“Be careful,,” the chemist implored, adding in jest. “Don’t poison your sweethearts.”

But that was what Ellen Heath clearly had in mind – to bump off her husband, Robert, with an arsenic-flavoured meat pudding.

They had only been married for about a year when he was jailed for eight months for theft.

By the time he was released, she had gone to live with her mother and he was to follow, remaining there during the day but returning to their home at night.

Eventually he found himself a job but for reasons never explained to the public, she decided he had to go – a fact, it appears, she was happy to tell all and sundry.

A few weeks later, hearing that a friend wanted to purchase oil from a chemist for her hair, Heath asked her to buy the poison.

However, the apothecary would only sell the arsenic if Heath accompanied her to his shop and so she did, telling the unsuspecting chemist their home was infested with rats.

In due course, Heath sprinkled it into her husband’s evening meal but he did not enjoy the taste and spat it out.

Within minutes the poison began to take effect and he progressively became more and more unwell.

A farmer friend lent him a horse and taking the residue of the meal with him, he rode to a doctor at nearby Alton where he was violently sick and collapsed.

The doctor examined the vomit and was shocked to discover its contents and that of the pudding.

He summoned the local constable who went to the home of the victim’s mother-in-law where he found his wife. #

He demanded to know what she was concealing in her pocket but she refused to hand it over, and there followed a long struggle before paper was eventually wrenched from her grasp.

On it were clearly written two words – “poison” and “arsenic”.

Heath stood in the dock at Hampshire Assizes in 1849, blatantly seeking the court’s sympathy by holding a baby in her arms, as the prosecution alleged she had administered the arsenic with the sole intention of murder.

The defendant claimed she had been a victim of circumstances, saying her young nephew had clambered on to a shelf and had accidentally dislodged the powder which fell onto the pudding that her sister had made.

Heath’s husband loyally spoke out in her defence, damning the other woman’s testimony about how the arsenic was acquired as a lie.

However, the jurors could not be swayed and the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Denman, passed the inevitable sentence of death.