M J Trow

For centuries, it was believed that a corpse would ‘bleed anew’ in the presence of its murderer. Chaucer wrote about it; so did Shakespeare. Only slowly, as the Renaissance and the Age of Reason drove away the shadows of superstition, did forensic science find its feet. From the Ratlciffe Highway murders of 1811 to the first murder trial with fingerprint technology (the Stratton brothers in 1905), In the Shadow of the Ripper charts the grisly history of crime and focuses on the technological developments that brought real justice just a little closer. General practitioners, police surgeons, anatomists, chemists and many others argued with each other in spectacular cases like the Ripper murders in 1888, the poisonings of William Palmer, Florence Maybrick and the axe frenzy of Lizzie Borden. And if the expert witnesses disagreed, how were juries, ‘twelve men and true’, with no scientific knowledge supposed to come to a verdict at a murder tria? oday, we take forensic science with all its brilliance for granted. In the Shadow of the Ripper looks at how it all began. The Ripper case is a shining example of the fact that it does not matter how many forensic advances are made, a killer in the shadows can sometimes outwit the police and science for over 135 years … and counting.

Richard III is England’s most controversial king. Forever associated with the murder of his nephews, the Princes in the Tower, he divides the nation. As spectacular as his death at Bosworth in August 1485 – the last king of England to die in battle – the astonishing discovery of his bones under a Leicester car park five centuries later renewed interest in him and re-opened old debates. Is he the world’s most wicked uncle; or is he (in the words of the man who most smeared him) ‘a prince more sinned against than sinning’?Richard was not born in the North; neither did he die there, but this detailed look at his life, tracing his steps over the thirty-three years that he lived, focuses on the area that he loved and made his own. As Lord of the North, he had castles at Middleham and Sheriff Hutton, Penrith and Sandal. He fought the Scots along the northern border and on their own territory. His son was born at Middleham and was invested as Prince of Wales at York Minster, where Richard planned to set up a college of 100 priests.His white boar device can be found in obscure corners of churches and castles; his laws, framed in the single parliament of his short reign, gave rights to the people who served him and loved him north of the Trent. And when he felt threatened or outnumbered by his enemies during the turbulent years of the Wars of the Roses, it was to the men of the North that he turned for support and advice. They became his knights of the body; members of the Council of the North which outlived Richard by a 150 years. They died with him at Bosworth.Although we cannot divorce Richard from the violent politics of the day or from events that happened far to the South, it was in the North that Richard’s heart lay.The North was his home. It was the place he loved.

They were often half-starved, marching through an alien land with few signposts and no maps. They were often suffering from dysentery, their legwear rolled down and they sometimes fought naked from the waist down. They were paid 6d a day – the same as a civilian craftsman – and they swore like the troopers they were. That was why the French called them the Goddamns and king and peasant alike were terrified of them. With their yew wood bows and ash arrows a clothyard long, they were the victors in countless clashes during the Hundred Years War and in the three great battles of Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt.They robbed, pillaged, raped and murdered, often in their king’s name. Yet they won battles and it is no exaggeration to say that England became a powerful nation state because of them. If they were caught in action by the enemy, they would have their bow fingers cut off and their throats slit. We know the names of very few of them. They were not worthy of ransom, unlike the knights they fought for. Most of them ended up in mass burial pits or some unmarked plot beside a French road. The vast majority was illiterate, so we have no firsthand accounts of their campaigns from the bowmen themselves. For all they won battles and renown, for all they helped indirectly to increase the power of the common man, they are like ghosts drifting over the battlefield.They were the bowmen.

On 2 November 1952, two teenagers, Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig, tried to break into a warehouse in Croydon, Surrey. The police were called and in the minutes that followed, Craig wounded one policeman and shot another dead.At 16, Craig was too young to hang, but Bentley, at 19, was not. Even though he had not fired a shot or carried a gun and was under arrest at the time PC Sidney Miles died, Bentley was deemed to be guilty of murder. The law – of joint felonious enterprise – was unjust and Bentley had an IQ of 66 (the national average is 100). Even so, he was hanged at Wandsworth in February 1953.Nearly forty years later, PC Claude Pain, who was there at the time of the shooting, told a different story. He was on the warehouse rooftop and saw the whole thing. What really hanged Bentley were the words he allegedly used, ‘Let him have it, Chris’. And Pain did not hear those words.M.J. Trow''s Let Him Have It, Chris, published in 1990, was based on Pain’s new evidence. Eight years later, the conviction against Bentley was overturned – not as a result of police corruption, but because of the appallingly partial performance of the trial judge, Lord Goddard.At the time, access to any material relating to the case was denied and only now, with the Freedom of Information Act, can Pain’s testimony be refuted. He was not on the roof. His original deposition is still in The National Archive.This book aims to put the record straight. There was indeed a dreadful miscarriage of justice in 1952 – one of many before and since – and, in a way, Claude Pain was part of it.