Shortly after 7 pm on March 6, 1913, the Bamford family sat down to their evening meal on their family farm at Kilfeera.
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Two daughters remaining unmarried, Amy and Jessie, and their father Thomas Bamford, were sitting at the table. Fifty-two year old Mrs Elizabeth Bamford joined them a few minutes later.
As they ate, they sipped their cups of tea.
Suddenly, Mrs Bamford said: "What is the matter with the tea? It is horrible. It tastes like poison.”
Holding the cup out to her husband, she said, "You taste it.”
Bamford took a teaspoon of it. He agreed.
“It is awful,” he said. "If you think it is poison, then you should take an emetic.”
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Amy, the elder daughter aged 22, got up, took her mother’s cup and threw away its contents.
Mrs Bamford got up from her chair and went to the mantelpiece.
From behind tins, she took down a bottle. "Have any one of you been fingering with this?”
“Is that poison?" Bamford asked.
“Yes,” his wife replied, reseating herself.
“What an awful place to keep it,” Bamford said.
“It is as safe there as in the drawer,” she replied.
“I can feel it burning my stomach,” Mrs Bamford got up.
“I am dying. I am losing my sight.”
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Bamford and Amy gave her an emetic.
Then Bamford went to saddle a horse to fetch a doctor.
In the dark he could not find a horse.
Feeling ill himself, he vomited three times in the paddock.
When he returned, his wife was lying on the back verandah unconscious.
Eventually, Amy hailed a neighbour and together she and the neighbour rode for Benalla and Dr Nicholson.
By the time they returned, Mrs Bamford was dead.
Later it was determined that Mrs Bamford had been poisoned.
Initially, at the inquest, Thomas Bamford gave evidence that relations between he and his wife were friendly.
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Later, Amy and her married sister contradicted this by giving evidence that the couple had been living separate lives in the one house for many years.
Thomas Bamford was recalled and confronted with their evidence. He confirmed its truth. Yes, he was in debt.
He knew nothing of his wife’s business, but he had not borrowed money from her.
She had left her property, not to her husband but to her daughter.
Shortly before her death, Mrs Bamford asked her husband whether he had given her the poison.
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He denied it. Amy blamed her 16-year-old sister Jessie, whom the police thought "an imbecile".
She suggested that Jessie had put the poison in the cup intending to kill mice or rabbits with it.
When taxed with this, Jessie was blunt, "Oh, what a fib. I never.”
Deputy Coroner Walker determined that two teaspoons of strychnine bought to kill foxes had been placed in Mrs Bamford’s cup.
Who put it there was unknown. He returned an open verdict.
Thomas Bamford died in 1915 aged 67. He and Elizabeth are buried together in Benalla cemetery.
- John Barry, Coo-ee
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