You’ve met the suspects, and you’ve got a look into their lives. Now for the answer –or the closest thing to one that a hundred and fifty years has produced.
You’ve studied the case, and you’ve come to your own conclusions. You are in excellent company.
Agatha Christie could not leave this case alone. She referenced it in three of her novels: Ordeal by Innocence, The Clocks, and Elephants Can Remember, in which her characters cite the real Bravo poisoning as the case no one ever solved. Writing in The Sunday Times Magazine, Agatha Christie named Dr. Gully as her suspect, arguing that he was the one person with an overwhelming motive. She thought he was the only one clever enough to manage it and, being so respectable, the last man anyone would suspect. Florence was rich enough to simply leave the marriage, and Mrs. Cox was too timid to actually pull it off. In Christie’s mind, it had to be the doctor.
Then, in 2004, Julian Fellowes, later the creator of Downton Abbey, co-wrote and presented Julian Fellowes Investigates: A Most Mysterious Murder, a five-part docudrama series that featured the Bravo case in one episode. He delivered the most chilling answer of all: that Charles Bravo killed Charles Bravo.
Fellowes’s theory starts with the illness. Florence had been mysteriously, chronically sick almost from the day they married. What if Charles was the cause, quietly dosing her with small amounts of tartar emetic?
As he lay dying, the doctors pressed him again and again on what he’d taken, and every time he said the same thing. He had applied laudanum to his gums. He never wavered. But laudanum doesn’t cause the symptoms he was experiencing, so either he was lying, or he’d swallowed something else without knowing it.
