TV & Radio
Late July BBC One and BBC iPlayer
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No matter how much we all hope to find colourful stories as we research our family histories, discovering a tale of grisly murder is at best unsettling. But what if you come to believe that your relative was innocent? Enter leading criminal barristers Sasha Wass QC and Jeremy Dein QC, who return to host a fourth series of the popular daytime show where they reinvestigate historical cases, probing whether convictions from the past are safe – or to our modern-day eyes seem to have been miscarriages of justice.
In the first of 10 new episodes, the duo trace events in Liverpool in May 1889, when cotton-broker James Maybrick died after a two-week battle with illness. When a postmortem revealed traces of arsenic, suspicion fell on his wife Florence.
In the terms by which Victorian society judged women, she was not a sympathetic figure. Despite a veneer of respectability, the couple were troubled by financial problems – and, crucial at her trial, stories of infidelities swirled around both husband and wife. On 7 August 1889, following a week-long trial in which much of the time was taken up by a lengthy summing-up from the judge, she was found guilty of murder. However, as relation Dave Maybrick knows through a fascination with the case that began during his childhood, this is a story with further twists.
As ever, Wass and Dein look at the evidence in the case dispassionately prior to taking their findings to Judge David
Radford, who ‘rules’ over whether the convictions featured in the series should be regarded as safe.
The programme’s sister show Case Closed? is also coming back for another run. Five new episodes will see the barristers revisit previous shows to track the new developments as relations fight to clear a forebear’s name.