Lady Killers Page 7

  DEVIL IN THE SHAPE OF A SAINT

  Elizabeth Ridgeway

  Elizabeth Ridgeway was raised in a good Christian home but met the devil somewhere along her path. At the end of her life, she’d chalk up her wrongdoings to a “familiar spirit”—a witch’s demon, so to speak—who laid with her throughout the night and whispered evil in her ear. Elizabeth didn’t care one way or another about the church, preferring to stay home and stir her cauldron. She was a woman who took offense easily and lied effortlessly, all while fretting about the impossibility of love. And even though she lived in the seventeenth century and appears in only two surviving sources from the era, she feels surprisingly knowable, familiar spirit and all.

  Elizabeth was born in a tiny British town named Ibstock during the second half of the 1600s. Her father was a farmer with the last name Husbands. Though Ibstock was a sleepy little town, it wasn’t immune to the type of frightening country violence that seemed to flare up out of nowhere. When Ralph Josselin, a vicar from a village to the south, stayed overnight in Ibstock, he was shocked to learn that a man had been murdered right outside his lodgings while he slept. “I have cause for ever to praise God for the mercyes of this day,” he wrote in his journal, shaken.

  Violence, God, and men—these were the elements that made up Elizabeth’s life.

  Flirting in Seventeenth-Century England

  Elizabeth lived at home until she was about twenty-nine, a spinsterhood long enough to make her little town assume she was a “Religious Maid, and a follower of the Presbyterians.” But this was a façade; Elizabeth informed a preacher she was “indifferently inclined to the Church and Private Meetings.” She had a bad temper and a very low tolerance for those who disagreed with her. When she and her mother had a spat—either “some falling out about their Household Affairs,” or a lecture from her mother about “some other thing she disliked in [Elizabeth]”—the daughter immediately dispatched the mother with poison.

  With Mother dead, Elizabeth kept house for her father, who was oblivious to the real cause of his dear wife’s sudden demise. After another year at home, though, Elizabeth decided it was time to move on. She craved stimulation and might even have found her father kind of annoying, since he—like her deceased mother—surely made a habit of telling her what to do. So she left her father’s farm and took a job in town, working and living as a servant in a wealthier household.

  Her master was rarely home, so Elizabeth had the freedom to entertain all the male visitors her wild young heart desired. And entertain she did. Her favorite way to flirt was to talk about love and marriage, heavily implying that she thought this particular man might be the one, and making plenty of promises she never intended to keep. She did have a couple of favorites among her scores of paramours: she liked John King, and she really liked Thomas Ridgeway. King was a servant at another household in Ibstock, hovering at about the same social level as Elizabeth. But Ridgeway was a tailor with two apprentices, and his name carried a certain degree of cachet in the town.

  While Elizabeth was flirting with her suitors, she was also harboring a major grudge against one of her male coworkers. It started over some minor disagreement, perhaps about household chores, but instead of confronting the other servant, Elizabeth bottled up her rage until she couldn’t take it anymore. This was typical of her; she had always been characterized by a “dogged, sullen Humour.” After all, she’d killed her mother under similarly petty circumstances. The servant who irritated her was a perfectly healthy young man in the morning, but after Elizabeth mixed white mercury into his broth, he began complaining that he didn’t feel well, and died in agony a few hours later.

  By the time summer was winding down, Elizabeth realized she’d let the John King/Thomas Ridgeway situation go on for too long. Both men clearly expected that she would marry them—she had been “so free” with them that their expectations were understandable, given the social mores of the time, and there was no easy way to extricate herself from this love triangle without breaking hearts and scandalizing society matrons—unless somebody died.

  At this point, Elizabeth knew for sure that she preferred the richer and more influential Ridgeway. But she couldn’t let King find out until she was ready to dispose of him, or else he might fly into a rage and, if he so desired, ruin her reputation. So she continued to lead King on with whispers and kisses, till she found the opportunity to “season him some Draught which sent him into the other World.”

  Poor John King, expecting a wife, found that his lover was a killer instead. His death was not pleasant. Not only was it sudden, but it was bizarre and highly memorable: his blood “turned black,” his insides burned, his stomach was consumed by a violent, gnawing sensation. Elizabeth was relieved when he was finally in the ground.

