107:. The press and general public were heavily in favour of her execution despite infanticide usually being viewed as less repellent than standard murder and thus less deserving of capital punishment. Factors that were atypical (and thus weighed against her) included the premeditated nature of the act and its apparent brutality – poisoning was considered much more cruel than the more common methods of drowning or smothering. As an older married woman, she was also viewed with less sympathy than younger women who gave birth out of wedlock and killed their babies to avoid social stigma.
100:. Eighteen witnesses were called, many of whom testified about her attempts to buy poison and false statements she had made about her son's health. The jury took 30 minutes to find her guilty but also issued a recommendation of mercy; the judge ignored this and sentenced her to death. A week after the trial, Smith made a confession to the prison chaplain in which she admitted using rat poison to kill seven of her other children. Of her eleven children, only the first-born survived to adulthood – two died of natural causes, and the other eight were killed.
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sect. In May 1831, she married an agricultural labourer, Philip Smith, who had a reputation as a drunkard. Their first child, Jane, was born the following year. Ten others followed, none of whom lived more than a few months. In 1846, following her mother's death, Smith inherited £100 (equivalent to $
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Smith's eleventh child, Richard, was born on 16 May 1849. He was initially healthy, but was taken ill on 7 June and died on the morning of 12 June. The local registrar, George
Shorland, initially recorded the cause of death as unknown but was persuaded by local rumours to order an inquest. Richard's
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body was exhumed on 22 June and autopsied on 24 June; traces of arsenic were discovered in his stomach. Smith's neighbours claimed that she had made a series of attempts to purchase poison both before and after the birth, culminating in a purchase of "
71:. Her husband squandered the inheritance, forcing her to find seasonal work as a crop-picker and vegetable grower; consequently, the family lived in "a visible state of poverty and ill health".
84:" on the morning of 7 June. Inquests into the deaths of two more of her children (Sarah and Edward) were conducted on 18 July, and both their bodies were also found to contain arsenic.
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Smith was publicly hanged in
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of her own child. She was convicted of killing her infant son
Richard, and was publicly
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126:"Religion, Community and the Infanticidal Mother: Evidence from 1840s Rural Wiltshire"
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46:. After her trial she confessed to having poisoned seven of her other children.
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17 May 1807 – 23 August 1849) was the last
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Richard's death on 9 August 1849, at the
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259:19th-century executions by England and Wales
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124:Watson, Katherine D. (November 2008).
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299:Child murder in the United Kingdom
249:1849 murders in the United Kingdom
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309:Executed suspected serial killers
54:Smith was born in the village of
279:Executed people from Wiltshire
254:19th-century English criminals
130:Family & Community History
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269:English murderers of children
284:Female murderers of children
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264:British female murderers
142:10.1179/175138108X355148
274:Executed English women
222:Watson (2008), p. 125.
213:Watson (2008), p. 124.
201:Watson (2008), p. 123.
189:Watson (2008), p. 122.
177:Watson (2008), p. 121.
165:Watson (2008), p. 120.
289:Filicides in England
88:Trial and execution
64:Particular Baptist
56:Bratton, Wiltshire
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294:Infanticide
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233:Categories
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111:References
50:Early life
304:Poisoners
150:143927181
75:Discovery
44:Wiltshire
69:Westbury
98:Devizes
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36:hanged
146:S2CID
24:Prior
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