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Twenty Cents’ Worth of Arsenic

Edward Butts

Tyrell Tilford of Woodstock, Ontario, fell ill on March 21, 1935. He’d long had a chronic heart problem, but this bout of sickness struck with inexplicable suddenness. The thirty-five-year-old garbage-truck driver died on April 1. Dr. Hugh Lindsay filled out the death certificate, in which he stated that the cause of death was myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle), complicated by influenza and catarrhal jaundice (now called hepatitis A). The doctor didn’t think an autopsy was necessary. Tilford was buried in Woodstock’s Hillview Cemetery. At the graveside were his grief-stricken elderly parents, James and Mary; his siblings William, Frank, Tom, Edward, Annie, Florence, and Agnes; and his wife, Elizabeth. Also present was a neighbor named William Percy Blake, who was overheard calling Elizabeth by an endearing name.

Tilford wasn’t in the ground very long before a dark rumor began to creep through Woodstock that Elizabeth had poisoned him. Malicious gossip passed from lips to ears that Mrs. Tilford, her husband’s senior by fifteen years, had lost affection for him because of his lack of ambition. There were stories of her involvement with other men and whispers of life insurance money. Elizabeth had allegedly told other women, in confidence, that she could get rid of Tyrell. Moreover, Tyrell had supposedly told his own family that his wife was poisoning him. Making the tales even more sinister was the innuendo that Elizabeth had done away with two previous husbands.

Three weeks after Tyrell’s funeral, the rumors reached Crown Attorney R. N. Ball. The stories had nothing other than circumstance to substantiate them, and Ball might have dismissed them as idle gossip. But he felt duty bound to look into the matter and contacted the Criminal Investigation Branch of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) in Toronto. Inspector E. D. L. Hammond, one of the OPP’s best detectives, was sent to Woodstock. Only a select few people in the town were aware of his arrival. Hammond’s assignment was kept secret from the general public, especially Tyrell’s widow.

Elizabeth Tilford was born Elizabeth Anne Kaye in Stockton-on-Tees, England, in about 1885. She was only fifteen years old when she married her first husband, Fred Yaxley. Six months after the wedding, Yaxley abandoned her for another woman. Elizabeth then married her cousin, William Walker, even though she hadn’t been legally divorced from her first husband. Sometime after Elizabeth’s second marriage, Fred Yaxley died. During the First World War, Elizabeth was trained as a nursing sister.

William and Elizabeth emigrated to Canada in 1928 and settled in Woodstock, a community of about eleven thousand people situated eighty miles southwest of Toronto. Although Woodstock had a growing industrial sector, its location in the middle of rich, rolling farm and dairy country meant that it was still very much an agricultural town. By the time Elizabeth and William arrived there, she had given birth to nine children, only four of whom survived. The family had high hopes of a good life in their new country, but in 1929, William suddenly went blind and couldn’t work. He died within the year. The doctors blamed a brain tumor.

Elizabeth had always been a devout Christian. In England, she’d often been involved in religious work, and for years had been superintendent of a Sunday school and captain in the Girl Guides (the British equivalent of the Girl Scouts). In Woodstock, she belonged to a church choir. There she met fellow member Tyrell Tilford. He was twenty-nine. She was forty-four and had grown portly in middle age. Nonetheless, in 1930, Tyrell and Elizabeth became husband and wife, although Tyrell’s father James opposed the marriage and did not attend the wedding. The couple moved into a small farmhouse on the outskirts of Woodstock, along with Elizabeth’s youngest children, Isabella and John Walker. The marriage would end with Tyrell’s sudden death five years later.

On the night of April 25, 1935, strange activities in Hillview Cemetery alarmed the residents of the adjacent neighborhood. They saw lantern lights moving among the rows of headstones and then heard the occasional clang of shovels. The mystery wasn’t cleared up until May 11, when the press reported that a police party under the direction of Inspector Hammond had exhumed Tyrell Tilford’s body and taken samples of fluid from the stomach. Analysis in a Toronto laboratory had revealed traces of arsenic.

The deceased was returned to his grave but wouldn’t rest in peace for long. The analysis had been complicated by the presence of embalming fluid. Further testing was required, so the body was exhumed again in mid-May. Meanwhile, a statement that appeared in the Woodstock Sentinel-Review had the town buzzing. James Tilford had told the newspaper, “The boy came to me on the Friday morning before he died, and he said: ‘Dad, I’ve come home to die. I am full of arsenic.’ He asked me to look at his tongue. It was just in rags, all ribbed.”

The second, more thorough examination of the body, carried out by Professor Jocelyn Rogers, the provincial analyst, revealed arsenic in the hair, stomach, liver, heart, kidneys, and lungs—more than enough to kill a man. That was evidence enough for a coroner’s inquest to be convened. It began on June 6, before Provincial Chief Coroner Dr. M. M. Crawford, and lasted two days. Witnesses were questioned, and the press quoted one sensational statement after another.

James and Mary Tilford both testified that Tyrell had come to their house and declared, “They are killing me with arsenic. I’ll never get better. I’ve had too much arsenic given to me.”

The parents swore that Tyrell had accused his wife of poisoning him saying that she’d done it to her first two husbands, and now he would be the third. They said that, when she showed up at the house, Tyrell confronted her. “Lizzie, you know that you are poisoning me with arsenic, and you know I shall never get better, and you can have the other man if you want him.”

Hutcheson Keith, a local pharmacist, testified that on March 20, Elizabeth Tilford phoned his shop and ordered arsenic, saying that she needed it to kill rats. He said he knew her by her English accent. Anybody could purchase arsenic, but records were kept of those who bought it. Victor King, the clerk who made the delivery to the Tilford house, said that Elizabeth’s sixteen-year-old daughter Isabella accepted the packet. She paid twenty cents for it and signed the “poison book.”