  With John King dead, Elizabeth spent the winter in coy servitude, knowing it would look suspicious if she immediately ran off with her other paramour. Finally, on Friday, February 1, 1683, she married Thomas Ridgeway. Her father had explicitly forbidden her to marry this man, but Elizabeth didn’t listen or care.

  Ashby-de-la-Zouch

  The first three weeks of marriage passed in a blur of “seeming mutual Love,” at least to outsiders. You could have caught the newlyweds strolling through the market at Ashby-de-la-Zouch and shopping for household goods, lost in a fog of wedded bliss. Of course, if you took the time to follow the couple through the market, you would have seen Elizabeth slip off to make a covert purchase from an old widow—two pennyworth of a mysterious white powder. But who was paying attention to those sorts of details at the time? The town flirt was married, the bachelor was happy, and it looked like all was well in the Ridgeway home.

  Elizabeth, though, was not happy. After a year of hinting at marriage, she found that it wasn’t what she wanted after all. Secretly, she was “frustrated of her expectations in her marriage: for she could not love her Husband as she ought.” Now, being unhappy in marriage is no small matter, but Elizabeth did have a history of turning on people for the smallest inconveniences. Maybe Ridgeway chewed with his mouth open. Maybe he disagreed with her—Elizabeth couldn’t stand that. Or maybe, without the scintillating foil of John King, Elizabeth realized that Ridgeway was actually a total bore.

  To add insult to injury, Ridgeway wasn’t exactly the wealthy, prestigious tailor she’d originally thought. Shortly after their marriage, his sister demanded that he pay her back a debt of twenty pounds—a sum that would have completely bankrupted him and his new bride. So instead of comfort and prestige, Elizabeth was suddenly faced with the prospect of poverty and embarrassment. Her unhappiness with the whole situation tortured her so much that she thought about poisoning herself to escape from the relationship. But she couldn’t breathe a word of this to anyone. She’d just gotten married to a man she’d been pursuing for months, and to express dissatisfaction would have made her seem ungrateful, irresponsible, crazy.

  If nothing else, Elizabeth was certainly solution-oriented. Before too many days had passed, she put aside thoughts of suicide and “converted her despair into revenge.” There was an easy way to rid herself of her doomed marriage, and she’d played this game before. She waited until a peaceful Sunday morning, three weeks and two days after their wedding, when Ridgeway left for church without her. As Ridgeway worshiped, Elizabeth boiled a pot of broth and stirred in some of the white powder she’d purchased in Ashby-de-la-Zouch. When Ridgeway came home, Elizabeth smiled and served him dinner.

  Ridgeway ate most of his meal, though he complained to his young apprentices that there was something a little gritty in the dish. Thirty minutes later, he began to throw up. He tossed and turned in “great torment” for hours, and finally died in anguish after midnight.

  He was buried without suspicion. Elizabeth was widowed—and free.

  The Body Bleeds

  A few days later, Ridgeway’s teenage apprentices ruined everything for Elizabeth. They, too, had noticed the gritty substance lurking at the bottom of Ridgeway’s bowl.
The boys suspected poisoning; Elizabeth, in turn, suspected the boys of suspecting her. So she attempted to shut them up with a bit of arsenic-laced porridge, and when they refused to eat it, she changed tactics, promising she would make it worth their while if they kept their mouths shut. It didn’t work: one of the terrified boys ran to Thomas Ridgeway’s relatives, saying he was pretty sure Elizabeth had just murdered her brand-new husband.

  News of the poisoning soon reached the justice of the peace, a “Gentleman of great Judgment and Prudence” named Sir Beamont Dixey, who ordered an inquest by the coroner. The coroner gamely dug up Ridgeway, who had been dead for eight days, and took a peek inside his decomposing corpse. It was clear that Ridgeway had been poisoned, and Elizabeth was whisked away to the jail in Leicester.

