Sign up for our Torbay newsletter and you'll never miss a big story again Keep me updated Thank you for subscribing See our privacy notice Invalid Email

On the surface, Herbert Rowse Armstrong was a successful, respectable and hard-working man.

A solicitor by trade and a successful officer in the Territorial Army, he owned a large house, ran a reputable legal practice and enjoyed a seemingly steady home life with his wife and three children.

Which is why his arrest in December 1921 for the murder of his wife and attempted murder of a rival solicitor caused a sensation.

He was accused of using poison – arsenic to be precise - in his crimes in the most creative ways ranging from drinks, to chocolates and even the clotted cream on top of a scone.

He protested his innocence at a trial which generated huge public interest. Could this pillar of the local community really be a murderer?

Six months later, he was hanged. He remains the only solicitor in the UK to have ever been hanged for murder.

Who was he?

Herbert Rowse Armstrong was born in Plymouth in 1869.

The family then moved to Liverpool, before Armstrong left to study law at St Catherine’s College at Cambridge University.

He qualified in 1895, before gaining an MA from St Catherine’s and then moving to a law firm in Newton Abbot.

It is thought to be here that he met Katherine Mary Friend from West Teignmouth.

Said to be a domineering, loud and unpleasant lady, they were nevertheless married in 1906, before having two girls and a boy.

It was interestingly also around this time that Armstrong was approached by a lady named Mary Lee – mother of South Devon murderer John ‘Babbacombe’ Lee, who famously survived three attempts at hanging before being released.

Armstrong even wrote to the local MP in an attempt to have him freed, but to no avail.

It was also in Newton Abbot that he started his successful foray into the Territorial Army. He and his men formed part of the guard of honour when King Edward VII laid the foundation stone of the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth.

Despite forging a reputation in the town as a smartly-dressed, capable and popular solicitor, Armstrong then moved to Hay-on-Wye in Breconshire.

His reputation continued to flourish. He bought a large home named Mayfield, and then became the owner of one of the town’s few legal practices when the owners, Mr and Mrs Cheese, both unexpectedly died within a day of each other.

But things were not as rosy below the surface.

His marriage to Katherine was an unhappy one as she dominated her diminutive husband, who was only just over 5ft in height and weighed a little more than seven stone.

Not only did she not allow him to drink unless he was ill, but he was only allowed to smoke in one room in the house.

Furthermore, she would continually undermine him, even in public. Once she told him: “I think you may have one glass of port Herbert – it will do your cold good.”

On another occasion he had to cut short a tennis match at his club after she arrived and told him to come home as it ‘was his bath night’.

World War One

With the outbreak of war, things changed.

Although he did not go overseas to fight, Armstrong was promoted to major and travelled the country extensively.

It appears this liberated the 45-year-old considerably, as he pursued a number of affairs and was regularly seen courting girls much younger than himself when on assignment in other parts of the country.

The war ended though in 1918, and when he returned to normal civilian life in 1919 he struggled to adapt.

His law firm started to crumble as he became involved in a long and costly battle over a property sale with the only other solicitor in the town – a Mr Oswald Martin.

Poison

It was around then he also dined with a lady he had first met in 1915. Within months, a new will for his wife had been drawn up, while Armstrong started taking a sudden interest in gardening.

Annoyed by the presence of some errant dandelions growing in one corner, he ordered some arsenic to deal with them – as it happened, from a chemist who happened to be the father-in-law of business rival Martin.

He then bizarrely injected the poison into each plant with a syringe.

By August 1920, his wife Katherine started to fall ill, complaining of vomiting, heart murmurs and partial paralysis of her hands and feet, as well as visions and hallucinations.

A known hypochondriac, she was eventually certified insane before being sent to an expensive asylum near Gloucester.

She made a swift recovery, and within six months was back home, only for her condition to rapidly deteriorate once again.

