Pretty Jane and the viper of Kidbrooke Lane : a true story of Victorian law and disorder
(Book)

Includes bibliographical references (pages 223-263) and index.

A vivid and violent investigation into the first unsolved murder case of the Victorian Era which involved a pregnant maid in the house of the renowned Pook family.

April 26th, 1871. In one of London's remotest beats a brutalized young woman is found kneeling in the muddy road, her face smashed and battered. The woman muttered "let me die, " slipped into a coma, and died five days later. She was Jane Maria Clouson, sixteen-year-old servant to the Pooks, a respectable Greenwich family. Hours after her death her master's son, Edmund, was arrested for her murder. Murphy creates a gripping narrative of the police procedural and the ensuing legal drama, with its many twists and turns, from the discovery of the body until the final judgment-- and applies contemporary forensic methods to this Victorian cold case