional Hints (Decrypt)

haqre n yhzc bs gne oruvaq n ohfu

Decryption Key

A|B|C|D|E|F|G|H|I|J|K|L|M
-------------------------
N|O|P|Q|R|S|T|U|V|W|X|Y|Z

(letter above equals below, and vice versa)

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Madeleine Smith Traditional Geocache

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