Madeleine Smith was 22 years old and the pretty daughter of a highly-respectable and well-off Glasgow family. Her life was possibly boring and sheltered and when she met Pierre Emile L'Angelier, she might have naively thought he would be able to bring some excitement into her life - in perhaps more ways than just one. Emile was an immigrant from Jersey and as poor as can be. He seemed to have had suicidal feelings, but seeing as he was a rather romantic minded young man, it might all have been part of an intricate act. At any rate, Madeleine and Emile fell in love with each other and wrote each other many passionate letters - it is unsure how Madeleine really thought about him though, but for this moment her feelings seemed pure enough towards him. Even the anger of her father when he realized what was going on could not break her away from her Emile and the relationship continued secretly.
The pretty little naive dream came crashing down when Madeleine announced she was going to marry - not Emile as he had hoped for, but a respectable gentleman by the name of William Minnoch. He had been picked by her own parents and Emile was crushed by the news and demanded she would change her mind and marry him instead. When she refused he threatened her with the worst - he would send all her love letters to her father. It would put complete shame on her and most certainly cause her to be ostrasized from the upper class community if not from her own family.
When Emile died a few weeks later, it must have been a great relief to her. He had been suffering off and on from a strange stomach illness and died in great pain. A week later her love letters were discovered and Madeleine was arrested for the arsenic poisoning of Emile. It was thought that she had put arsenic in his cocoa during the last of their meetings together, as he had mentioned to a mutual friend just weeks before he died that he could not figure out why he was getting so ill after that coffee and chocolate from her. The mutual friend, Miss Perry, understood that the 'her' was in fact Madeleine.
Her trial was a true sensation in Victorian Scotland as her explicit love letters were read in court. The fact that Madeleine had even had a lover ranked slightly higher than murder in shock value, it was simply sensational. Her defence lawyer portrayed her as an innocent, seduced by a blackmailer. Seeing that there was no actual evidence of her meeting Emile in the days before he died, even if there had been proof that she had indeed purchased arsenic for cosmetic purposes (she had however lied to the apothecary about the actual purpose), the jury found her 'Not Proven'. This is a unique judgement in Scotland which means that there is insufficient evidence to find the accused guilty - but leaves the door open for another trial if new evidence emerges.
Madeleine Smith left the court a free woman and later moved to London, married, had two children and then separated from her husband. She emigrated to New York in 1916 (at the age of 80) and married again. She eventually died at the age of 92.