Pretty Jane and the viper of Kidbrooke Lane: a true story of Victorian law and disorder : the unsolved murder that shocked Victorian England
Law and crime, True crime
Human-narrated audio
Summary
1871. A police constable walking one of London’s remotest beats stumbled upon a brutalized young woman kneeling on a muddy road - gashes were cloven into her skull, her left cheek was slashed open and smashed in, her right eye… was destroyed, and above it a chunk of the temporal bone had been bashed out. The policeman gaped in horror as the woman held out her hand before collapsing into the mud, muttering “let me die” and slipping into a coma. Five days later, she died, her identity still unknown. Within hours of her discovery on Kidbrooke Lane, scores of the officers of the Greenwich Division were involved in the investigation, and Scotland Yard had sent one of its top detectives, John Mulvany, to lead it. After five days of gathering evidence, the police discovered the girl’s identity: Jane Maria Clouson, a maid in the house of the renowned Pook family… and she was two months’ pregnant with Edmund Pook’s child when she died. Murphy carefully reviews the evidence in the light of twenty-first-century forensic science in order to identify Jane’s killer. 2016.