THE current controversy over the Not Proven verdict which is unique to the Scottish criminal justice system has rarely been placed in its historical context. That cannot be done in just one column, but I will attempt to do so over the next three weeks during which I will return to a particular case which continues to fascinate me – that of Madeleine Smith who I have now concluded got away with murder when the jury found the charge of poisoning her French lover not proven. That case in 1857 is usually claimed as the biggest not proven controversy of them all, but today and next week I am going to write about the most infamous case of the latter years of the 19th century that featured a contentious not proven verdict, namely the Ardlamont Murder of 1893, which is more properly known as the Ardlamont Mystery because the jury decided that the accused, Alfred John Monson, was not proven to have murdered Lieutenant Cecil Hambrough in a shooting incident. It was the most sensational
The Most Infamous Murders Of The Victorian Era Shutterstock
By Debra Kelly/Jan. 28, 2021 2:46 pm EDT
Murder is a strange thing. It s an act that to many is absolutely unthinkable, but at the same time fascinating. The idea that a human being sometimes, a perfectly ordinary-seeming person could take the life of another is so strange and yet so common.
And this is nothing new people have, of course, been killing other people since they figured out how to swing a club. Fast forward to the Victorian era, and killers were still killing they d just gotten much more creative.
While Jack the Ripper might be the most infamous of the Victorian era s murderers, he definitely wasn t the only one. The era was downright full of dastardly men and women, and some of them committed crimes so heinous they sound like something right out of a crime novel, or Netflix special. But they re not they re absolutely true, and even though they ve been overshadowed by the infamo