Murder of Elizabeth Chantrelle

Eugène Marie Chantrelle murdered his wife and former pupil Elizabeth Chantrelle (née Dyer) on 2 January 1878, and was convicted for his crimes and hanged at Calton Prison in Edinburgh, Scotland. The trial is claimed to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson to write the story Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in which the socially respectable character Henry Jekyll has a violent and monstrous alter-ego named Edward Hyde. Stevenson met Eugène Chantrelle, the basis for Jekyll/Hyde, at the home of Victor Richon (Stevenson's old French master).^[1]

Eugène Chantrelle was born in 1834 in Nantes,^[2] and became a teacher of French at the private Newington Academy in Edinburgh. He began a relationship with a pupil, Elizabeth Cullen Dyer, who was born on 18 July 1851, and was 15 years old at the time. They married on 11 August 1868 when she was aged 17, and moved in together at 81a George Street. Elizabeth gave birth to their first child two months after they were married.

From the start, the marriage was not a happy one. His trial heard that, in addition to physical violence, he regularly threatened to poison her.^[2] On 18 August 1877, he took out a £1,000 life insurance policy against her accidental death. She was found unconscious on the morning of 2 January 1878 and later died in hospital. Subsequently, traces of opium were found in vomit on her nightgown and so the death was suspected to be criminal in nature.^[1]

He was arrested after her funeral at Grange Cemetery^[3] on 5 January 1878.

He pleaded not guilty to her murder; his trial lasted four days, and he was convicted by a jury within an hour and ten minutes.^[2]

He was hanged in the grounds of Calton Prison on 31 May 1878, and his body was buried there in an unmarked grave.

In 1906, the trial was included in a series of articles on Scottish trials published by The Spectator magazine.^[4]

• A. Duncan Smith (ed.), Trial of Eugene Marie Chantrelle (William Hodge & Co., 1928) 2nd ed., Notable British Trials series