This Thames Television courtroom drama series (written by Clive Exton based on official transcripts) featured reconstructions of five notable murder trials between 1911 and 1946.
Actors in the six episodes included Maurice Denham, Tony Steedman, Ian Hendry, Harold Innocent, Geoffrey Bayldon, Paul Darrow and Bernard Lee. Much of the casting was done on a “look-alike” basis, especially in the cases of legal figures such as Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the pathologist who gave evidence in three of the cases (played by Derek Waring).
The series debuted with the two-part ‘Stinie Morrison Case’, dealing with the brutal murder on New Year’s Day 1911 of Russian-born Leon Beron (Alfred Hoffman), who was found clubbed to death, stabbed and mutilated on London’s Clapham Common. Stephen Greif played the accused, Russian Jewish immigrant Stinie Morrison.
‘The Crumbles Murder’ told the story of Patrick Herbert Mahon (Maurice Colbourne) and his mistress, Emily Kaye, who conducted a “love experiment”. Her remains – dismembered, fragmented and boiled – were found in a bungalow on the Crumbles, a shingle waste near Eastbourne, Sussex. Did it go so wrong that he murdered her? Maurice Denham played the cantankerous Mr Justice Avory.
‘Murder at The Metropole’ followed the trial of Sidney Harry Fox (Christopher Timothy), a homosexual accused of strangling his 63-year-old mother, Rosaline (Mary Andow) – whose body was dragged from a burning room in the Metropole Hotel in Margate, Kent – for her £3,000 life insurance.
Commercial traveller Alfred Rouse (Martin Jarvis) was on trial in ‘The Blazing Car Murder’ for the murder of an unknown man whose body was found in a blazing car in Northampton in 1930. Rouse – a serial bigamist – had attempted to fake his own death.
In ‘The Chalkpit Murder’, Thomas John Ley (Bernard Lee), the former Minister for Justice in New South Wales, Australia, and Lawrence John Smith (Ray Armstrong), a joiner, were accused of murdering John Mudie (Philip Donaghy), a Reigate barman who Ley suspected of a liaison with a former mistress of his. Mudie’s body was found dumped in a chalk pit on Woldingham Common in Surrey in 1946.
Episodes
The Stinie Morrison Case (1911): Part 1 | The Stinie Morrison Case (1911): Part 2 | The Crumbles Murder (1924) | Murder at the Metropole (1930) | The Blazing Car Murder (1930) | The Chalkpit Murder (1946)
