By Kim Donovan
ESSAY
I was 10 years old when I discovered that my great-great aunt had been murdered. I can vividly remember the day: I was looking through my grandparents’ old photographs, when I came across a black-and-white image of a man and a woman, posing for a formal portrait in a photographer’s studio. It was a cabinet card, a photograph mounted on a piece of stiff cardboard in a manner that was popular in the late 19th century.
“Who are these people?” I asked my grandmother. She pointed to the woman. “That’s Mary Jane Bennett, my mother’s half-sister.” My grandmother paused, before adding: “She was murdered just before my mother was born.”
The man in the photograph was my great-great aunt’s husband. I would later learn that the image had been taken in a small studio in Great Yarmouth around the time of their marriage in 1897, during what (I imagined) to be a romantic holiday. The love they shared would soon begin to crumble, just as the rounded edges of the cardboard mount had 100 years later.
As the years passed, I kept being pulled back to the image, and when I eventually decided to start researching the story, only fragments of the narrative remained. At the time, I was motivated by a desire to know the truth, to discover the facts of the case, and to be able to tell my grandmother and other members of our family what had happened to our relative all those years ago. I would eventually realise that there were some things my grandmother would probably have preferred to stay hidden.
Over the course of my research, I unearthed long forgotten family secrets that had brought great shame to my great-great grandfather and his family when they were revealed in court at the turn of the 20th century. These shames were recounted so vividly by reporters, that – when I read the accounts – I felt as if I were sat in that grim, gloomy courtroom alongside them: a voyeur bearing witness to the disclosure of hidden truths that would have deeply shocked my grandmother had she still been alive to hear them. I could picture the scene, imagine the gasps that had reverberated around the room, see the reporters scratching gleefully on their parchment, recording the latest chapter in this sensational story.
While interest in true crime has soared in recent years, a thirst for crime news has existed for centuries. The Victorians
