Writer Lindsey Dawson at the West Auckland house where the gruesome death of a man from strychnine poisoning in 1892 led to a sensational murder trial. Photo / Dean Purcell
Was it murder? Or was it suicide? A new book revisits one of New Zealand’s most scandalous crimes and the fallout that reverberated through the generations.
It begins and ends with a poisoning. The first is with strychnine, an agonising death that leads to one of Auckland’s most sensational murder trials and sends a convicted killer to the gallows.
Almost 130 years later, on the other side of the world, a woman directly connected to the case swallows legal euthanasia drugs after being diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour.
“She ended her own life on a bright morning of her choosing, surrounded by people who dearly loved her,” writes Lindsey Dawson in Poisoning on Parker Road, a fascinating account of the death in 1892 of a young English settler, William Thompson, and how its consequences have rippled through the generations. “In a way, the story had come full circle.”
A former journalist and magazine editor, Dawson was researching Victorian life in Auckland for her 2017 historical novel Scarlet & Magenta when she stumbled across the scent of a 19th-century scandal.
Over the past five years, she’s followed its trail to Australia, England, the US and Canada, trying to piece together exactly what happened and searching for any surviving descendants.
“It became quite an obsession with me,” says Dawson, who spent “countless hours” on genealogy sites and poring through the official records.
“It was such a scandal, and so mysterious at the beginning because nobody could work out why this fit and healthy young man had died.
“I wanted to get to the bottom of the story – there’s so much unknown about it still. And I was really interested, too, in the impact something like that would have had on the family.
“Two small boys left fatherless and their mother cast as a scarlet woman. What happened to them afterwards?”
For her initial research, Dawson spent months sifting through the archives on Papers Past, an open-access website with digitised newspaper records dating back to the mid-19th century.
Thompson’s ”strange and suspicious death” at his home in Ōratia and the arrest of Alexander Scott for his murder were breathlessly reported by the New Zealand Herald and the Auckland Star, which covered the ensuing court case as feverishly as the media followed every salacious detail of last year’s Polkinghorne trial.
(Decades later, Dawson would get her own start in journalism at the Star, joining the paper as a teenage cub reporter in the 1960s.)
Scott had turned up from Australia the year before to stay with his uncle near the Thompsons on Parker Rd, at the edge of the Waitākere Ranges. Witness accounts would later emerge of Scott’s unseemly intimacy with Alice, the dead man’s pretty young wife.
The complicity of Alice as an accomplice to murder remains unclear. She was absent on the night a distraught Scott arrived on horseback at a neighbour’s house, shouting that Thompson was having spasms and about to “kick out”.
For the past two months, Alice had been away in Auckland awaiting the birth of her third child. Baby Eric was just 6 weeks old when Thompson died.
The trial, described as one of the most celebrated “in the annals of the criminal history of this colony”, was a spectacle that played out daily to a packed public gallery at the Auckland Supreme Court.
Scott’s defence team argued Thompson had committed suicide, still distraught over the death of his firstborn son, Alaric, the previous year and in financial difficulties due to his failing apple orchard.
The jury wasn’t having any of it, taking less than two hours to find Scott guilty. Newspaper reporters witnessed his execution at Mt Eden Prison by infamous hangman Tom Long, who later used the same rope to send convicted baby killer Minnie Dean to her death.
Dawson, who founded More, Next and Grace magazines in the 80s and 90s, is a skilled storyteller whose attention to detail is what brings the story to life.
Poisoning on Parker Road paints a vivid picture of the “Waikomiti mystery”, as it was called, from the strictures of Victorian morality to the intrigues and entanglements of an isolated rural community.
At first, there was speculation that William might have suffered a fatal bout of food poisoning. “Meat pies had recently poisoned six people in Parnell,” she writes. “Three of them had died.”
Later, when one of the jurors felt unwell and threatened to collapse, the judge suggested a bed could be brought into court, as had been done during a previous trial.
It’s difficult to imagine how Scott could have stood by and watched Thompson’s final moments, although evidence points to him tidying the grisly scene.
As part of her research, Dawson came upon an account of the unsolved murder by strychnine poisoning in 1905 of Jane Stanford, co-founder of the prestigious Stanford University in California.
Her final words, uttered between waves of violent convulsions that contorted her spine into an excruciating arch, were “This is a horrible death to die.”
It’s all compelling stuff. What Dawson never loses sight of, however, is that these aren’t fictional characters in a spicy novel but real people whose lives were ruined in tragic circumstances.
Disillusioned with lawyering, William had fancied himself as a gentleman farmer, although Dawson suspects Alice took some convincing that they could make a good life for themselves in New Zealand.
“I became very tied up with William and Alice, thinking about what it would have been like for them here in the late 1880s,” she says. “They were both from quite prosperous backgrounds in England and came out with such big hopes and dreams.”
By 1892, Alice was grieving for her lost child and stuck out in the wops. When Dawson tracked down the death certificate, she discovered Alaric died of kidney cancer at the age of 4.
