A young woman lay face down floating in a river in Hertfordshire in 1699, without any of her outer garments on.
From a wealthy family and with her whole life ahead of her, Sarah Stout’s death confused even the most experienced investigators.
With no known enemies or illnesses it was hard to tell what caused her to drown in those cold murky waters.
‘Conspiracy theories were flying,’ Blessin Adams, a former detective and now-historian, told Metro. ‘Many thought she was pregnant and as she had no husband, she killed herself to spare her and her family the shame.’
But as forensic science emerged from its earliest infancy, Sarah’s death could be – and was – solved, amongst other notable cases.
This is without the modern scientific knowledge detectives are able to employ today. There was no finger printing, no recording equipment, and especially no DNA tests.
Blessin told : ‘All deaths were investigated by coroners , and many of them had no medical or legal training. they were flying by the seat of their pants.’
But her case and subsequent trial marked the first time experts outside of the church were deployed to give their verdict on what happened to the young woman.
Where did the answers lie? Well, in throwing dogs off bridges and submerging babies lungs in water of course.
Drownings
The last man to see her alive, Spencer Cowper, was arrested. The married 29-year-old lawyer was a good friend of her family.
He was alone with Sarah for about five hours, and all eyes were on him as her family accused him of their daughter’s murder.
The coroner ruled her death as a suicide, but her parents, who were both Quakers, could not accept this, and had her body exhumed and paid for a private autopsy.
Two expert witnesses were called to the stand, who insisted a woman who had drowned wouldn’t possible float.
A ship’s doctor claimed all drowned bodies were full of water, meaning they would sink. Another seaman claimed people killed in battle and thrown overboard floated, while those who drowned sank.
To test their theories, some unfortunate dogs were rounded up and drowned to see whether they sank or floated.
Blessin said; ‘It is cringe to read about, but this was a form of forensic science they were just trying to prove or disprove.’
Despite this hard-and-fast science, Spencer took to the stand and was able to convince a judge love lorn Sarah killed herself.
He insisted she was suffering from a severe depression brought on by an obsession of him, which the jury believed.
Infanticide
When babies died, the mothers were automatically assumed to have killed, even if they have miscarried.
Unmarried women were especially scrutinised for their role in their baby’s death, with many automatically expecting they murdered them to prevent ridicule and ruin.
The case if Elizabeth Balleans was one such example. As she aged out of childhood, she found a job in domestic service to Samuel Samlin.
Blessin said: ‘This is how I fell into my area of research of the early modern period. I was following morbid curiosity, when I came across the case of Elizabeth.
‘It was so nice being able to bring her story to life when it had been buried away for so many years.’
As an isolated young woman living away from home for the first time, Samlin was able to take ‘carnal knowledge of her body’ and within three months Elizabeth was pregnant.
As an unmarried woman, Elizabeth was set to be despised, labelled as a harlot and was cast out by her employer and abuser.
Thankfully her mother and sister took her in and trio were able to hide the pregnancy, until Elizabeth delivered a stillborn baby boy.
As forensic science was an emerging discipline new experiments such as ‘the lung floatation test’, came into play.
Blessin said: ‘The idea was simple. The lungs of an infant that had died before birth would be dark and heavy. But the lungs of a baby who died after birth would be lighter and float in water.’
The lungs of Elizabeth’s baby boy sank, and although this test was a greatly flawed experiment, it spared the young woman from the hangman’s noose.
Suicide
Anyone who expected of having taken their own lives were – from the start – immediately treated with contempt.
Blessin said: ‘It was one of the worst crimes you could commit. The legal system would insist upon your court being desecrated, even though it wasn’t written in statute.’
This includes corpses being stripped of their clothes, tied to a back of a horse and dragged through the streets for everyone to see.
They were then buried in an unofficial grave, with a spear piercing through the ground to let everyone know a person who died by suicide was laid there.
Yet investigators were able to quite easily differentiate between suicide by hanging, and murders to make look like so.
One such case included Richard Hunne, who was arrested by church authorities in 1514 for heresy after he refused to hang back his dead infant baby’s christening robe.
He was found hanging in his cell from a girdle of silk. But despite nearly all non-judicial hangings being suicides, the coroner smelt a rat.
‘Public hangings were a part of life back then, and they were closer to that kind of death compared to modern investigators,’ Blessin said.
‘He was able to take one look at the corpse and see straight away there was evidence it was staged.’
The coroner’s report said Richard’s skin was ‘fair’, which is unusual for a victim of hanging who usually turned blue and rashy in the process.
His hair was also neatly combed and a hat was even placed carefully on his head, making him unusually neat and tidy.
After an investigation the coroner and the jury ruled Richard had been murdered by church officials while in a torture cell. But due to the influence of the clergy and King Henry VIII, no one was found guilty of the murder.
Sexual assaults
Solving and punishing sexual assaults was something which was not developed, and it was ‘almost impossible to prosecute rape’.
One such example is Mary Hobry a French midwife living in London, who was viciously assaulted by her husband Denis, to the point she almost died in 1687.
Denis was an alcoholic who squandered their money and frequently beat her up. After a particuarly bad incident where he sexually assaulted her, Mary knew she had to take action.
She picked up an axe and murdered him before chopping up his body parts and distributing them around the village.
But the brutal abuse she had suffered for years at home with her husband was not mentioned in her trial.
Blessin said: ‘There was no mention in records about her trying to save her own life, she was framed as a monster.
‘Women at the time were expected to endure the horrible life their husband may have given them, and of course it wasn’t even a crime to rape your wife back then.’
She was burnt at the stake on March 2, 1688.
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