Today in History: Father dies after months of poisoning
Mary Blandy killed her father in an attempt to get hold of the £10 000 dowry he had offered to the man who would marry her.
In 1752, Francis Blandy fell into a coma and died mysteriously in his home outside London, England, after months of being poisoned with arsenic.
The servants in the Blandy home had been suspicious of his daughter, Mary, because the unmarried 26-year-old had been having an affair with William Cranstoun, a penniless man with a wife back in Scotland, against her father’s wishes. Cranstoun was determined to get a piece of the Blandy fortune.
Blandy had initially approved of the match, even allowing Cranstoun to live in their house. But when Cranstoun wrote to his wife and kindly asked if she wouldn’t mind disavowing their marriage, Mrs Cranstoun became outraged and caused quite a stir locally.
Cranstoun was then abruptly tossed out of the house, but Mary continued to see him behind her father’s back. The couple, frustrated at their inability to touch Mary’s sizeable dowry, decided to find another route to the money.
Mary began slipping small amounts of arsenic into her father’s food, slowly poisoning him over a period of months. As Blandy began to suffer from nausea and acute stomach pain, the servants grew suspicious.
One found white powder in the bottom of a pan that Mary had used to feed her father. After Blandy eventually died on 14 August 1752, the cook saw Mary trying to dispose of the white powder and managed to preserve some of it.
Later that night, Mary offered one of the family’s servants a large sum of money to help her get to France immediately. Mary was forced to flee on her own when he refused, but she was chased down and caught by neighbours who had heard that Blandy had been poisoned.
Mary was charged with murder and faced trial at the Oxford Assizes in March 1752. Doctors testifying for the prosecution agreed that Francis Blandy had been poisoned with arsenic. Mary was sent to the gallows, where she told the executioner, “Do not hang me too high, for the sake of decency.”
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