1. John Tawell fled the crime scene by train, but police were able to use the newly installed electric telegraph to circulate a description of the suspect ahead of his arrival at his destination, where he was identified as he left the station.
16 Facts About John Tawell
1. 2.
John Tawell was arrested the following day and later sentenced to hang.
3.
John Tawell started out as a shop worker in London and for some years worked in a number of businesses owned by the Quakers, a strict religious society which he later joined.
4.
John Tawell was eventually disowned by the Quakers as a result of his relationship with a non-Quaker woman, Mary Freeman, whom he ultimately married and with whom he had two children.
5.
In 1814 John Tawell was charged with possessing forged banknotes from the Uxbridge Bank, potentially a capital offence.
6.
However, the Quaker-owned bank was opposed to the death penalty and, mindful of scandal, negotiated for John Tawell to be allowed to plead guilty to a lesser offence.
7.
John Tawell's family rejoined him in Sydney in 1823 and Tawell set about rehabilitating his reputation, being influential in setting up the first Quaker community in Australia and engaging in various philanthropic activities.
8.
John Tawell had employed a nurse, Sarah Lawrence, who later changed her name to Sarah Hart, to look after Mary.
9.
John Tawell bought two bottles of Scheele's prussic acid, a treatment for varicose veins containing hydrogen cyanide, and on 1 January 1845 travelled to Salt Hill, where he poisoned Sarah while sharing a beer in her cottage.
10.
Williams followed him onto a New Road omnibus where John Tawell mistook him for the conductor and gave him 6d for the fare.
11.
John Tawell then went to a coffee tavern and later to a lodging house, all the while with Williams following.
12.
John Tawell's defence was handled by Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who tried to make a case that the prussic acid that killed Sarah Hart was ingested accidentally, from eating the pips of apples.
13.
John Tawell himself tried to convince the jury that Sarah had poisoned herself.
14.
John Tawell was nevertheless convicted at Aylesbury Courthouse, and was hanged in public on 28 March 1845 in the Market Square at Aylesbury with huge crowds watching.
15.
John Tawell's case was significant as the first known homicide case where the criminal attempted to flee the scene of the crime by a railway train, and it was one of the first cases in which prussic acid was used for a deliberate homicide.
16.
The telegraph transmitter and receiver used to apprehend John Tawell are preserved in the Science Museum, London.