In 1912, the British Raj in India was shaken by a murder case that exposed a secret romance, two poisoning plots, and a contract killing arranged by a respected doctor and the wife of a civil servant. The case ended with multiple death sentences, but one of the convicted conspirators escaped the gallows—at least temporarily. Augusta Fairfield Fulham was born in Kolkata in 1875, the daughter of a Bengal River pilot. In 1896, she married Edward McCuan Fulham, an official in the Indian Civil Service’s military accounts department.
The couple settled near Kolkata and had three children before moving to Meerut in 1908. Shortly after arriving in Meerut, Augusta met Dr. Henry Clark at a military ball. Clark, a married medical officer with three children, was described as handsome and self-assured, though his reputation was already questionable.
Despite the rigid social hierarchy of the Raj, which placed Clark’s mixed European and South Asian heritage below Augusta’s social standing, the two began a discreet affair that soon became the subject of local gossip. Augusta’s husband appeared oblivious, and the affair continued even after she gave birth to another child, Myrtle, in 1910. Divorce was rare and heavily biased against women, leaving Augusta little room to leave her marriage without ruining her social standing. Clark, meanwhile, was transferred to Delhi and later to Agra, partly due to suspicions about the relationship.
Despite the distance, the couple exchanged letters detailing their love and their plans to be together—plans that increasingly involved eliminating their respective spouses. In early 1911, Augusta became pregnant by Clark. He gave her drugs that induced a miscarriage. Around the same time, Clark attempted to poison his wife, Louisa, by mixing arsenic into her cocaine, hoping the combination would make the cause of death difficult to determine.
The attempts failed. The couple then devised a coordinated plan. Augusta began slipping arsenic into her husband’s food and drink. Edward grew ill and vomited repeatedly but survived.
In October 1911, he was hospitalized and later discharged, moving with Augusta and their daughter to Agra—the same city where Clark was stationed. Three days after their arrival, Clark visited Edward and injected him with a substance, telling him it would help him recover. Edward McCuan Fulham died soon after. His death certificate listed heat stroke as the cause of death.
Clark’s efforts to dispose of his own wife also continued. He first tried to bribe the family cook to poison Louisa’s food, but the cook instead revealed the plot to Louisa, who had the powder analyzed. It was arsenic. After hiring a new cook, Clark asked him to find local criminals willing to break into the house and kill his wife.
On the night of November 17, 1912, Clark went for a bicycle ride while four men entered his bungalow and murdered Louisa Clark in front of her teenage daughter, Mabel. The men then staged the scene to look like a botched robbery. Police were immediately suspicious of both Clark and Augusta. A search of Augusta’s home uncovered a lockbox containing more than 400 letters from Clark.
The letters detailed their affair and their detailed plans to murder their spouses. A search of Clark’s property revealed letters from Augusta as well. Investigators later exhumed Edward Fulham’s body and found arsenic in his remains. Augusta and Clark were arrested, along with the four men accused of carrying out Louisa’s murder.
The trial began on February 26, 1913, in Allahabad and became a sensation across India. Both daughters—Mabel and Augusta’s daughter Kathleen—testified about the crime. Newspapers in India and Britain covered the proceedings extensively. The jury deliberated for only ten minutes before finding Augusta, Clark, and three of the four men guilty of murdering Louisa.
All four were sentenced to death. The fourth man was acquitted. Clark and the three other men were hanged on March 26, 1913. Augusta, however, was not executed because she was pregnant with Clark’s child.
She gave birth to a son on July 18, 1913, and her sentence was commuted to life in prison. Just over a year later, on May 28, 1914, Augusta Fairfield Fulham died. The official cause of death was heat stroke—the same diagnosis recorded on her husband’s death certificate. Her son was rejected by both families and raised in an orphanage in Bengal.
He was renamed William Hope, served in the Navy, and later moved to Australia, where he raised his own family. He died in 1975 without ever learning the identity of his birth parents.