THIS WEEK IN HISTORY: 1905 MOM AND DAUGHTER IN DOCK OVER POISONED PROSPECTOR
In their mugshots, mother and daughter wear black mourning dresses, their eyes downcast.
Arrested on Dec. 22, 1905, Esther Jones and Theresa Jackson were charged with perjury in a case that captivated Vancouver.
Six weeks earlier, Jackson’s husband Thomas died when someone spiked his favourite beverage — Epsom salts and beer — with the poison strychnine.
Fresh from a trip to northern B.C., the prospector’s painful death behind the locked doors of his home at 1284 Melville St. presented police with a whodunnit that could have been ripped from the pages of an Agatha Christie novel 20 years later.
Apart from Thomas, there were four people inside the house that night: Theresa Jackson, her American mother, Jones, and two boarders, including Jones’ nephew, Harry Fisher, and another man, Ernest Exall.
Thomas’ death — proved to be the result of strychnine after the coroner fed pieces of the prospector’s stomach to two dogs and watched them die in a manner consistent with poisoning — was only the beginning of the sordid tale told in the pages of The Vancouver Daily World over the next few months.
As police struggled to determine who was responsible without the benefit of fingerprint analysis, the newspaper received a letter from someone claiming the boarder Fisher was not Jones’ nephew, but in fact her son.
A month after the poisoning, with police and reporters questioning his parentage, Fisher “slipped away on the electric car to New Westminster where he caught the Great Northern train for the south,” reported the World. He managed to avoid extradition and disappeared.
In Vancouver, Jackson and Jones were arrested and charged with perjury for lying about Fisher’s identity at a coroner’s inquest. As The World revealed, Fisher had changed his name from Fred Jones to hide a conviction for forgery that saw him serve three years in the B.C. Penitentiary. The women were also somewhat notorious, with Jackson previously charged with stealing a screen door and Jones acquitted of embezzling money in Victoria.
In early 1906, the women’s trial led to a steady stream of headlines.
At one of their first appearances, Jackson looked down, her attitude “being that of one sunk in sombre melancholy,” as her fingers beat a ceaseless tattoo on the edge of the prisoners’ dock. Her mother, clad in a “handsome sealskin jacket,” preserved an appearance of outward calm.
Three weeks after their arrest, the women’s defence lawyer Joseph Martin told the judge he was ready for trial, while the prosecution asked for another two weeks to prepare.
This caused concern that the case was “dawdling along.”
“Without friends,” and unable to get bail, the women complained about conditions in the female prison ward where they were being kept. Martin told reporters “the law does not contemplate freezing prisoners to death, even if they are accused of perjury,” and they found sympathy with the police chief who presumably turned up the heat.
In the end, Jones was sentenced to 12 months in jail, while Jackson received nine months. Jones cursed the court as she was led away. Jackson, sobbing, tried to calm her mother.
Almost as if he were forgotten in the drama, Thomas Jackson’s murder remained unsolved.