In the Arthur Conan Doyle story, “The Adventure of the Speckled Band,” Dr. Grimesby Roylott tries to kill his stepdaughter, Helen Stoner, by introducing a deadly snake into her room to bite her. Roylott has already killed Helen’s sister, Julia, in the same way. He presumably would have succeeded in killing Helen in this way as well if she had not hired Sherlock Holmes to investigate.
Roylott married the Stoners’ mother when the girls were two years old. She has been dead 8 years at the time of the story. She brought a large amount of money to their marriage and gave it to Roylott with the stipulation that the girls would each get a large sum when they marry. Julia was killed when she was about to marry. Helen is now engaged and Roylott is planning to kill her.
His first step towards murdering Helen is to have her move to a room next to his own. It turns out that he has arranged to have a ventilation shaft constructed between the two rooms and has placed a rope in Helen’s end of the shaft. He says the rope is a bell pull to summon a servant, but it is actually just tied to a hook.
Roylott’s plan was to be in his room and to put a swamp adder, which Holmes says is the deadliest snake in India, into the shaft and force it towards Helen’s room. It will go down the rope to her bed (the rope touches the bed) and will bite her. She will die in seconds.
Holmes, however, figures out what is going on and foils Roylott. Roylott ends up getting killed by the same snake that me meant to use to kill Helen.
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