After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Why Do People Kill at Christmas?

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

 Why do people kill in the season of goodwill? Why are we fascinated when they do? And what does it say about us?Professor David Wilson, leading criminologist and bestselling author, joins Maddy and Anthony for this Christmas Special edition.David's latest book is "Murder at Home: how our safest space is where we're most in danger".Edited by Tom Delargy, Produced by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte LongDiscover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up now for your 14-day free trial http://access.historyhit.com/checkout/subscribe/purchase?code=afterdark&plan=monthly

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Hello and welcome to this festive episode of After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal. I'm Dr Maddy Pelling. And I'm Elf on the Shell. And we are very excited here in the After Dark studio about Christmas. Anthony is so excited. I love Christmas so much. What do you like most about it? Okay, what do I like best about Christmas? I like Christmas trees, but not decorating them or taking them down, but I just like them to be up I like open fires I like a lot of food I like going home to Ireland because we always do Christmas in Ireland and my nephews come up and they open presents and oh it's so it's I love it it's it's yeah it's my favorite time of the year that sounds idyllic that's giving me slightly sort of Nancy Mayer's film vibes I love it for me

it's all about the mulled cider it has to be and a ghost story of course at christmas so every year i select a different collection of ghost stories we've got you know the classics the mr jameses i do love an ef benson story it has to be said yes yes yes frosty landscape with sinister things hiding in it i'd love them love them it feels like we're in the proper run-up to christmas now i mean this isn't even our christmas episode and it feels really christmasy it's also because recently we've been filming and talking about charles dickens and ghost stories and stuff for the for the podcast and for history hit so you have that to look forward to as well what's your favorite ever christmas present that you've ever received well the first thing that comes to mind

was i was maybe i don't know 12 13 it was the dvd box set of bride's head revisited the original itv as a 13 year old yeah and i remember i have a really vivid memory of opening this present and thinking what is this and being so obsessed and i think there's about 11 hours of it and that's all i did for that christmas that was just your parents way of shutting you up for christmas day they were like no i don't want to hear about this and brideshead was my personality for the year to come that year yes i love that a 13 year old girl what about you uh mine is way less highbrow surprise surprise um about three or four years ago i think was it even that long ago i don't know shane my husband got me the entire set of spice girls original

issue dolls wow and i remember getting up at christmas morning i was like oh my god i'm an adult and i've got the entire set of spice girls dolls i was beside myself who needs barbie when you know they're currently displayed on my bookshelf somewhere now i know i do know which spice girl is your favorite but which is your favorite doll do they correspond oh god uh yeah they do they do correspond yeah yeah it's victoria beckham everyone posh spice that's that's my favorite spice girl the other thing i mean this is interesting this is all very well and good because you talk about like you don't one talks about christmas and family and gifting and it's a happy time but you hinted at something a little bit darker there about like christmas ghost stories and the other thing that comes out in the media often and it seems to sit

really uncomfortably beside some of these jollier stories that we've just been talking about is this notion of why there is such a, it seems to be in the media that there's such an influx of crime and particularly murder around Christmas. And it seems it's such a big jolt to go from talking about one to the other, but it's why those stories, I think, endure. And that's why they come to attention during the Christmas period, if there has something particularly awful has happened. You'll see from the title of this episode, which is Why Do People Kill at Christmas, that we've been thinking about this question here at After Dark. And we've been maybe playing around with ideas that it's because

we're sort of boiled down, stuck inside with maybe relatives that we wouldn't otherwise see, or friends that we wouldn't otherwise see.'s all these pressures there's all these new out of the ordinary interactions that happen around this time of year and in some cases very sadly it can lead to an explosion of sorts and the spark of something that can end quite violently now in this episode we have been talking to not a historian, as we usually do, but an expert criminologist. Yeah, we decided rather than continue to speculate about some of the reasons why some of these historic murders seem to occur at Christmas, that we'd get somebody in who knew what they were talking about in terms of the criminal mind. And we were so lucky to speak to Professor David Wilson, who, as you probably know, is a criminologist. And he has spent a career essentially working with murderers and serial killers and the police force to try and get to the bottom of why people kill generally.

