Charles Bravo
| Charles Bravo | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
Charles Delauney Turner 1845 |
| Died | 21 April 1876 (aged 30–31) Balham, London, England |
Charles Bravo (1845 – 21 April 1876) was a British lawyer who was fatally poisoned with antimony in 1876. The case is still sensational, notorious and unresolved. The case is also known as The Charles Bravo Murder and the Murder at the Priory.
It was an unsolved crime committed within an elite Victorian household at The Priory, a landmark house in Balham, London. Leading doctors attended the bedside, including the royal physician Sir William Gull, and all agreed that it was a case of antimony poisoning. The victim took three days to die, but gave no indication of the source of the poison during that time. No one was ever charged with the crime.
Charles Bravo was born Charles Delauney Turner in 1845. He was the son of Augustus Charles Turner and Mary Turner, but later took the surname Bravo from his stepfather, Joseph Bravo. He became a barrister and by the time of his marriage to Florence Ricardo (née Campbell) he had fathered an illegitimate child.
His wealthy wife Florence had previously been married, in 1864, to Alexander Louis Ricardo, son of John Ricardo MP, but had been separated from him because of his affairs and violent alcoholism. She herself had had an extramarital affair with the much older Dr James Manby Gully, a fashionable society doctor who was also married at the time, and she had fallen out of favour with her family and society. Ricardo died in 1871 and Florence married Charles, a respected up-and-coming barrister, on 7 December 1875, terminating her affair with Gully.
Police inquiries in the case revealed that Charles's behaviour towards Florence was controlling, mean, violent and bullying. Florence was wealthier than Charles and had opted from the start to hold onto her own money, an option only recently provided by the Married Women's Property Act 1870. This led to tensions within the marriage.
The poisoning of Charles Bravo occurred four months into the marriage. Bravo's death was drawn out, lasting from two to three days, and painful. It was particularly notable that he did not offer any explanation of his condition to the attending doctors.
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