She was accused of having poisoned her husband and several children over her lifetime, with locals giving her the nickname Sally Arsenic.
[1] His mother Lydia Taylor claimed that he had fallen ill after being fed rice pudding and apple turnover by Sarah Chesham.
[4] She was then tried for the murder of Solomon Taylor the following day but was once again acquitted, this time at the direction of the judge, on the grounds that it was never proved if the victim had been poisoned.
[1] The public strongly disagreed with the verdict, with The Times calling Chesham "an accepted and reputed murderess"[1] and running sensationalist articles accusing her of offering her services as a poisoner to others for a fee.
During the illness, Sarah Chesham had constantly been by her husband's side and had fed him milk thickened with rice and flour, refusing to let anyone else feed him.
It was instead argued that she had fed him small doses of arsenic throughout his period of illness in order to weaken his system until he was unable to continue fighting off the tuberculosis.
[3] A 2019 episode of the BBC show Murder, Mystery and My Family examined the case and suggested that the victims could have died of natural causes.