And in this specific case, we're interested to know why people kill at Christmas. So Maddy and I had lined up three historic cases that we wanted David's input on and wanted to see why the pressure in those instances were so acute during the Christmas period. And it was really, really fascinating to hear what he had to say. It really was. And I think for us, a lot of the time on After Dark, we try to shine a spotlight on the victims of historical crimes and to provide a historical context, a cultural context for why these things happened and how people responded to them. And we're always struck by just how long standing our interest in true crime is. What David was really good at doing, I think, in this conversation is

he's able to give us his insight, not only into the historical cases that we bring to him to talk about, but also cases now. And I think that's something to bear in mind, listeners. So what was really interesting about David's insight into this, because most of his experience is in more contemporary crime that he's worked on or studied, it allowed Maddy and I and the team at After Dark more generally to start thinking about links between some of these horrendous crimes in the past and the impact that similar crimes have today on families, on victims, on perpetrators and how they are handled after they've been discovered. And it just was a really interesting way to, again, we're always talking about this, bringing the past into the present. And it was a really interesting way to do that. So David's insight, I thought, was really, really fascinating. But as a result, just a warning to listeners that if you are listening

to this episode, there will be some reference to more recent crimes and violence because of David's work. Welcome to this Christmas episode of After Dark. Today you'll be hearing macabre and mysterious tales of Yuletide murder. But we begin with a short story that invites us to think about the tragic reality of why we kill at Christmas. In 1894, Edmund Keveston was 39 years old. His 11-year career as a professional cricketer was over. It hadn't been a glittering one. For the past four years, he had been living with Sarah Ann Oldham, a dressmaker. Both were heavy drinkers, and Edmund seems to have had a history of psychotic episodes.

On Christmas Eve 1894, Sarah Oldham went out with her sister to do some Christmas shopping. Afterwards, Sarah went home, while her sister went to a party that, by coincidence, was being given by one of Sarah's neighbours. Around midnight, the doors of the party burst open and Sarah entered, her face, neck and nightdress covered in blood. She did not speak but sank into the chair, then onto the floor and died within a few minutes. A group went to Sarah's home. Edmund and Sarah's door was kicked down. Edmund was there waiting coolly inside. I have done it and I'm not going to deny it. Upstairs in the room you will find something I have done it with. Upstairs was the broken razor he had used.

Some of Edmund's former teammates tried to raise money to help his trial, but it was no good. He was found guilty and hanged on the 26th of March, 1895. and hanged on the 26th of March, 1895. Hello and welcome to After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal. I'm Dr Maddy Pelling. And I'm Dr Anthony Delaney. Christmas is the most magical time of the year, but there's no shortage of stories of people who kill at Christmas.

Today, we're bringing you tales of Christmas murders and asking why people kill at Christmas. Our guest is the wonderful Professor David Wilson, who is a criminologist and who has spent a lifetime exploring the dark corners of human behaviour, which is why you were perfect for After Dark. Alongside his professional work assisting police with murder inquiries, he was also a prison governor, and he's written numerous bestselling books exploring the minds of serial killers. He is also the host of the TV show Crime Files for BBC Scotland. David, welcome, and thank you so much for joining us on After Dark.