  During this time, some courts still practiced “cruentation,” a medieval method of proving guilt. The accused murderer would be required to touch the victim’s corpse, and if the accused was guilty, the theory ran, then the corpse would begin to bleed. Allegedly, Thomas Ridgeway’s father forced Elizabeth to touch her husband’s moldering body, an act that—shockingly!—“she was very averse to.” A source claims that when she finally touched it, the corpse “burst out at Nose and Mouth bleeding, as fresh as if new Stabbed.”

  On Friday, March 14, Elizabeth pleaded not guilty before a jury of twelve, all of whom quickly agreed that she’d poisoned Ridgeway. She was sentenced to death by burning. There was some backlash against the harsh verdict, since certain “tender people” argued that the testimony of a sixteen-year-old apprentice shouldn’t be enough to convict her, but the judge stood firm. Instead of granting her a retrial, he asked a clergyman named John Newton to counsel her during the last days of her life.

  Now, this John Newton—not to be confused with the famous preacher and abolitionist of the same name in the 1700s—was a mild, self-deprecating man with the best of intentions. He was horrified by Elizabeth’s crime, but he approached her with a certain grace. He wanted to provide her with the counsel she so desperately needed, to help her understand the gravity of her crimes, and to ease her transition from this life into the next.

  Unfortunately, Elizabeth was still “indifferently inclined” to men of the cloth and had no interest in making John Newton’s job easy. This was just so Elizabeth: unmoved by matters of life and death, uninterested even in the fate of her soul.

  False Creature

  Newton visited Elizabeth in jail every day for a week and a half, determined to extract a full confession. He was shocked to find that Elizabeth—this weepy woman who had been protesting in court that she’d never killed a soul—was actually quite difficult to work with. She took obvious pleasure in fabricating confessions, weaving elaborate stories to confuse him, and generally laughing in his face.

  The first lie she told Newton concerned the death of John King: she claimed that her husband, Thomas Ridgeway, had murdered King without her knowledge. According to Elizabeth, she had no idea why Ridgeway would have wanted King dead, but just before Ridgeway died, he cried out in horror that “God’s hand was just upon him, for the wrong he had done to that person so deceased.” She even insisted, coy and ironic, that in a way she blamed herself for King’s death. His ghost, she said, often appeared to her!

  Elizabeth had several siblings, and when Newton talked to them, they quickly informed him that she was lying. She’d told them a slightly different story about her former lover: she still claimed that Ridgeway had killed him, but in this version, Elizabeth maintained that she knew all about the murder and had in fact condoned it. Since Thomas Ridgeway and John King were rivals for her heart, said Elizabeth, they understandably hated each other, and even after Ridgeway married Elizabeth, he still talked about getting revenge on his hapless opponent. (Her siblings must not have been paying very close attention to Elizabeth’s life, because this timeline was impossible. King was already dead by the time Ridgeway and Elizabeth got hitched.) “For a time [I] endeavored to dissuade him,” said Elizabeth to her siblings, who relayed all this to Newton, “but at last permitted him by saying these words, ‘Do what you will with him.’”

  When Newton tried to confront Elizabeth with her lie, she replied sanctimoniously that she “dare not judge” her husband for whatever he might have done, and refused to admit any guilt in the matter.

  By now, Newton was irritated at Elizabeth, and probably mad at himself for believing her ghost story. He went home and stewed over the “reserved, stupid, uncertain, yea, and false Creature I had to deal with.”

  A week after Elizabeth was sentenced to death, another witness popped up with evidence against her: this person, her neighbor, had seen her buying poison at the Ashby-de-la-Zouch market. After this incriminating development, Elizabeth finally admitted that she had indeed purchased poison, but wouldn’t admit what she had used it for. Newton nipped back into Elizabeth’s cell to get the inside scoop, but all he got was an infuriating vagueness: she refused to confirm or deny the purchase of the poison, and she wouldn’t even admit that she had previously admitted to the purchase. The pastor left in a huff, refusing to visit her again until she entered into a “better mind” and sent for him of her own accord.