Within a month she was dead, her cause of death given as gastritis - inflammation of the stomach – aggravated by heart disease and a kidney condition known as nephritis.

Her final words were: "I'm not going to die am I? I have so much to live for - my husband and my children."

In contrast, “K died,” was Armstrong’s pithy entry in his diary that day.

Only four people attended the funeral, but what was immediately apparent was Armstrong’s cheery demeanor – he reportedly chatted vigorously about fishing rights for much of it.

He then proceeded to hold a number of dinner parties at his house, and appeared to be enjoying his new-found freedom.

He also started pestering his old rival Martin, bizarrely inviting him at least 20 times for afternoon tea.

Martin was baffled at the turn of invents but, having exhausted his excuses, he eventually agreed.

At Armstrong’s trial, he later described his host handing him a scone with cream on it, exclaiming ‘excuse fingers’ as he did so.

Martin was violently sick after returning home, and it was then he remembered another event. Some months earlier, his practice had received a box of chocolates in the post. When Martin’s sister-in-law ate one at dinner, she was also ill.

Upon inspection, a tiny syringe-size hole could be found in each individual chocolate, which were found to have high levels of arsenic in them after being sent for analysis.

Martin informed the police, and Armstrong was monitored for several months – during which he again pestered Martin for afternoon tea – before being arrested.

Not only was he found with arsenic in his pocket at the time of his arrest, but the body of his wife was exhumed and was found to be riddled with poison.

Trial

Despite a seemingly overwhelming amount of evidence against him, many people backed Armstrong. Surely this upstanding solicitor could not be behind such a dastardly act?

But the evidence against him was overwhelming. His wife's first will had left her money to their three children and housekeeper, but her 'latest' will was written in his handwriting with a clearly falsified signature.

News of his affairs was also revealed in court. Awkwardly, he had even contracted a sexually-transmitted disease from a prostitute while she had been in the asylum.

He had also proposed to his mistress within three months of his wife's death.

Armstrong's defence was that his wife had killed herself by consuming - either deliberately or accidentally - the arsenic he used for gardening purposes, and he stood up well in court. Bizarrely, another solicitor in the same area named Harold Greenwood had walked free a year earlier after a similar trial.

But - despite most people expecting an acquittal - the jury did not believe him and he was found guilty.

There was outrage - especially in Newton Abbot where his stock remained high.

But the guilty verdict saw others raise questions about other deaths in the area. Mr and Mrs Cheese - the former owners of Armstrong's legal practice - had unexpectedly died within a day of each other, while an estate agent named Willi James David died a day after lunch with him having tried to obtain money he was owed.

Execution

Armstrong was sentenced to death.

While awaiting his execution, he was offered £5,000 to go towards his children's education by author Edgar Wallace is he admitted his crimes.

He refused, saying: "I am innocent of the crime for which I have been condemned to die."

He was hanged at Gloucester Prison on May 31, 1922.

According to executioner John Ellis, he called out "Kitty, I'm coming to you!"

Was he framed?

There are many who still believe in his innocence. One theory put forward was that he was framed for the crime by business rival Martin, who produced a large quantity of the evidence supplied against him in court..

Martin himself never recovered from the poisoning, suffering from depression and dying just two years later in East Anglia.

In a bizarre modern-day postscript, a solicitor by the name of Martin Beales bought Mayfield - the family home of the Armstrongs - and also happened to be working at the very same desk in the same solicitors' office.

It was there he heard about the Armstrong case, before meeting his now-elderly daughter, Margaret. She had known nothing of her parents' demise, and she only learned of it when she found a waxwork model of her father in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussauds during a school trip.

Beales went on to write an award-winning book named Dead Not Buried, which sought to exonerate Armstrong and claim he had been framed and the subject of jealousy, hearsay and a miscarriage of justice.

The true version of events may never be known, but what is certain is that Herbert Rowse Armstrong retains the dubious distinction of being the only solicitor in the UK to be hanged for murder.