Well, thank you both for inviting me. And, of course, it's a Christmas special. So I feel as if we should be discussing It's a Wonderful Life. Unfortunately, it's a little bleaker than that, isn't it today? It is a little bit bleaker. So we've started with this story of Sarah Oldham, who's killed in the 1890s by her ex-cricketer partner, Edmund. It's quite a good illustration, I suppose, of a story of murder at Christmastime. Why do we think that murders happen with some regularity around Christmastime? What is it about this festivity that leads us to kill one another? Well, I think if we leave Christmas just for a second, the story of Edmund and Sarah is typical of murder. You know,

whether you're a man or a woman, you're more likely to be murdered in your home than in an outdoor public space like a street or a park or an indoor public space like a pub or a nightclub. And the figures underlying that statement are doggedly consistent. I mean, eight out of 10 women, six out of 10 men will be murdered in their home. And often they are going to be murdered by the kind of domestic materials that are going to come to hand. Knives most obviously, in this case, it was a razor. So the first thing to understand is that this is actually not so unusual that we're dealing with a husband, wife, a partner falling out with each other, five minutes of madness. Suddenly there's an argument then, and before we know it,

that person has killed the person that they're supposed to be loving. So that's common in terms of murder. I think if we accept that often one is murdered by people that one knows, which again is doggedly consistent, that's how the police solve the crimes of murder. It's not clever offender profilers. It's not DNA. It's simply the fact that the person that's most likely to kill you is the person that you're in a relationship. It's a cliche of crime TV, isn't it? Always look at the husband first. He's always the number one suspect. That's what I know from every Agatha Christie. I usually blame my friend Amelia Fox for all of this at this point. I usually say it's her fault because of silent witness. But if you accept it's somebody that you're in a relationship with, Christmas brings with it a number of pressures, doesn't it? A pressure to

be social, a pressure that's financial, a pressure that is about a year ending and a new year beginning. And therefore, there's expectations. There's a weighing up, isn't there, about what the year previously has been like and what the year in the future might hold for you. And those pressures are added to by usually the fact that family comes to visit and families bring with them their own pressures. There's a lot of alcohol that's taken at Christmas time. Usually, I say in my writing that a lot of murders are committed during five minutes of madness. And that five minutes of madness often has a context of drink or other substances, which is going to alter your cognitive functioning so that the executive decisions that you might make would be ones, if you were sober, you wouldn't have made. And their story, the story you started with, Maddy, really perfectly sums up all of those consistent things that we know about murder,

with this added dimension that it's at Christmas time as well. But the key take-home message from me, in terms of when you read out the story, is that this is typical. I know we're talking about the 1880s. We could be talking about the 1980s. We could have been talking about 2018. So if we have now established, which I think we have, that the circumstances in which people are killed at Christmas very much echo the circumstances that they are killed in throughout the year. at Christmas very much echoed the circumstances that they are killed in throughout the year. Let's shift that question as not now, why do people kill at Christmas? Why do we become fascinated with people who are killed at Christmas? Why are Christmas murders the ones that really stand out in the public imagination, do you think? I mean, it was a beautifully framed,

beautifully framed academic question. And as you were saying it, I was like, well, actually, I started by saying, I'm really surprised we're not talking about It's a Wonderful Life. You see, my glass tends to be half full, rather than half empty, perhaps because I am a criminologist, I tend to try to think of good, as opposed to evil, because I deal so often with people who, well, are evil, that if I only concentrated on them, I would lose all perspective on the fact that the vast majority of people are good and want to do no harm. But I think as a genre, why we become fascinated by this is that, you know, Christmas is this time when we have to be merry, when everybody is exchanging presents, when we sing carols, when people knock on our door who are strangers

and sing to us. And we know we want to remember all those people who've passed in that year. And if we think about Christmas in those terms, then to kill during that period of time is to almost assault a culture, something that has now grown up. As we lose religion in our society, as we become more secular, you know, it's Christmas and Santa Claus and Father Christmas almost takes on a religious nature in itself. I mean, let's be honest, it's supposed to be about the birth of Christ, but by and large,

it's whether the Waitrose advert is going to be nice or not. Right, well, on that very cheery Christmas note, are we ready for another Christmas crime? Yes, please. Right, let's do it. Christmas, 1836, London. As the Georgian era teeters to an end,

