Anna Wetherell’s collapse and attempted-suicide charge began with a night whose missing hours she could not account for. After leaving Emery Staines’s house to smoke opium, she remembered returning to her room at the Gridiron Hotel and lighting her pipe; her next memory was daylight in the gaol. Authorities took her unconsciousness as evidence of an attempted suicide, a conclusion she rejected. The episode left open whether the overdose was accidental, deliberate, or caused by someone else, while its legal and personal consequences continued after Anna regained consciousness.

The night and the lost hours

Anna told Aubert Gascoigne that she had spent the night in Staines’s bed, then left his house because she wanted to smoke. She said she was not at the opium den, but went back to her own lodging at the Gridiron Hotel. The sequence she could recall was ordinary and specific: she unlocked her door with her key, entered, closed it, sat down, and lit her pipe. After that, she remembered nothing until she was in gaol and it was daylight.

When Gascoigne asked whether anything in her room suggested that another person had entered, Anna said the door had been locked as usual and reported no sign of an intrusion. Her account therefore established neither how the large quantity of opium had affected her nor whether anyone else had been involved. It also placed Staines with her earlier in the night, a detail that became more consequential when he disappeared and could not be questioned.

The accusation and Anna’s denial

Anna initially understood that she might be fined for being drunk in public. Gascoigne told her instead that she would be tried for attempted suicide, as the gaoler had confirmed. The accusation astonished her. When he asked whether she had tried to take her life, she emphatically denied it and demanded to know who had made the claim. Gascoigne identified the duty sergeant who had found her.

The charge converted an episode Anna described as a memory gap into a legal claim about her intention. Her denial did not resolve the matter: it was her account of what she meant to do, while the authorities had encountered her after she had lost consciousness. The distinction between taking opium and intending to die remained central. Anna acknowledged having left to smoke, but insisted that the blackout and her detention were not the outcome she had chosen.

Suspicion without proof

Joseph Pritchard, the chemist who supplied opium to West Coast dens south of the Grey River, heard about the incident through Dick Mannering, who had in turn heard from Ah Sook. Pritchard was offended that Anna had not contacted him directly, but his professional concern was also practical: he wanted to know what had happened and to examine the remaining resin for possible traces of poison. Ah Sook, furious with him, refused to provide it and declared that he would no longer do business with the chemist. Pritchard’s request was denied, leaving his suspicion untested.

Pritchard did not believe Anna had attempted suicide. He considered the possibility that she had been made to take the drug or that the substance had been altered to harm her. Later, however, he weighed another explanation: Anna might have concealed the truth, perhaps to protect someone. She was an experienced opium user, and he had never known her to remain unconscious for more than twelve hours. He reasoned that her collapse could hardly be dismissed as an ordinary effect of a familiar drug, but could not determine its cause. A physician had confirmed that she had taken a great deal of opium on 14 January; Pritchard thought the prolonged, witnessed unconsciousness made a feigned collapse implausible. None of his competing explanations was established as fact.

Trial and aftermath

On the day after Crosbie Wells’s burial, Anna was tried for attempted suicide in the petty court. She refused to plead. The court fined her five pounds for the attempted felony and reprimanded her for wasting the Magistrate’s time. The outcome imposed a definite penalty without answering the question that had produced it: whether Anna had meant to die, been harmed by another person, or withheld some part of what she knew.

The episode also became entangled with Staines’s disappearance. Anna’s account placed her at his house before the collapse, but he was gone by morning and had not been seen since. As the disappearance came to light, she was repeatedly examined, cross-examined, and disbelieved, asked to recount the same night until the story itself began to feel unfamiliar to her. The blackout thus had consequences beyond the charge: it made her an important witness to a disappearance while depriving her of the hours that might have clarified it.

Recurrence and the limits of explanation

Anna did not return to the opium den in Kaniere for more than a month after 14 January. The half-ounce of resin Ah Sook had given her that afternoon would normally have lasted about two weeks, given her habitual use. He missed her visits and could not explain her absence. He suspected Pritchard had engineered the overdose, despite assurances to the contrary, yet found it harder to accept the possibility that Anna had stopped taking opium altogether. Her withdrawal from the den suggested a change in her routine, but did not settle what had happened on the night she collapsed.

When Anna and Staines were later held in the Police Camp gaol after their reunion, their circumstances gave the earlier incident a further contrast. Anna had no hidden fortune in her clothing and no employer able to pay her eight-pound bail. Staines, detained on charges of fraud, embezzlement, and dereliction, chose not to pay his standard one-pound-one-shilling bail so that he could remain with her. Under Dr. Gillies’s care, Anna received decreasing doses of laudanum intended to wean her from opium. Staines also received laudanum, and later acknowledged that he had spent much of his own unexplained absence under opium’s effects, perhaps in Kaniere Chinatown. These later developments connect the collapse to a wider pattern of dependence and disappearance, but they do not retrospectively establish who caused Anna’s overdose or what she intended. The event remains defined by that gap between what the law declared and what Anna could remember.