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Revenge of the chocolate cream poisoner: Broadmoor archives go online, revealing the story of its most crazed inmate
She was a scheming, image-obsessed, murdering minx who in her younger days laced sweets with strychnine to see off the wife of the married man she desired.
Now, though, she appeared perfectly harmless as, in her dotage, she preened herself for her last attempt to entrap a man.
'Are my eyebrows all right?' the temptress asked a fellow inmate at Broadmoor, the hospital for the criminally insane, as she prepared for a Christmas dance at the institution in 1906. 'I was a Venus before,' she declared, the years of her incarceration seemingly forgotten, 'and I shall be a Venus again!'
The male doctors and staff could expect her full-on, sexually-charged attention, even if, in her late 70s, Christiana Edmunds's man-mesmerising days were long over. Mad, bad and dangerous to know, she was one of the most notorious inmates of Broadmoor in Victorian times, her name a byword for something that hidebound era found impossible to comprehend or forgive — a woman's unbridled lust.
Sex pest, stalker, compulsive liar, manipulator, trouble-maker, murderess — there is something uncannily modern about her case, though the crimes for which she was locked up were committed almost a century and a half ago. Her story has been resurrected by a local archivist who was given unprecedented access to 19th-century patient records at the 150-year-old secure unit tucked away in a Berkshire forest. It is aired in what has become this winter's surprise internet hit.
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