The Armstrong Case

The Armstrong Case is the tragic event that provides the motive for the murder at the heart of Murder on the Orient Express. It was a notorious kidnapping and murder that destroyed a prominent family and led to the deaths of several innocent people, creating a web of grief and rage that ultimately culminated in a planned act of collective vengeance on the Orient Express.

The Crime and Its Victims

The case centered on the kidnapping of three-year-old Daisy Armstrong, the only child of Colonel Armstrong and his wife, Sonia Armstrong. Colonel Armstrong was an Englishman and a Victoria Cross recipient, half-American through his mother, a daughter of Wall Street millionaire W. K. Van der Halt. Sonia Armstrong was the daughter of Linda Arden, the most famous tragic American actress of her day. The kidnappers demanded an impossibly high ransom. After the parents paid the enormous sum of two hundred thousand dollars, the child's dead body was discovered; she had been dead for at least a fortnight. The public's indignation rose to fever pitch. The tragedy did not end there. Mrs. Armstrong, who was expecting another baby, gave birth prematurely to a dead child following the shock of the discovery, and she herself died. Her broken-hearted husband, Colonel Armstrong, then shot himself. The case also claimed a fourth victim: a French or Swiss nursemaid named Susanne. The police were convinced she had some knowledge of the crime and refused to believe her hysterical denials. In a fit of despair, the poor girl threw herself from a window and was killed. It was later proved that she had been absolutely innocent of any complicity in the crime.

The Perpetrator and His Escape

About six months after the kidnapping, a man named Cassetti was arrested as the head of the gang. The gang's method was to kill their prisoner and hide the body if the police seemed likely to get on their trail, continuing to extract money before the crime was discovered. Cassetti was the man responsible. However, by means of his enormous wealth and the secret hold he had over various persons, he was acquitted on a technical inaccuracy. He would have been lynched by the populace had he not been clever enough to give them the slip. He changed his name to Samuel Edward Ratchett and left America, living as a gentleman of leisure, travelling abroad and living on his income.

The Conspirators and Their Plan

The Armstrong Case directly connected twelve people on the train, each of whom had a personal stake in seeing Cassetti punished. The group included Linda Arden, Mrs. Armstrong's mother, who played the role of Mrs. Hubbard; Mary Debenham, who had been the governess in the Armstrong household; Greta Ohlsson, the nurse who had been in charge of little Daisy Armstrong; Antonio Foscarelli, the family's chauffeur; Edward Masterman, who had been Colonel Armstrong's batman in the war and later his valet; Pierre Michel, the Wagon Lit conductor, who was the father of the dead nursemaid Susanne; Cyrus Hardman, who had been in love with Susanne; Colonel Arbuthnot, Colonel Armstrong's best friend; Hector MacQueen, whose father had been the district attorney on the case; Princess Dragomiroff, who was Sonia Armstrong's godmother; and Countess Andrenyi, who was Sonia Armstrong's younger sister, Helena Goldenberg. They decided that the sentence of death that Cassetti had escaped had to be carried out. The plan was for each of the twelve to stab him once, creating a crime that would appear to be the work of a single, frenzied killer but which would be impossible to pin on any one person. The murder was staged to look like an outside job, with a fake Wagon Lit uniform and a description of a mythical small, dark man with a womanish voice.

The Aftermath and Confession

When the train became snowbound, the conspirators were forced to adapt their plan, knowing that suspicion would now fall on the passengers themselves. The investigation by Hercule Poirot gradually uncovered the connections to the Armstrong Case, as each passenger's lies and evasions revealed their link to the tragedy. Linda Arden, in her role as Mrs. Hubbard, finally confessed to Poirot, explaining that the decision was made in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, when she was "crazy with grief." She described how the group, including the servants and Colonel Arbuthnot, decided that Cassetti must die. She took full responsibility, offering to let Poirot lay the blame on her alone, but Poirot, with the agreement of M. Bouc and Dr. Constantine, chose to present the first, simpler solution to the authorities, allowing the conspirators to go free.