Daisy de Melker

A nurse, three marriages and a string of deaths

Daisy Louisa de Melker was born Daisy Smith near Grahamstown in the Eastern Cape on 1 June 1886. She trained as a nurse and later settled on the Witwatersrand, where she married three times. All three of her husbands were plumbers, and her life moved between Rhodesia, the coastal cities and finally Johannesburg.

Her first husband, William Alfred Cowle, married her in Johannesburg in 1909. Of the five children born to the couple, only one son, Rhodes Cecil Cowle, survived early childhood. William Cowle died on 1 January 1923, and his widow inherited a sum of money under his will. She then married Robert Sproat, who died in 1927; again she was the beneficiary, receiving several thousand pounds as well as pension money. Sources give slightly different months for Sproat's death. In January 1931 she married Sidney Clarence de Melker, a former Springbok rugby player, in Germiston.

The death of Rhodes Cowle

The case that would bring her to the gallows centred on her only surviving child. In early March 1932 Rhodes Cowle, then 20 years old, fell ill at work after drinking coffee his mother had prepared for him. He died at home a few days later, on 5 March. A small insurance payout followed.

Accounts of the motive differ and none was ever firmly established. Reporting on the trial describes tension between mother and son: he is said to have pressed her for money, including for a car, and to have expected a substantial sum when he turned 21. These were the prosecution's theories rather than proven facts.

A brother-in-law raises the alarm

The investigation began outside the police. William Sproat, the brother of Daisy's second husband, read the notice of Rhodes's death in a Johannesburg newspaper and took his suspicions to the authorities. In April 1932 a court ordered the exhumation of the three men: William Cowle, Robert Sproat and Rhodes Cowle.

Laboratory analysis found arsenic in the young man's remains. A further piece of evidence came from a pharmacist in the suburb of Turffontein, Abraham Spilkin, who recognised her photograph in the press. In February of that year a woman signing as Mrs D. L. Sproat had bought arsenic from him and recorded the purchase in the poisons register, saying it was needed for a sick cat. That register entry became one of the most important exhibits in the case.

The trial in Johannesburg

The trial opened on 17 October 1932 in Johannesburg before Judge Leopold Greenberg, who sat with two assessors. Daisy de Melker chose to be tried by a judge rather than a jury. She faced three counts of murder: the deaths of her two earlier husbands, which the prosecution attributed to strychnine, and the death of her son by arsenic. She pleaded not guilty. Her defence was led by Harry Morris, and the proceedings drew large crowds and intense press coverage over several weeks.

On 25 November 1932 the court delivered its verdict. Judge Greenberg found that the state had not proved beyond reasonable doubt that Cowle and Sproat had been poisoned, and she was acquitted on both of those counts; in law she is innocent of their deaths. She was convicted of murdering Rhodes Cowle and sentenced to death. The judge noted that hanging was the only sentence open to him.

Execution and unresolved questions

Daisy de Melker was hanged at Pretoria Central Prison on 30 December 1932, aged 46. Her third husband, Sidney de Melker, is reported to have maintained her innocence for the rest of his life.

Speculation about other deaths has persisted for decades. Her defence attorney later wrote that she had been suspected in several further poisonings, and writers have pointed to the early deaths of her other children and of a former fiancé. None of these was ever the subject of a charge, and they remain allegations and theories rather than established facts. Sources also describe the evidence on the husbands differently: some later accounts say strychnine was detected in their remains, while the court itself found the poisoning unproven.

Why the case still matters

The de Melker trial shows how much a South African murder prosecution of the period depended on toxicology after exhumation and on the poisons register kept by pharmacists. Writers on the case have noted that arsenic and strychnine poisoning was easily mistaken for ordinary illness at the time, which helps explain how earlier deaths passed without inquiry. The surviving trial record is held in the historical papers archive at the University of the Witwatersrand, the state's own case papers having been destroyed.

Her execution also belongs to the long history of capital punishment in South Africa, which carried out a very high number of judicial executions during the twentieth century. Executions were suspended in 1990, and on 6 June 1995 the Constitutional Court ruled the death penalty incompatible with the new constitution.

Recent attention

Interest in the case has been revived by author Ted Botha's book Daisy de Melker: Hiding Among Killers in the City of Gold, published in 2023, which reconstructs 1920s and 1930s Johannesburg around the trial. In December 2024 the regional newspaper GO! & Express revisited the story through Sidney de Melker's rugby career. Our searches found no official commemoration or new legal development concerning the case between 2024 and 2026.