From the Staffordshire Advertiser, 28 July 1838, and the Morning Post, 21 July 1838:
“The Dublin people and papers are in great excitement about the death of a young man named Goddard Sterne, whose father (called General Sterne) has been several years confined for debt in the Marshalsea, in that city, and which took place in the prison under very mysterious circumstances.
The inquest was held by Sir Nicholas Brady on Monday. It appears that the father of the deceased, who goes by the name of General Sterne, has been for years confined in the Marshalsea, where he lives upon some property, which he would have to give up if he came out under the Insolvent Act. He was, however, often heard to say that the nature of his case was such that his petition would not be entertained by the court, as he was in for the amount of a verdict obtained against him for an affair of a criminal nature. From what we could hear in the prison, it appears that he latterly led a very intemperate life, and that many of the prisoners who were acquainted with him considered him to be at times subject to mental aberration.
His son, who was a fine young man, was in the habit of coming to see him. He had two servants, a woman (with whom he cohabited) named Elizabeth Mullaly, and a boy named James Mooney, who was in the habit of going of messages for him. The son came to see him on Sunday morning, and in some time after he was suspended by a silk handkerchief from the rail of an iron bed in which his father slept. From circumstances of a suspicious character appearing to the coroner and jury on the first day, the inquest was adjourned, in order that time might be afforded to test the contents of the stomach. The examination confirmed the worst suspicions.
By other evidence on the inquest, it appeared that in consequence of his disreputable connection with the woman Mullally, the unfortunate deceased and his father used to have some differences, which occasionally broke out in angry disputes of so loud a nature as to be heard in the rooms of other prisoners. Young Mr Sterne had been an officer in the British Legion, and while in Spain displayed much gallantry. He had received four wounds in his right arm.
Upon the day of the deceased’s death, he was found suspended from the rail of the bed by a silk handkerchief. The bed was separated by a screen from where the father lay; and at the time when the young man was discovered, there was no person in the room except the father and the woman. The former had been sleeping, and, from the evidence, must have previously been drinking. The woman, too, was tipsy.
The old father, in his examination, strongly asserted the innocence of the woman and imputed the crime to the boy Mooney. The jury, however, after deliberating about half an hour, brought in the following verdict:- We find that the deceased came by his death from the deleterious preparation of morphine administered to him, and also from suffocation; and we find that Eliza Mullaly was present when the said poison was administered, and that she aided and assisted in administering the same. The woman was afterwards committed to Newgate upon the coroner’s warrant.
Late on Monday evening a hearse and mourning coach – the latter containing the mother and sister of the ill-fated young man- proceeded to the prison. The remains of the deceased were then deposited in the hearse, and, accompanied by the two relatives, with an officer of the Marshalsea, the lonely funeral proceeded to St Michan’s burial ground, beneath the church of which the family of the Sternes of Westmeath have a vault. The body was interred, it being quite dark at the time, in a grave dug for its reception. Mrs Sterne expressed her determination to have it exhumed at another period and deposited in the last earthly home of a long line of departed ancestors.”
In a dramatic twist, Eliza Mullaly was later acquitted of murder after the doctor who gave evidence at the inquest changed his opinion shortly before her trial and concluded that the deceased had not been poisoned after all.
Readers of long-standing may remember that Goddard’s father ‘General’ Sterne had eloped with the wife of a barrister on the Connaught Circuit called Guthrie back in the 1820s. Guthrie subsequently brought an action against Sterne for criminal conversation, obtaining substantial damages. Inability to pay this debt resulted in the senior Sterne’s detention in the Marshalsea, where he remained until his death in 1862, many years after the burial of his son.
Could the remains of this notorious seducer also repose in the Sterne family vault in St Michan’s?
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