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1913: Henry Lovell William Clark, Raj poisoner

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This date in 1913 saw the hanging of Henry Lovell William Clark for a sensational pair of domestic murders in the British Raj.

The half-Indian Lieutenant Henry Lovell William Clark of the Indian Subordinate Medical Department struck up a sweltering affair in colonial Agra with the bored memsahib Augusta Fullam.

Their trysts over three-odd years from 1909 would become the scandal of British India — the specifically British part — after Clark’s wife Louisa was sabered to death in her home in November 1912 by a quartet of native assailants* who turned out to have been hired by her faithless husband.

The police inquiry soon uncovered a much deeper passion and depravity.

A trunk full of adulterous correspondence incautiously retained by Fullam documented months of her frustrated attempts to poison off her husband over the course of 1911.

The plan had simply been to infiltrate arsenic doses into Edward Fullam’s food. Arsenic poisoning was so popular precisely because the symptoms were so difficult to isolate from natural causes of death; off in India, it could easily be passed off as heat stroke or cholera.

“I give him half a tonic powder every day in his Sanatogen, lovie darling, because it lays on the top of the white powder quite unsuspiciously,” Augusta cooed to her doctor-lover in one letter.

Despite Augusta’s best efforts, lovie darling, Edward’s constitution proved to be as tenacious of his life as it was unsuspecting of his wife.

For month after harrowing month, his helpmate tried to kill him at dinner and teatime and anywhere else she got the opportunity to administer a packet of the “tonic powders” Dr. Clark supplied. He would often vomit and fall ill — Fullam recorded one occasion in June where her husband puked ten times in a single evening — but it wasn’t until October that Edward finally succumbed. Clark himself topped the arsenic wallop for that fading patient with a lethal dose of gelsemine just to make sure, then put his professional signature to the death certificate.

One spouse down. One to go.

It might have been wise for the lovers to stick with this potentially subtle method of homicide for Louisa Clark. While “murdered by swarthy intruders” is a classic, it can’t be signed off quietly by some random member of the medical profession. Neighbors had figured out the love affair, and when police pursued that line of inquiry, everyone’s alibis fell apart. Not to mention that trunk full of lovey-dovey bloodthirst.

Though Henry Clark hanged for the murder on March 26, 1913, he left his mistress pregnant — and this sufficed to save Augusta Fullam from the gallows. She died in Naini prison in 1914.

* According to this book, three of the four hired assassins were also executed.

Part of the Themed Set: Arsenic.

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