Murder is such a horribly commonplace crime that the annals of any major centre of population must be teeming with cases of violent, often premeditated death over the years. Domestic incidents that went out of control, drunkenness and sheer greed were often the reason. This survey of 30 cases in Bristol between 1741 and 1957 suggests that, no matter what else may have changed over two centuries and more, human nature basically alters but little.
| Bristol Murders by Nicola Sly | |
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| Category: True Crime | |
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Reviewer: John Van der Kiste
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| Summary: Accounts of 30 murder cases committed in Bristol between 1741 and 1957. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 160 | Date: June 2008 |
| Publisher: The History Press Ltd | |
| ISBN: 978-0750950480 | |
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Take the case of 22-year-old Ada James, an apparently religious factory worker who also, it seems, had a prodigious appetite for alcohol and enjoyed a healthy sex life which may have included prostitution. She was engaged, possibly secretly married, to Ted Palmer, who also liked a drink or two and whose mental balance was open to doubt. After they had an argument one evening in 1913 she was found dying in the road with her throat cut. Just as intriguing is that of Cecil Cornock, a cross-dresser with a penchant for strange sexual preferences which disgusted his wife Ann. One evening in 1946 she called the police to tell them that she had just found him dead in the bath, his body bearing the marks of several strange injuries.
Going further back in time to 1849, we find the matter of Miss Jeffries, an obnoxious old woman who gave her servants hell until one, Sarah Thomas, little more than a girl, lost her patience – and ended up in the dock charged with killing her. From 1874 there is the sad story of William and Alice Hole, both heavy drinkers, though Alice was by far the worse offender and provoked her husband beyond endurance until he silenced her for ever with a carving knife.
Some of those charged with murder were found guilty, and some went to the gallows while others were sentenced to be transported or imprisonment (not necessarily life), others were acquitted, and occasionally a case went unsolved.
True crime has never lost its fascination for a reading public. In my teenage years I remember coming across the Penguin Famous Trials series with great interest, and finding the Crippen case particularly enthralling. None of these murders is as well-known as that, although two or three were recently examined in a TV documentary series 'Roy Marsden’s Casebook', first shown in 2007. Even so, this still makes for an enthralling read into the darker side of human nature when life was often nasty and brutish if not always short – and the ending life was even nastier. The attention to detail and the placing in social context of these cases is as skilfully handled throughout as the telling of the gory deeds and the legal proceedings afterwards.
If you enjoyed this title you might also like to try Mixed Blessings: My Psychic Life by Diane Lazarus.
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