Anna Wetherell falls unconscious, is arrested, and is charged with attempted suicide

Anna Wetherell’s opium collapse and arrest turned an episode of uncertain cause into a public legal accusation: she was charged with attempted suicide despite denying that she had meant to die. The case also brought hidden gold, disputed accounts of the drug’s effects, and the limits of her ability to speak safely about what had happened into the same chain of events. Neither the charge nor the evidence settles whether she had been harmed by another person or was protecting someone.

Background and Discovery

Joseph Pritchard learned of Anna’s attempted suicide only indirectly. Dick Mannering passed on what he had heard from Ah Sook, who managed the opium den at Kaniere and was distressed by Anna’s near-death. Anna was a familiar visitor to Kaniere Chinatown, where she had shared opium with Ah Sook. Pritchard had not seen her for many weeks, and the news reached him through a chain of men rather than from Anna herself.

That distance mattered to Pritchard. As a chemist and a major supplier of opium to the West Coast dens, he considered himself qualified to investigate an overdose. He resented that Anna had not sought his advice, but his professional interest was entangled with a personal conviction: he could not accept that she had deliberately tried to end her life. He suspected either that she had been forced to take the drug or that the resin had been altered to injure her.

Pritchard asked for the remaining portion of the lump from the den so that he could examine it for poison. Ah Sook refused, furious with him and determined to have no further business with the chemist. Pritchard was not materially threatened by losing the den’s custom, but the refusal left his suspicion unresolved. His plan to question Anna directly followed from both his expertise and his inability to establish what had been in the drug.

Detention and the Hidden Gold

When Aubert Gascoigne first encountered Anna in the Police Camp gaol-house, she was shackled on the floor, feverish and dishevelled. She asked him quietly to trust her and not tell George Shepard how she could raise bail. Directing Gascoigne to her corset, she showed him concealed material that felt like metal plating and claimed it was gold. The discovery connected her detention to an undisclosed store of wealth, but did not explain how she had acquired it or why she had carried it on her person.

Shepard insisted that bail could not be accepted on a promise: Anna had to produce the money then, or remain detained until someone raised it for her. Gascoigne had reason to suspect that the gold might not belong to her, and knew that her attempt to communicate privately had put him in a difficult position. He nevertheless chose to protect her and help her secure release, guided by compassion rather than by the strictest application of his official duty. The episode therefore placed the practical question of bail beside the question of whether Anna would be treated as a person in desperate circumstances or merely as a suspect.

After the gold was removed from her clothing, Anna expected only a fine for being drunk in public. Gascoigne told her instead that she would be tried for attempted suicide, on the gaoler’s confirmation. Anna reacted with disbelief and denied having tried to take her life. The difference between her understanding of the incident and the accusation against her became explicit: the charge interpreted her collapse as an act of intent, while she rejected that interpretation.

Medical Evidence and Unresolved Cause

Pritchard’s later reasoning did not resolve the competing accounts. Anna was a seasoned opium user who took the drug nearly every day and knew its effects. Yet he had never known her to become so completely unconscious that she could not be revived for more than twelve hours. He doubted this degree of unconsciousness could have occurred by accident. If Anna had not intended suicide, he reasoned, someone might have drugged and abandoned her, or she might be lying to protect another person. His questions about whom she might be shielding remained questions, not established facts.

The physician’s evidence narrowed one uncertainty while leaving the central one intact. His testimony, published after Anna’s trial, confirmed that she had taken a great deal of opium on the night of January 14. Pritchard considered whether she could have deceived the physician, but concluded that her prolonged unconsciousness could not plausibly have been faked through examination and detention. This supported the reality of the overdose; it did not establish whether the dose was voluntary, accidental, or administered by someone else.

Anna’s own account also allowed for complexity without proving intent. Pritchard remembered her acknowledging that thoughts of death could occur to her from time to time, but still believed her denial that she had tried to kill herself. The episode thus resists a simple opposition between a wholly suicidal act and an entirely fabricated accusation. Her distress, her established drug use, and the unexplained duration of her unconsciousness coexist in the evidence without supplying a conclusive cause.

Trial and Aftermath

The day after Crosbie Wells’s burial, Anna was tried for attempted suicide in the petty court. She refused to enter a plea. The court fined her five pounds for the attempted felony and reprimanded her for wasting the Magistrate’s time. The outcome made the accusation consequential even though the evidence preserved uncertainty about her intention: a collapse became a charge, and the legal response treated it as an offense rather than as an occasion to determine how she had come to be unconscious.

Her absence from Kaniere continued after the incident. More than a month passed without her returning to share a pipe with Ah Sook or replenish her supply, although he could not explain the change. He wondered whether she had stopped taking opium or begun obtaining it directly from Pritchard, and found the possibility of her recovery especially difficult to accept. That later absence does not settle what caused the January collapse, but it shows how the event altered the routines and expectations surrounding Anna’s drug use.

The arrest is significant because it exposes how little certainty the available authorities possessed, even as they acted decisively. Pritchard could identify an extraordinary overdose but not its cause; Anna denied suicidal intent but did not disclose an alternative explanation; and the court imposed a penalty without resolving the discrepancy. The concealed gold briefly gave Anna a means to meet the immediate demand for bail, while leaving the deeper question of her vulnerability unanswered.