The jam roll of death

Watching the mushroom poisoning case in Australia has been fascinating and we thought about all the cases where food and drink has been used to kill.
Poisoning is not always easy to determine and sometimes it’s hard to hard to detect.
Overseas, there have been numerous famous cases, including poisoned curry in Japan, poisoned cakes in Spain, soup in Japan in a nursing home and a serial killer called the Giggling Granny in America who killed 11 of her family members with different foods and drinks.
And in New Zealand poison was most often put into drinks, although we have also written about poisoned chocolates and cake.
But it's not often jam roll is the culprit. Although in this case, it wasn’t murder but terrible carelessness.
Walter Nelson was only 25, when he, his wife Anneata and their baby went to visit her grandmother in Freeman’s Bay in Auckland on January 5, 1893.
Like many good hosts, some baking had been done for the guests, among them was a jam roll made by Laura Webb, Anneata’s sister.
The whole family - without Walter who was out - sat down for afternoon tea about 4pm. Most of them ate a bit of the jam roll and became ill.
However, as they began to recover over the next few hours, no one thought about the jam roll being the cause.
Walter returned later that evening and had his own piece of the jam roll.
Shortly after he complained of feeling sick and decided to go for a walk to get some fresh air and visit a tailor’s shop.
But he was worse when he came back complaining about being ill and his throat burning and he was given various things to make him vomit but by midnight it was too late and Walter died.
The police were called in. The only explanation for why there was only one death was that all the others had thrown up and Walter had not.
The jam roll - along with all the ingredients that were used to make it - were taken into custody for examination.
It was quickly discovered the cream of tartar used in the recipe, which was printed in full in the newspapers of the time, contained almost pure arsenic.
It had been bought from a local grocer James Boyle’s shop in Union Street.
A whopping amount of arsenic was found in the jam roll and worse - a current cake baked at the same time but untouched - had even more.
Boyle had bought the cream of tartar from an importer in one big container and had been supplying it to his customers who often brought in their own tins to put it in.
The inquest asked several questions about the container the cream of tartar was in and how the arsenic could have got into it, but it remained unclear. Arsenic was also sold by the same importer. The theory was that one of the stone jars had previously been used for arsenic.
A verdict of accidental death was returned.
And Walter was buried in Waikumete Cemetery. Six months later Anneata gave birth to a son who she called Walter after his father.​