Kindle Notes & Highlights
To help identify her, the head was preserved in spirits and put on display where members of the public, who could claim good reason to do so, were allowed to view it.
(The ‘candle factor’ was an important clue at crime scenes then, its whereabouts indicating where in-house suspects had actually been as opposed to where they said they had been — although some in-house offenders got wise and planted a candlestick by the door to suggest the crime was committed by an outsider.)
One of the most striking things about these early investigations is the amount of dashing about the lead investigator was obliged to do. This was due partly to the limited number of officers allotted to a case but also to the lack of rapid means of communicating developments.
Respectable people were rarely seen bareheaded out of doors, therefore the hatless became more noticeable and suspect.)
realizing that a wax candle in a silver holder would look suspicious in a servant’s room (they were only allowed tallow candles).
Young Richard Dadd was an exceptionally gifted artist known particularly for his Oriental scenes and, later, for the miniaturist detail of his fairy and supernatural paintings, such as The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke. Admitted to the Royal Academy at the early age of twenty,
As pointed out earlier, it was the second of the two attacks on the Queen in 1842 which had helped the pressure for the formation of the branch.
We know that the murders of prostitutes are particularly difficult to solve, given the number and anonymity of suspects,
During the 1830s Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cook introduced the first working electric telegraph outside a laboratory,
Following the second request Inspector Jonathan Whicher was sent down, so of course he was later than ever on the scene. Very late — fifteen days.
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury, 2008),