“That must have been appalling. And then along comes this rather dashing young Australian, who paid her rather too much attention. Of course, there was no marriage counselling in those days except the local vicar, I suppose, who would just tell you to obey your vows,” she says.
“It was really sad in that Scott and William were good mates; they used to have these little musical evenings together where Scott would play the bones. I had to Google what that meant. But he was clearly obsessed with Alice.
“Her arrival back in England must have been horrendous, with her in-laws knowing her betrayal of William had led to his horrible death.
“And how was the family going to raise these two boys, who were the children of their precious son? Well, certainly Alfgar, the older one, was. They must have had their suspicions about Eric.”
Today, it can take as little as half an hour to drive from Ōratia to the city centre. In the late 19th century, Parker Rd would have been barely more than a muddy horse track winding deep into the bush. In the worst of winter, it would have been almost impassable.
Built in the 1860s, the home where William and Alice lived is still standing, although the bedroom where his body was found has been converted into a bathroom.
In the weeks before his fatal poisoning, Thompson had been suffering bouts of a strange, unexplained illness, and Scott had moved in to care for him while Alice was in town awaiting the birth of her child.
Last Sunday, Dawson held her book launch at the beautifully restored wooden house where people milled from room to room, picturing the dramatic events that took place.
There was the original fireplace where a scandalised neighbour saw Scott and Alice sitting with their feet nestled together by the hearth. There were the narrow wooden stairs leading to the attic floor, where policemen found two women’s chemises in a trunk in Scott’s room and – most shockingly of all – a birth-control device called a “preventative pessary” in the pocket of his extra pair of trousers.
Just before the turn-off to Parker Rd is the small country cemetery where William was buried next to Alaric.
“Son of William Thompson,” reads the inscription on the gravestone (where his name is misspelt as Aldric). No mention of the little boy’s mother. But then, Alice – the woman at the heart of this tale in more ways than one – was to become strangely invisible in her own story.
Still in her 20s, she was described in an early Herald report as “slight and of an attractive appearance, showing every indication of refinement and culture”.
However, she wasn’t called to give evidence at either the inquest or Scott’s trial. Nor did she see her lover condemned to death. By then, she was on a ship back to England. Incomplete shipping records make it unclear whether her two sons went with her or followed later.
“The judge wouldn’t have Alice in his courtroom,” says Dawson. “She was a woman whose word could not be trusted – ‘a woman lost to every sense of moral decency’.
“Her behaviour was obviously hugely frowned on by those in charge at the time, and it made her untrustworthy. Even if she had appeared in court, they wouldn’t have believed a word she said.”
The real detective work in the book begins after the conclusion of the trial as Dawson digs into Alice’s life back in England and tries to find out what happened to Alfgar and Eric, aided by access to a box of Thompson family records sent over from the UK.
The two brothers were raised separately within the family and seem to have had only sporadic but cordial contact when they were young.
Alfgar trained as an engineer and lived in Wales with his mother, who suffered for the rest of her life from “nervous prostration” caused by high emotional stress.
During World War I, Alfgar was made an officer and worked on early tank warfare, marrying in the spring of 1917. But his life, too, would be blighted by tragedy in the years ahead.
Eric, whose parentage must have been the subject of great speculation, was 16 when he left the UK on a ship bound for Canada. Whether he was exiled or escaping the shadows of the past will never be known.
“I imagine he always sought what was missing in childhood – stability, self-respect and a constant supply of love,” writes Dawson. “What he got was a mother whose own life was blighted, a brother he rarely saw, and an extended family who may or may not have shown him genuine encouragement and kindness.”
After hitting one dead end after another, Dawson does eventually succeed in contacting William’s last surviving descendant, who is living in the US.
That encounter leads to the book’s moving denouement, alluded to at the very beginning of this story. However, the details of that and what else she uncovered along the way aren’t for revealing here.
Over the years, Dawson has developed a close relationship with Ōratia local Carolyn Melling, who shared the material she’d gathered for a 2005 essay on William’s death that’s held by the research centre at the Waitākere Public Library.
Melling still lives in the old Thompson house – then known as Sunnydale – which her parents bought back in 1962. Even as a child, she knew some of its history, although what she remembers being told is that a man had been murdered there by eating crushed glass.
In an alcove by William’s old bedroom, she’s compiled a display of memorabilia, including old photographs and newspaper articles that guests will no doubt find intriguing when the house is made available soon for bookings on Airbnb.
When Melling began researching the case in the early 2000s, it had largely been forgotten, despite the sensation it caused at the time.
On the anniversary of William’s death, she took flowers, a candle and a bottle of wine to his grave. “An injustice had been done, but that day it felt like something had lifted. Someone had finally listened to him,” she says.
“It’s a fascinating story and it had to be told. Now the book is finished, that’s the end of an era. Lindsey’s turned over most of the stones – more than we ever thought. Now I think it can be put to rest.”
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.
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