Augusta Fullam

Augusta Fairfield Fullam (1875 – 1914) was a British Raj woman implicated in a double murder in Agra in India. Fullam was born in Calcutta in 1875 and died in Allahabad in 1914. She was the wife of Lieutenant Edward McKeon Fullam and lived in Calcutta, Barrackpore, Meerut and finally Agra (India). She came to notice when she was interviewed in connection with Dr Henry Clark whose wife had been hacked to death on 17 November 1912. She and Clark had been lovers since 1909, and some 400 letters Augusta had written, swiftly discovered by the police, provided unarguable evidence of conspiracy to murder their respective spouses. On 11 October 1912, days after the Fullams moved to Agra, Edward Fullam had died, supposedly of heatstroke and “general paralysis of insanity” (tertiary syphilis), but as later post mortem revealed, of arsenic poisoning., The definitive account of Augusta Fullam's life and the double murder of which she and her lover were convicted is Molly Whittington-Egan's Khaki Mischief

Early life and marriage According to the definitive account of her life and crime, Molly Whittington-Egan's Khaki Mischief (1990), Both Maud Clark and Kathleen Fullam were key prosecution witnesses, having witnessed their respective parents' murders. It took the jury only 10 minutes to return with guilty verdicts on all those charged (except Ram Lal, who was found not guilty and discharged). Henry Clark and the other three badmashes were hanged on 26 March 1913. Augusta's sentence was indeed commuted to life imprisonment. She gave birth to Henry Clark's son on 28 July 1913, and died of heatstroke at the age of 38 in Naini Prison, Allahabad, on 28 May 1914. Her son, christened Lovell Henry William Goodwyn, was rejected by both families, brought up in a Bengal orphanage, renamed William Hope and served with distinction in the Merchant Navy, before settling in Australia and raising a family. He died in 1975 without ever knowing who his natural parents were.

Popular culture

The case featured as an episode of the 1970 six-part ITV series Wicked Women with Augusta Fullam played by Vivien Merchant.