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Beatrice Pace (1892-1973), was a farmer’s wife who was tried and acquitted for murdering her husband, Harry Pace, with arsenic in 1928. Her trial attracted considerable press coverage, making her a “celebrity”.

Death of Harry Pace

Beatrice Pace lived with her husband, Harry Pace, and their five children in an isolated farmhouse, on the fringe of the Forest of Dean. Two years before his death, Harry began to suffer gastric problems that the local doctor believed were due to the arsenic in the sheep dip that he regularly used seeping through the pores of his skin. He died on 10 January 1928. His relatives refused to believe he had died of natural causes and contacted the police. Elton Pace alleged that Beatrice “was always saying she wished my brother dead” and that “she wished to be rid of the mangy old bugger”.

Investigation and inquest

A coroner’s inquest concluded that the deceased had met his death by a large dose of arsenic administered by his widow. The inquest verdict meant that Beatrice would be tried for murder at the assizes, although evidence would first be presented at a magistrates’ court (see also police court). Between her arrest and trial Beatrice was jailed on remand. She was moved from Cardiff to Birmingham Prison after her magistrates’ hearing on 5 June, where she was kept in the prison’s hospital. Beatrice wrote a number of letters from prison, and extracts of these letters were reported in newspapers including the World’s Pictorial News. During the investigation and inquest the press sympathetically reported the suffering of the ‘tragic widow’, focusing on her separation from her children, her anxieties and fears. A headline in the Sunday Express called the murder charge ‘the climax of the long series of ordeals endured by the tragic widow since the death of her husband more than five months ago’.

Trial

The trial began on 2 July 1928 at Shire Hall, Gloucester. During the trial, sensational front-page press coverage depicted Beatrice as a victim, a devoted wife and mother who had endured a violent marriage. Her husband, a lustful man who “never gave me any peace”, had regularly beaten her: “Many times he threatened to murder me and the family and to commit suicide.” Yet she claimed to have loved him. “Harry was my man, and I had to stick to him.”

Many female readers identified with her predicament during her trial, with hundreds sending letters of support. Criticism was voiced in the press, too, about the heavy-handed conduct of the coroners and police, and the plight of poor defendants. And at the end of the trial, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. While it is difficult to judge the impact of popular support upon the verdict in her case, it clearly encouraged politicians to defend and assist her, motivated people from all walks of life to support her financially, and allowed her to sell her story for a substantial sum.

Release

After her acquittal, Beatrice Pace sold her memoirs to the Sunday Express for more than £3,000 (worth about £500,000 today). In weekly instalments readers of the newspaper were provided with details of her childhood and abusive marriage, her experiences at the trial and the new life she was seeking to build. With the money from her memoirs, she built a comfortable new life for herself and her children, bobbed her hair, wore bright fabrics - and went to the cinema for the first time. She never remarried, dying in obscurity in 1973.