  Being a clergyman, Newton would have had plenty of people to visit during the week, but he couldn’t shake the thought of Elizabeth, because he couldn’t figure her out. He knew she wasn’t actually stupid, “because she otherwise appeared sufficiently Apprehensive and Knowing.” Maybe, he theorized, her silence stemmed from a desire to keep her own reputation as clean as possible; she didn’t want to “imprint the mark of her Infamy upon her the deeper by her own Confession.” What’s more likely is that Elizabeth was hoping for a reprieve. She knew there were still certain “tender people” who thought her trial had been unfair; maybe she thought she’d be handed some sort of last-minute pardon if she kept her mouth shut.

  That being said, she couldn’t stop toying with John Newton. She pretended at least three times that she was ready to give a full confession, and each time Newton raced over to her cell, only to be disappointed. Ironically, if she was really hoping to save her own life, Newton could have been a useful ally. She could have fed him a sob story, convinced him of her innocence, and begged him to talk to the judge on her behalf. Instead, she went out of her way to torment him.

  During one of these fake-outs, Elizabeth began by telling Newton she was ready to reveal the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and ended up constructing her craziest tale yet. It went like this: There was a man from a town called Hinckly who was completely obsessed with her, and his obsession didn’t stop when she married Ridgeway. Instead, the man from Hinckly turned into something of a stalker and decided that the only way he could have Elizabeth for himself was by killing her new husband. So one Sunday, when Ridgeway was away at church, the man snuck into Elizabeth’s house and slipped poison into a bowl of broth. Elizabeth saw this happen and didn’t stop it, nor did she hesitate in feeding the poisoned bowl of broth to Ridgeway.

  Elizabeth informed Newton that she was under oath not to reveal the name of man from Hinckly, but if Newton watched very closely at her execution, he would spot the man in the crowd, “for his Countenance would betray his Guilt.” Newton, bless his innocence, believed this bizarre tale, and was appalled that Elizabeth had sworn not to reveal the identity of her husband’s murderer. “I discovered to her the wickedness of such an Oath,” he wrote, “and that it could no ways bind her to such an Hellish Concealment.” But Elizabeth still refused to name him, and Newton left, frustrated once again.

  Clearly, Elizabeth liked to manipulate people. The drama with John King and Thomas Ridgeway was a perfect example of this: she skillfully navigated the social mores of her time to bring the men so deep into her web that (a) they both thought they were going to win her hand in marriage and (b) they both ended up dead.

  The gleeful element to her manipulation—laughing in Newton’s face, blowing air kisses (or whatever the seventeenth-century equivalent was)
at Ridgeway and King—seems at odds with her suicidal thoughts and tendency toward gloominess. But she seemed to revel in the power she had over people, and perhaps it was the only thing she truly enjoyed. The agency she felt when she toyed with others must have helped her claw her way out of the “dogged, sullen Humour” and, yes, the “despair” to which she was so susceptible. Centuries later, researchers would divide female psychopaths into two broad categories, and the first—women who seek sensation, who are prone to boredom, who lack empathy, and who love interpersonal deception—describes Elizabeth to a fault. She often felt jaded, frustrated, and claustrophobic, and in those moods, she murdered the people who were encroaching on her life. Her mother told her what to do, criticized her character. Her coworker disagreed with her, invaded her professional space. John King really inconvenienced her by his annoying habit of believing what she said. And Thomas Ridgeway may have been the biggest headache of all: a man who was suddenly taking up space in her home, waiting in her bed, telling her what to do, expecting her to have the soup ready when he came home from church.

  In another era, Elizabeth might have channeled her boredom and sensation seeking into some sort of high-powered career. Here, in her tiny town, with her reputation as first a “Religious Maid” and then an incorrigible flirt, there weren’t many cures for ennui. Elizabeth certainly found one. It just wasn’t very pretty.

  The next day was a Sunday, and Elizabeth was taken to church along with an assortment of other criminals. Newton preached, and he flattered himself that his sermon on obedience had finally convinced Elizabeth to make an honest confession. Alas, Elizabeth still had no interest in telling the truth, even though she was scheduled to die the next day. She also refused to see Newton that night. Instead, she chatted with her father, cackling about how the man from Hinckly was nothing but a lie. Her father must have been appalled at his heartless daughter, wondering by now if she’d murdered her own mother, wondering why she was so comfortable laughing about death.