Fatal Families - Unleashing the evil within (Infamous Murderers) by Rodney Castleden Page B

apparently goading Freddy to murder Percy. Stupidly, she made a statement to the police saying that Percy had felt ill and collapsed, that she saw no-one attack him. Presumably she hoped by doing this to avoid giving a description that would lead the police to Freddy, but they had already reached Freddy and knew from him what had happened. Edith made another statement, but by this time she had already done herself irreparable damage.
    Edith decided to present herself and Freddy as a romantic hero and heroine, using and defending her letters as witnesses to their great passion. She was not only a great reader of romantic fiction; she was in her way a great writer of romantic fiction too. Her letters are fluent flights of fancy derived mainly from the cheap fiction she read. Freddy’s attack on Percy was to be seen as a forgivable crime of passion.
    The letters were in fact a godsend to the prosecution. In the letters she came across as a shameless wanton, which did her no good in court. She had written fantasies based on her novelettes about poisoning her husband with quinine or broken light-bulb glass, and these could easily be turned into the raw materials of a conspiracy to murder. Thompson’s body was exhumed and tested for poison, but no trace could be found by the two distinguished pathologists who studied it. Freddy Bywaters ceaselessly protested Edith’s innocence, but to no avail.
    The evidence of poisoning could not be produced, but it was possible to use the letters to suggest that she was guilty of aiding and abetting the murder. The Solicitor General misled the jury when he said that Edith’s correspondence contained ‘undoubted evidence’ of a ‘preconcerted meeting between Mrs Thompson and Bywaters at the place’, that is, the place where the murder took place. The letters contain no such thing, but the jurors were in no position to check because only half of Edith’s correspondence was submitted as evidence. Were the jury to assume or guess that the Solicitor General was lying? That would not have seemed very likely. The judge in effect reinforced this deadly lie in his summing-up, by failing to correct it. He should have explained, then or before, why many of the letters had been withheld; it was simply because they contained material that was deemed too sexually explicit. Her two pregnancies were described. One of the letters described having sex with Freddy in the open air in Wanstead Park.
    Even the letters that were deemed fit for the jury to read were fairly raunchy by the standards of the day, though they consisted largely of fantasies. The foreman of the jury said, ‘It was my duty to read them to the members of the jury. . . Nauseous is hardly strong enough to describe their contents . . . Mrs Thompson’s letters were her own condemnation.’
    Both of them were found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. Edith sobbed, ‘Take me home, Dad!’ as she was taken to the cells.
    Edith’s appeal was rejected. The Lord Chief Justice declared that this was ‘a common and ordinary charge of a wife and another murdering her husband’. There were appeals to the King and Queen and the Prime Minister. A newspaper tried to beg a reprieve from William Bridgeman, the Home Secretary, at his holiday home in Wales. All to no avail.
    What counted heavily against Edith Thompson was the fact that she was an older woman, a successful businesswoman, whereas Bywaters was no more than a young merchant seaman. Obviously the murder was set up by the dominant partner – in this case the woman. Another factor was the explicitness of her letters, which contained references to their sexual activity. She was a brazen adulteress. In the final analysis, Edith Thompson was hanged for sexual wickedness, for adultery. Even the foreman of the jury admitted as much.
    In Holloway, as the execution date approached, Edith Thompson disintegrated emotionally and psychologically. The prison doctor was giving her increasingly heavy