Frank Tilford testified that there had never been a problem with rats at his brother’s house. Edward Tilford said that, in Elizabeth’s presence, Tyrell had given him a bottle and asked him to have it analyzed, saying, “I’m being poisoned.”

Edward said he’d told his brother that was an awful statement to make and asked him if he had proof. Tyrell said there were pills in the house that his wife had been giving him. Elizabeth had then sent Edward to get a package of pills from the dressing table in the bedroom, telling him they were the pills that had been left by Tyrell’s doctor.

When Elizabeth was called to give evidence, she would only say, “I have no statement whatever to make concerning the death of my husband; only that he died a natural death.”

Elizabeth’s refusal to answer questions or challenge any of the accusations her late husband’s family had made only served to cast further suspicion upon her. Then a representative from the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company made matters worse for her when he told the coroner’s jury that immediately after Tyrell’s death, she had made a claim for money from his life insurance policy. To her disappointment, she was told that Tyrell had allowed his policy to lapse. She could lay claim only to an equity of CAD $309. The notion that money could have been a motive for murder fit in nicely with the rumor that prior to Tyrell’s death, Elizabeth had complained that the government had discontinued the widow’s allowance she’d been receiving since the death of her second husband, William Walker.

The coroner’s jury came to the decision that Tyrell Tilford’s death had been caused by poison administered by person or persons unknown. Elizabeth had yet to be formally charged, but Inspector Hammond, without mentioning her name, told the press he expected to make an arrest soon. In the meantime, the OPP had William Walker’s body exhumed to be analyzed for arsenic poisoning.

On June 10, Major General V. O. S. Williams, Chief of the OPP, issued a warrant for Elizabeth Tilford’s arrest on a charge of capital murder. It was served at 9:15 p.m. at the Tilford house by Inspector Hammond and a Constable Clark. At home with Elizabeth were Isabella; John, now ten; and her older sons William, twenty-two, and Norman, twenty-six.

Isabella was in tears and wanted to go with her mother, but Elizabeth told her she was only making things harder for herself. “I’m not guilty and have nothing to worry about. I shall be home in a few days when this thing is all over.” She instructed her children to shut the door after she was gone and not let anyone take their pictures.

A crowd had gathered when Elizabeth stepped out of the house between the two officers. Her head covered with a shawl, she said nothing as she was escorted to a police car. Another crowd of people anxious to get a look at the now-notorious three-time widow was waiting at the Oxford County Court House and the jail when Hammond and Rogers arrived with their prisoner.

The next morning, after a brief appearance before a magistrate for a formal reading of the charge, Elizabeth was permitted to speak to the press. “I’m not afraid of anything,” she told a reporter from the Sentinel-Review. “I’m going out of this a free woman… They can say lots of things about a person. Now it’s up to them to prove it… They may keep me here for twelve months, but I’m coming out a free woman.”

A preliminary hearing was held on June 24. Elizabeth was represented by Frank Regan, KC (King’s Counsel), of Toronto, one of the most high-profile criminal lawyers in Ontario. Assisting him was another top attorney, Charles W. Bell, KC, of Hamilton. There was little doubt at the start of the hearing that Elizabeth would be committed to stand trial at the Fall Assizes (criminal trial sessions held periodically in a judicial district), so Regan and Bell began to lay the groundwork for their defense. Testimony given by Isabella had raised an intriguing development. She said that she, not her mother, who was out at the time, had telephoned the drugstore and ordered the arsenic. It was her English accent Keith had heard. Moreover, Isabella said that her stepfather had told her to make the call and to not tell her mother. When Victor King made the delivery, Isabella said, she had paid for it with two dimes her stepfather had given her. Then he had gone into the barn with the arsenic, saying he was going to kill rats.

Chief Constable A. T. Moore of the Woodstock police contradicted Isabella’s statement. He said that when he interviewed her, she claimed she didn’t know who had ordered the arsenic. However, Moore hadn’t written Isabella’s answers down at the time he questioned her and had to quote her from memory, leaving open the possibility that he was not repeating her exact words. Regan thought that it wouldn’t be unusual for a frightened, confused teenage girl to be inconsistent in her answers to questions in such a traumatizing situation.

Regan and Bell had a theory that Tyrell Tilford had not been murdered but had committed suicide. He had poisoned himself, intending to frame his wife, who he believed was unfaithful. They thought it was quite possible that Elizabeth was unaware that arsenic was even in the house. Their task would be to convince a jury.

The trial began on September 24 before Mr. Justice A. C. Kingstone and lasted nine days. Prosecuting for the Crown was Special Attorney Cecil L. Snyder. He intended to portray the defendant as a cold-blooded, calculating woman who had killed for money. Elizabeth had already been convicted in the court of public opinion. When the newspapers reported that no trace of arsenic or any other poison had been found in William Walker’s body, most of the people in Woodstock still held to the belief that Elizabeth had murdered him.

Members of the Tilford family were the Crown’s principal witnesses. They said that Elizabeth had become involved with Bill Blake, a prosperous man who owned two farms. Tyrell’s sister, Annie, testified that her late brother had complained to her just two days before he died that Blake and Elizabeth had been “kicking up a terrible racket” in his own home.

The Tilfords said that Elizabeth wanted a separation from Tyrell and had demanded to be reimbursed for the CAD$1,900 she had put into their house. They claimed it wasn’t enough for her that she was the sole beneficiary of Tyrell’s will. She had threatened to take James Tilford to court and “get every cent he has,” they said.

William Tilford said he’d gone to Tyrell’s house when he first heard his brother was ill and found him in bed. He and Elizabeth were both sitting at the bedside when Tyrell said, “It’s no use, Bill. My wife has been giving me poison.”