many parts of the city that are now well established are still under construction. At this time, along the Edgware Road, a new set of houses are being built. On the 24th of December, the labourers working on these houses were sent home early because of the cold. They were not due to return to work again until the 28th of December. Three full days of rest and frivolity awaited them. When they returned to work, however, they found a package wrapped in coarse cloth that had been tucked away behind some paving stones. A pool of frozen blood had formed beneath it. Inside was a human torso. The head and legs hacked off. The torso was taken to a surgeon, Mr Girdwood, who concluded that it

was the body of a woman of about 50. The whole metropolis was horrified, but as no one could identify her, it was decided the best thing to do was to bury the unknown torso in Paddington Graveyard. A week later, on the 7th of January 1837, another gruesome present was found. A bargeman in Stepney was navigating through a lock on the Regent's Canal. The gates weren't shutting properly. Something in the water was jamming them. He got out his hook, assuming it was a carcass of a dog. But what he prized from the jaws of the gate was a human head.

The torso in Paddington Cemetery was dug up. The head put on top. It was a match. The same surgeon, Mr Girdwood, embalmed the head with spirits. Anyone who wanted to could visit to try and identify it. Thousands came, but no one could. On the 2nd of February, a third unwanted Christmas gift was found. A gardener in Camberwell was cutting a row of willows when he noticed a package in a ditch.

He lifted one corner to reveal a pair of legs. The dismembered woman was now completely reassembled. But who was she? And who had spent Christmas cutting her up and delivering the pieces of her body across the city? Answers finally came in March, when a Mr Gay visited Mr Girdwood, the surgeon, and asked to see the embalmed head. He recognised his sister, Hannah Brown. Hannah had last been seen on Christmas Eve, on her way to meet James Greenacre. The couple were to have been married on Boxing Day. A manhunt ensued, and James was eventually found with a woman called Sarah Gale,

who had transpired had been living with him for years and was an accomplice to his crime. On Christmas Eve, with Sarah having made herself scarce, James had invited Hannah Brown to his house. But when Hannah arrived, she admitted to James that she was not as rich as she had previously claimed. In revenge, James hit her a fatal blow with a rolling pin. And so, as children all over the city were tucked into bed on Christmas Eve, awaiting the sound of sleigh bells, James Greenacre set off across London, travelling on omnibuses until he reached Stepney.

On his lap the whole time, wrapped only in a silk handkerchief, was Hannah Brown's head. On Boxing Day he went out again to deliver the torso to the Edgware Road and the legs to the bushes near his own home in Camberwell. Meanwhile Sarah Gale stayed inside, cleaning up copious amounts of blood. James Greenacre was hanged for his crimes. Sarah Gale was transported on the prison h refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap.

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wherever you get your podcasts. what a horrible story yeah i also was really taken when you were reading out that story of all those people who came to view the head. Dismemberment. I often say that when I first started working as a criminologist, as somebody who first was employed by the prison service, I encountered one man who'd beheaded his victim. And now I find mutilation beheading, well, frankly, all the time. And I can even date when one saw that level of mutilation increase, and it was during lockdown. Suddenly, there's a change in how society is supposed to behave, and how people are supposed to behave towards each other when we're no longer touching, hugging, kissing, but maintaining a two meter distance. Suddenly one noticed in crime

scenes that the amount of overkill, which is the polite way of saying mutilation in many respects, just went through the roof. So there was something going on, I think, in terms of the mutilation, especially during lockdown. But I'd also even broaden it even further. I still teach first year students the survey course in criminology. I think it's important that professors actually teach first year students. They're paying a lot of money and I feel that I should be delivering the course for them. And every single year for the past five years, I've asked the same question.

