By Bernard Phillips

Part Two

Elizabeth hurried to the Frary's cottage where she found Kate's husband groaning in his bed and baby Harriet "very full of pain.  She continued shrieking for long hours together.   I could see nothing but the whites of her eyes".

Mrs. Southgate sweetened a cup of warm water with a white powder which looked like sugar.  At first it seemed to help then, "Harriet went to sleep for a quarter of an hour, but when she awoke her face was wrung aside;  she was convulsed from head to foot.  She continued in the same state until Sunday morning when she died in my arms".  The Burnham Murderers had claimed their first, accidental, victim.

While Mrs. Southgate went to break the news to her husband, Kate Frary went on feeding her sick husband gruel, seasoning the insipid mixture with the same white power which Elizabeth Southgate had used to 'sweeten' her child's last drink.

Kate Frary was 40 years old, the only daughter of "poor but honest parents", the Allinsons of Wells, by whom she had been "creditably brought up".  She had spent several years in "respectable service" until 1823 when she met and married Bob Frary, a Burnham Overy man seven years her junior, one of a large family of fishermen and farmworkers.  They had three children;  Robert 7, Anne 4 and Elizabeth 18 months.  They all lived in an upstairs room above Thomas Lake's carpentry shop on North Street next to the Methodist Chapel.  The cottage and the two adjoining ones where the other murderers Peter Taylor and Fanny Billing lived are now used as garages.  (These homes have been demolished since this story was written in the 1980's)

Kate Frary had soon embarked on a series of love affairs which earned her a certain notoriety in Burnham.  Aiding and abetting her in these was her old Wells friend Hannah Shorten, a 'cunning woman', an expert at love charms and other more sinister potions.

The first attempt on Bob Frary's life had been made two years earlier but had been abandoned when another of Mrs. Shorten's 'clients', Mary Wright from Wighton, had been caught at the same game.  Sentenced to death, the widow Wright had appealed on the time-honoured grounds that she was carrying her poisoned husband's child.  A "jury of matrons" examined her and pronounced her fit to be hanged.  A panel of court-appointed surgeons disagreed.  Mary settled the argument by giving birth to a son.  Her sentence was commuted to transportation, but four months later she died in Norwich Castle.

One of Mrs. Shorten's favourite ingredients was white arsenic.  Mixed with salt and sprinkled on the fire it was reported to draw your loved one irresistibly towards you.  It also had more lethal uses.

The Market Place at Burnham Market during a 1980's Craft Fair.
The people in the story of the Burnham Murderers would have no difficulty in recognising it - the Hoste Arms in on the left, the Pharmacy where the poison was purchased is to the right and the murderers and their victims lived in a row of cottages in North Street which is in the far left corner of the photo.

As they climbed the narrow stairs to the Frary's room, Mrs. Shorten exclaimed, "Dear me, here is a smell like a dead corpse!".  But this was wishful thinking on her part.  She had already told Kate Frary's fortune, foreseeing "fatigues and troubles" and it looked as if the troubles were starting, for their 'patient' was not dead after all, he was sleeping peacefully.  Robert Frary's robust fisherman's constitution was winning the day.

Kate and Mrs. Shorten hurried downstairs and across to the Pharmacy where they ordered two pennyworth of white arsenic.  Mr. Nash's assistant, Samuel Salmon, warned them to be careful because it was "dangerous stuff".  Kate was well aware of this;  she had already learned that there were other, more effective uses for white arsenic than simply sprinkling it on the fire.  She told young Salmon, as she had told him before, that she needed the arsenic to rid her room of the rates and mice with which it was infested.

Hannah Shorten spent that night in Burnham, sleeping in the third cottage in the row, in the bed of the Billings' eldest son Sam who was away at sea.

The next afternoon, Elizabeth Southgate, calling to collect her head baby's clothes, found that Bob Frary had taken a turn for the worse.

Fanny Billing appeared with a jug of warm porter from The Black Horse.  She stirred it well before pouring it out.

"I couldn't drink porter with sugar in it", Mrs. Southgate observed, seeing a white sediment in the jug.

Fanny made no comment, held it to Bob's lips.  "Drink it up", she said, "It'll do you good".  Bob sipped at the warm, bitter liquid and retched.  "Come on!", Fanny insisted, "Drink it all up".

Later that evening Elizabeth Southgate found Bob Frary alone.  "He was sitting up in bed with a hand basin in front of him.  He was retching and brought up a good deal of his stomach", she said.  And in the morning, "He was still very sadly and felt sick to himself".

The next evening, after her work in the fields, "He was very sick.  I gave him the basin and held his head.  He was still retching violently but very little came up.  What did come up was like water".

Early the next morning, she called again.  "He was very restless.   He kept getting in and out of bed.  I remained there about two hours.  I then went home for about an hour.  When I returned I found his mother and sister and Fanny Billing.  "Bob Frary said, 'I can't see you, mother'.  Soon afterwards he said to his sister, 'I can see you again'.  A few minutes later, he said to his wife, 'I can't see you'.  He died about twenty minutes afterwards which was at twenty to two o'clock in the afternoon".

His mother and sister left at once, taking the grandchildren with them.   Sara, Robert's sister-in-law at Burnham Overy was seriously ill with the same symptoms and they feared the worst.  They were right.  Kate Frary and her 'cunning' friend had been busy there too.  We need look no further for Kate's motive;   she fancied her brother-in-law, John Frary.  And if he failed to appreciate her amorous intentions, there were always some of "Auntie" Shorten's less lethal recipes to be tried.

Elizabeth Southgate went next door to fetch Peter Taylor, a part-time barber who would shave the ravaged corpse and help to tidy it up before any more of the Frary family came to pay their last respects.  As Elizabeth, wearing soft slippers, followed Peter up the stairs, she heard the new widow planning for the future.  "Just let's bury him out of the way and there'll be some more of them dropped!". 

The shaving and laying out completed, Peter Taylor and Fanny Billing sent down to Lake's shop.  A few minutes later, moving quietly down the stairs, Elizabeth Southgate heard another snippet of conversation.

"The doctor's been", Fanny Billing said, "and it's all right with him".  "Good!", Peter Taylor replied.  "Then we'll go about her as soon as you like".  The experiment had been successful;  the right dosage had been determined, the best method of administration devised, the doctor convinced.

Elizabeth Southgate walked across to the Green, thinking of all she had seen and heard in the Frary home.  Elizabeth Southgate could not read or write.  A cross marks her name in the marriage register and on the sworn depositions made to the coroner and the magistrates.  But she could listen, "Just let's bury him out of the way and there'll be some more of them dropped . . .  The doctor's been and it's all right with him . . .  Then we'll go about her as soon as you like . . . ".

And she could repeat what she had heard and seen.  Which she did, six months later in the witness box at Norwich assizes, facing her friends, Kate and Fanny who were trembling in the dock on trial for their lives.

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