Everyone, a Orwell pointed out, loves a murder. This book tells of one of the classics: George Smith whose modus operandi was to marry a woman, insure her life, steal her savings and then drown her in her bath. He got away with it three times under three different names in three different seaside towns getting three inquests to declare three misadventures before the father of one of his victims read in the newspapers about another case and recognised too many similarities for coincidence. Nevertheless there might have been an acquittal. Forensics was still in its infancy as a science and the corpses were in an advanced state of decomposition when they were eventually exhumed. But the brilliant pathologist Bernard Spilsbury, whose evidence had helped convict Dr Crippen, showed that it would be possible to forcibly drown a woman in a bath with no conclusive marks left on the body and without a struggle.
This delightful and readable book oscillates between a chapter describing another victim and a chapter describing Spilsbury's early career before clamaxing in the trial scene.
Good fun. January 2013; 246 pages.
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