And this year was no different. I have 400 students in the first year. And I say, please put up your hand if you've watched a beheading video online. And every single year, with the exception of about five hands the entire eight bunch of 18 year olds will put up their hands yeah i mean i was genuinely shocked by the story of hannah brown that you were reading out but i can tell you now the kids that i'm currently

teaching are inured to this. I would not go as a witness to see an execution. I just couldn't do it. But most of the students, most of your students that you're teaching will have watched beheading videos online. And that takes us back into that story that you've told about Hannah Brown. Why are all those people wanting to look at the head? You know, they're not really looking at the head because they're going to help with identification. They just want to see a head. And I wondered if there is an element that's universal in the story

I've told about my students. You know, why would you want to look at a beheading video? It's so interesting to me that our reaction to you saying that was genuine shock, because we talk about people in the past who go and see state-sanctioned execution all the time. And we talk about the people who attended those crowds as having that morbid curiosity, but I don't necessarily treat them as unusual. I understand that their mindset is different from my own in our own modern time, but I don't necessarily think about what that would mean to go and actually witness that. I'm asking the same question, really. Why do we punish the style in which we punish?

What does that tell us about ourselves? Why does Norway... Do you know what Norway's maximum punishment is? Norway's maximum punishment is 21 years. So Norway released its only serial killer who had killed 23 people after actually slightly less than 21 years because he got out early for good behavior. Anders Bering Breivik, the white Christian fundamentalist who kills 77 people, has served half a sentence. Because of course, the maximum penalty you can face in Norway is 21 years. So I try to make the students think about why do we have a whole life tariff? Why does the United States still have capital punishment? Why can you still be executed in a number of states of the United States? What do those different reactions to our maximum penalty say about us in this moment of

time? And I think there is a universality though. I don't think it's just about people in the 18th, 19th century or today. I mean, again, if you think about, again, it's an easy one to use with first year students. And you say, have you ever slowed down to look at an accident on the other side of the motorway? You know, why do you do that? Why do we want to look at the misery of other people? What actual social, cultural benefit is it giving to us to use punishment or to use the trauma of other people in the way that we're consuming it i've coined this phrase the murder entertainment business you know there is there is for anybody who's coined that phrase before me i forgive me there may be many people will say hang on a minute, hang on a minute. I've been using that phrase

for years. But there is something about consuming murder and consuming execution for pleasure, which I find odd. David, something is occurring to me as I'm listening to you speak, and it's becoming very pertinent in my mind because it's just so fascinating. You know, we talk about these things, we talk about the history of these things, but actually you're living the present tense of a lot of these things right now. And often on After Dark, we talk about hauntings and they often are spectral, but you talked before about having a glass half full approach to a lot of this and to your life outside of your career. But these are difficult topics. And I'm wondering about the element of haunting you or other criminologists, how you, or if you rather, experience a haunting based on some of the work

that you have done, in whatever form that might take. It's probably the question I'm asked most regularly. You go to some very dark places with some very, very evil people, and you have to sit in the same room and you have to ask them questions. And you have to, if they are prepared, to talk about some appalling things. Therefore, if you know you're going into that space, asking those questions of those individuals, you have to be psychologically robust in yourself. You have to be able to compartmentalize, because if you can't compartmentalize, you are going to bring back out of that cell, out of that prison, into your present, into your domestic life. You're going to bring that back

with you. Then the other thing, of course, is that you've got to have other interests, something that will take you into another place. I lost faith, my Christian faith. I was brought up as a Presbyterian, but I lost that faith a long time ago. I am very much a secular person. But I do believe in the goodness of the vast majority of people. I love meeting people. I like being social. I like being in company. actually good, then you have to work with that as a basis of moving forward, as opposed to concentrating on that tiny fraction of people who will do evil. Do you like serial killers? The short answer to that is no. But you were asking, I think, a more complex question with a very direct way of framing it. I had a lifelong, professional lifelong association with a Scottish serial killer called Dennis Nielsen. I joined my first ever job after uni. I literally did my viva on the Friday. And on the Monday, I was the assistant

governor under training at Wormwood Scrubs. And one of the first people that I met was Dennis Nielsen, who is a Scottish serial killer. And I think because I was 23, and he murdered a lot of young men, Dennis Nielsen must have chatted to me about murder every time we met. And I didn't believe a word he told me, but he would continue to write to me. And so I had lots of his letters, lots of his articles. He was a constant letter writer. Did I like him? No. Society has to have a way of metaphorically drawing a line in the sand and saying that is unacceptable times how many people that he killed. Was it 10? Was it 13? Was it 15? Was it more than 15?

