Madelaine Smith

From 1976 to 1989 Madeleine Smith was one of the figures in the Chamber of Horrors section in the Edinburgh Wax Museum on the Royal Mile.

Smith's story was the basis for several plays and the David Lean film Madeleine (1950). Jack House's book Square Mile of Murder (1961), which contains a section on Smith, formed the basis for a BBC television version in 1980. A television play based upon the case, Killer in Close-Up: The Trial Of Madeleine Smith, written by George F. Kerr, was also produced by Sydney television station ABN-2, broadcast on 13 August 1958.

The case was again dramatized in 1952 for Mutual Radio in an episode of The Black Museum titled "The Small White Boxes".

In the early 1930s, MGM starred Joan Crawford, Nils Asther and Robert Montgomery in a film called "Letty Lynton", which was based on a 1931 novel of the same title by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes. This film closely follows Madeleine's story, except that Crawford's character is never charged and, in an example of pre-code Hollywood, gets away with murder. The film is not presently available due to a copyright suit filed shortly after the film's release in 1932.

She died in 1928 and was buried under the name of Lena Wardle Sheehy.

Other novels based on the case include The House in Queen Anne's Square (1920) by William Darling Lyell, Lovers All Untrue (1970) by Norah Lofts, and Alas, for Her That Met Me! (1976) by Mary Ann Ashe (pseudonym of Christianna Brand).

After many years of marriage, she and her husband separated in 1889 and Madeleine moved to New York City. Around 1916, she married a second time to William A. Sheehy and this marriage lasted until his death in 1926.

The case was an inspiration for Wilkie Collins' novel The Law and the Lady (1875), though the only main similar features were the problem of the Scottish "Not Proven" verdict and arsenic poisoning as a means for murder.

On 4 July 1861, she married an artist named George Wardle, William Morris's business manager. They had one son (Thomas, born 1864) and one daughter (Mary, called "Kitten", born 1863). For a time, she became involved with the Fabian Society in London, and sometimes made the coffee at meetings. As she was known by her new married name, not everyone knew who she was, but a few did.

Smith attempted to break her connection with L'Angelier and, in February 1857, asked him to return the letters she had written to him. Instead, L'Angelier threatened to use the letters to expose her and force her to marry him. She was soon observed in a druggist's office, ordering arsenic, which she signed for as M.H. Smith.

Early on the morning of 23 March 1857, L'Angelier died from arsenic poisoning. He is buried in the Ramshorn Cemetery on Ingram Street in Glasgow.

Smith broke the strict Victorian conventions of the time when, as a young woman in early 1855, she began a secret love affair with Pierre Emile L'Angelier, some ten years her senior, an apprentice nurseryman who originally came from the Channel Islands. He worked as a packing clerk in a warehouse at 10 Bothwell Street nearby.

Madeleine Hamilton Smith (29 March 1835 – 12 April 1928) was a 19th-century Glasgow socialite who was the accused in a sensational murder trial in Scotland in 1857.

Smith was the first child (of five) of an upper-middle-class family in Glasgow; her father, James Smith (1808–1863) was a wealthy architect , and her mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of leading neo-classical architect David Hamilton. The family lived at No 7, Blythswood Square, Glasgow, at the crown of the new developments by William Harley on Blythswood Hill, and also had a country property, "Rowaleyn", near Helensburgh.