Daisy de Melker

Daisy de Melker was born Daisy Hancorn-Smith in Seven Fountains in what was then the Cape Colony. She was one of eleven children. When she was twelve, Daisy went to Bulawayo, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to live with her father and two of her brothers. Three years later, she became a boarder at the Good Hope Seminary School in Cape Town. She returned to Rhodesia in 1903, but soon moved to the Colony of Natal and enrolled at the Berea Nursing Home in Durban.^{[citation needed]}

On one of her holidays in Rhodesia, Daisy fell in love with a young man named Bert Fuller, a civil servant in the Native Affairs Department at Broken Hill. They planned to marry in October 1907. However, Fuller contracted blackwater fever and died, with Daisy at his bedside, on the very day they had planned to marry. Fuller left a will bequeathing £100 to his fiancée.^{[citation needed]}

In March 1909, about eighteen months after Fuller's death, Daisy married William Alfred Cowle, a plumber in Johannesburg. She was 22 and he was 36. The couple had five children, four of whom died. The first two were twins who died in infancy; their third child died of an abscess on the liver; and the fourth suffered convulsions and bowel trouble and died at fifteen months old. Their last, and only surviving child, Rhodes Cecil, was born in June 1911.^{[citation needed]}

First purported murder: William Cowle (first husband)

Early on the morning of 11 January 1923, William Cowle became ill soon after taking

On 21 January 1931, Daisy married for the third time. Her husband was a widower, Sydney Clarence de Melker; like her two previous husbands, he was a plumber.^[citation needed]

Late in February 1932, Daisy had travelled from

Daisy's motives for killing her son Rhodes remain unclear. In the case of her first two husbands, the motive (if indeed she killed them) seemed to be financial gain. Rhodes seems to have been under the impression that he would come into an inheritance at age 21. One theory is that he was demanding more than his mother could give him and was becoming a burden to her. The most obvious answer is that he had become a disappointment to Daisy; she had pampered him all his life, but he rarely showed her any consideration in return.^[citation needed]

Arrest, trial and execution

By this time, Daisy's former brother-in-law, William Sproat, raised his suspicions concerning his brother Robert's death to the authorities. On 15 April 1932, the police obtained a court order permitting them to

One week later, De Melker was arrested and charged with the murders of all three men. Public interest in the case grew, and newspapers gave the story a great deal of coverage. The Turffontein chemist, Mr. Abraham Spilkin, from whom she had bought the arsenic that killed her son, contacted police after he recognized de Melker from a newspaper photograph as being "Mrs D.L. Sproat", who had signed the poisons register.^[citation needed]

The De Melker trial lasted thirty days. Sixty witnesses were called for

• Rhodes Cowle had died of arsenic poisoning
• The coffee flask held traces of arsenic
• The accused had put the arsenic into the flask
• The defence of suicide was untenable

When the judge finally turned to pass sentence on De Melker, her face went pale but she still proclaimed her innocence. De Melker was condemned to death by hanging. The sentence was carried out on the morning of 30 December 1932 at Pretoria Central Prison.^{[citation needed]}

Daisy de Melker in popular culture

• In 1934,
  Sarah Gertrude Millin wrote the novel "Three Men Died," based on the de Melker case.^[6]
• In 1993, a television mini-series was made about Daisy de Melker, with Susan Coetzer in the title role.[7]

See also

• List of serial killers in South Africa

References