Society has to have a way. And we're back to Anomi and Durkheim, aren't we? When we talk about some of this stuff, you're back to that sense in which crime allows society to draw moral boundaries. And I think serial killers have helped me to do that. We have to have a moral boundary about them. And therefore, I could never conceive of releasing Anders Bering Breivik, who is a mass murderer rather than a serial killer, but I could never conceive of releasing him or indeed any of the current serving prisoners in this country who are serial killers. Do you think from the interactions that you've had with serial killers and the work that you've done on them, do you think some of them are haunted by the crimes that they've committed and by their victims? Or do they not think about those crimes and those victims in those ways? Every single serial killer I've ever worked with is a psychopath, and they have absolutely no empathy whatsoever. They would find it impossible to walk in your took. They know what the words of remorse would be, but they don't actually authentically experience remorse. So they're not haunted. In fact,

if you think that they could be haunted, if you think that they could be worried about meeting their maker, shuffling off their mortal coil, and is there a heaven and is there a hell, they wouldn't have done what they did in the first place. And is there a heaven and is there a hell? They wouldn't have done what they did in the first place. And it's another media trope whereby people say, oh, that serial killer is very close to death. Won't they want to tell you about all the other crimes they've committed? And of course they don't. They don't want to do that at all. They never do a deathbed confession because they themselves feel like gods. They have behaved like God anyway. They've chosen who will live and who will die. They're not expecting to meet their maker. They made themselves.

It's actually petrifying. The mindset is what's petrifying, I think. The mindset is the thing that's unseeable, unknowable, and that's the thing you can't imprison. That's the thing you can't control, really. And it's not necessary. That's what my work has been about. I don't need to go into the mind of a serial murderer to tell society how to reduce the incidence of serial murder. Serial murder. Because rather than working out what's going on in their minds, a pretty dark place, Anthony, let's just deal with the five groups of people who are murdered by serial killers in Britain. And four of those groups are women. And only one group of men, by and large, gets murdered by serial murders, which are gay men. And the two groups of women who are most regularly murdered are sex workers or women over the age of 60. I used to say older women, and then I turned 60 and then thought, well, I'm not old. Why am I calling these people elderly? Why am I saying that? But if you just take those three groups

for a second, you can then reduce the incidence of serial murder by tackling homophobia, by having a grown up debate about how we police sex work in this country. And above all, by giving a voice to older people in Britain, a culture that's obsessed with youth. Do that rather than go into the mind of a serial killer. to the mind of a serial killer. I think that's a perfect place to leave that discussion and gives plenty of thought for ways in which we can approach some of these cases

and these histories on After Dark as we go forward. But you're not getting off that lightly, David. So just before you go, we want you to solve a crime. Oh, here we go. Yes, yes, here we go. This is probably what you get

everywhere you go. I can imagine people in pubs coming up to you all the time going, there's a mystery, solve it. We have a New Year's mystery for you now to end today on. And, you know, we won't go into the ins and outs, but as our outro today, we'd love to just give you the final words to what you think may have happened. May have happened in this scenario. We won't hold you to it. It's not legally binding.

Okay. Maddy, do you want to bring us in? I do. We won't hold you to it. It's not legally binding. Okay. Maddy, do you want to bring us in? I do. The Pimlico mystery, as the papers called it, both was and was not a mystery.

Everybody was pretty sure who had killed Edwin Bartlett, and the why was reasonably clear. But the how is unexplained to this day. This is the strange history of a menage a trois in a flat in Pimlico, London, that ended on New Year's Eve 1885 with a baffling murder. Adelaide Bartlett had a pleasant face. She was born in France but came to England aged 26 when her father arranged for her to be married to Edwin Bartlett, 10 years her senior. Edwin came from a family with an eye for business, and he used Adelaide's dowry to invest in a chain of South London grocery stores. Adelaide and Edwin's marriage was unconventional.

