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He admitted he should have come forward earlier – he convincingly argued that anyone in his position may have reacted similarly in the same situation, but swore that he had turned off the road at the junction before the murder site. He was acquitted, to popular acclaim, and the question of whether Light committed the murder remains one that is still hotly debated among criminologists and crime historians today. SOUTH The Richmond Poisoning In 1858, Dr Thomas Smethurst of Richmond, Surrey, and his wife took in a lodger, a spinster named Isabella Bankes.

The case had drawn massive public interest and Baker was hanged in front of a crowd of 5,000 outside Winchester Prison on 24 December 1867, the prison’s last public execution. A short while after these horrific events, rations were changed to include tinned mutton for British sailors; they were unimpressed, and the derisory joke arose that the meat must be the chunks of ‘Sweet Fanny Adams’. The term, meaning as good as useless or nothing at all, has been in parlance ever since. EAST The Burnham Poisoners Two sudden deaths, initially blamed on a mystery ‘sickness’, occurred in quick succession within the Frary household in early March 1835, leaving poor Catherine Frary, aged forty, a widow and mourning the loss of a child.

Suspicious of the cause of death, Maybrick’s brothers requested that James’ body be examined. Traces of arsenic were detected, not enough to prove fatal, but they were present and Florie was arrested and tried for murder at the Liverpool Assizes in July 1889. The evidence against her was flimsy – there was no way of proving Florie had administered the arsenic to James but it seems her private affairs drew enough condemnation and she was found guilty, more for lack of morals than for direct evidence of murder.