A chemical killer

A new book outlines the life of a woman who may well have been New Zealand’s most prolific poisoner. What was it that led police to exhume the body of her husband from its watery grave?

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In 1992, builders tearing down a house in Auckland's Devonport came across a skeleton. It turned out that 60 years before, Scottish nurse Elspeth Kerr had run a private nursing home from the property. The local community at the time was shocked when the well-respected nurse was arrested for the attempted murder of her foster daughter, Betty, and rumours flew that she might have killed her husband, Charles, and at least one other patient. In this extract from a new book about Kerr by true-crime author Scott Bainbridge, suspicious detectives decide to exhume the body of Charles Kerr.

Inspector James Cummings was New Zealand's top detective. In 1920, he solved the murder of Ponsonby postmaster Augustus Braithwaite by using fingerprint technology, thus securing the British Empire's first ever capital conviction using fingerprint science and sending Dennis Gunn to the gallows. Several months later, Cummings investigated the murder of farmer Sydney Eyre in Pukekawa, and determined the killer had ridden up on a horse and fired the fatal shot through a window. Cummings noticed one horseshoe had a distinctive characteristic, causing the horse to overstep. All horses in the vicinity were checked, and one with an unusual horseshoe was found. It was owned by a farmhand named Samuel Thorne, who had once worked on the victim's farm. Thorne was convicted and sentenced to hang. Later in 1920, renowned author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle visited New Zealand and, when told of Cummings' feats, proclaimed him the "real Sherlock Holmes".