Exactly how unconventional is unclear. At trial, Adelaide's defence claimed that it was what we'd call an open marriage today. Into this relationship entered a third character, the Reverend George Dyson, a young Methodist minister with, we're told, a splendid moustache. George met the Bartletts at the start of 1885 and soon became a frequent caller on Adelaide. Edwin approved wholeheartedly and all three were close friends, even taking holidays together during the summer. But the friendship and Edward's spell on earth wouldn't make it to the end of the year. On New Year's Eve, 1885, Edwin went to the dentist to have some diseased teeth removed then returned home to

enjoy his dinner. A man with a voracious appetite Edwin's last meal on earth was a dozen oysters, a jugged hair and some chutney. He went to bed looking forward to a haddock in the morning and woke up dead. When Edwin's stomach was opened during the autopsy, an overpowering smell of chloroform filled the air. On the night he died, Adelaide had been with Edwin, sitting at the foot of his bed, as was her usual habit. For someone to swallow chloroform, whether willingly or not, would have been excruciatingly painful. It would leave burn marks on the mouth and throat and trigger involuntary screaming. But there were no marks, the neighbours heard no noise. If this was the world's first case of murder by chloroform,

then the question was, how had Adelaide done it? During the trial, Adelaide managed to win over public opinion and, in the end, the jury. Perhaps at the dawn of a new year and with a new world of women's liberation not far away, the jury admired Adelaide's unconventional but strong spirit. Or perhaps they didn't believe a woman could have outsmarted the forensic experts who could not prove how this crime had been committed. Adelaide inherited all Edwin's money. What became of her and George Dyson after that is unknown.

I think there is a possible explanation because you gave the game away, Maddy, didn't you? You said that there was no evidence, forensic evidence of the ingestion of the chloroform, no burning of them on the mouth. But before coming to what I think is perhaps the way that she would have done it, isn't it interesting that those sets of circumstances almost pre, they're kind of a prescient echo of what's going to happen to Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters in the 1920s, because Edith was in a menage a trois. She, her lover, Freddie, Freddie is going to kill Percy Thompson, to whom Edith is married to. But of course, Edith is going to be found guilty of that murder and will indeed be executed. So this kind of idea that somehow, is it because, you know, a new dawn of women's liberation, that's all going to unravel in 20 years from, 30 years from the period that you've just been describing. My suggestion would be to you a tube. She uses a tube to,

tube um she uses um a tube to um he he had bad teeth and so of course um the tube i think she would use a tube so that the the chloroform the liquid chloroform would go directly into his stomach which would be why the smell was so overpowering when his stomach was opened. And perhaps there was a willingness there, because how would you get the tube, although the chloroform initially would make him sleepy, and so she could put the tube down his throat. I wonder if the chloroform has something to do with the dentist. If actually this is a red herring and he's had these teeth removed earlier on in the day, has he had too much chloroform at the dentist? Would they have used it?

Well, remember, we're in this period, the Victorian era is the poison century. So usually we're talking about arsenic if it's criminology and women using arsenic to poison. But chloroform was, but arsenic was omnipresent.. But arsenic was omnipresent. Chloroform was omnipresent. Chloroform would be used to help seasickness. Chloroform would be helped to allow people to sleep. Obviously, it was also an anesthetic. So, of course, it could have been used at the dentist,

but it's a sufficient enough quantity without leaving any traces of it. And perhaps that meant a tube into his tummy. I wonder if Adelaide knew the dentist. Yes, maybe he was the fourth member of the marriage. We're getting carried away. Listen, David, thank you so much. We could stay here all afternoon, except the studio are going to kick us out at some point, so we can't. But that was truly, truly fascinating and so insightful. So thank you very much for sharing your time with us.

Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you. Thank you, Maddy. Thank you, Anthony, for asking me. So if you liked this episode, please check out some of our previous episodes on After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal.

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