A boozy spree, bloody banknotes . . . but would a jury convict today?

DAME agatha Christie could scarcely have devised a more twisted coincidence. On New Year’s eve 1934, a group of friends in a North-east pub gathered round for a riotous card game called murder.

One of them drew the ace of Spades, marking him out as the game’s ‘murderer’.

His name was John Stephenson Bainbridge, and the following day he was arrested and accused of slitting a man’s throat and beating him to death with a poker in a blood-drenched robbery.

The gruesome case came up for review in Murder, Mystery And My Family (BBC1), the highly watchable morning series in which two real-life barristers argue the details of a historic crime before a Crown Court judge.

Bainbridge, a soldier, was just 26 and recently engaged when he was hanged at Durham prison. He left no descendants, but 80 years on a distant cousin, Louise Bainbridge, was researching her family tree when she stumbled on newspaper accounts of the trial.

There were no witnesses to the murder and the evidence against Bainbridge was circumstantial . . . but damning. Deeply in debt, the young man had recently been turned down for a loan when he called on neighbour edward Herdman, who was known to keep large sums of money in his house.

a couple of hours after Bainbridge’s visit, Jenny Herdman discovered her father’s body.

That evening, suddenly flush, Bainbridge embarked on a boozy spree. The following day, his closest army pal received an envelope stuffed with bloodstained banknotes. The address was written in Bainbridge’s handwriting.

The show’s presenters, Sasha Wass and Jeremy Dein, are two of the most respected QCs in the country. They’ve been involved in high-profile murder cases such as the Fred and Rose West killings and Wass has been in the news this month as The Sun’s lawyer in the Johnny Depp libel case. But they struggled to find any chink in the evidence against Bainbridge.

He was guilty as Bill Sikes, which left a blot on Louise’s family tree.

The frustration in these historic investigations is the volume of facts that can’t be known. Bainbridge had blood on his shirt when he was arrested — he claimed he had cut himself shaving.

DNA tests weren’t developed for another 50 years, but why wasn’t it tested for a blood type match at the time? and was it Herdman’s blood on the money in the envelope? It’s intriguing to wonder whether a jury today would convict, with such gaps in the evidence . . . especially if a verdict of ‘guilty’ meant the gallows.

Joanna Lumley was revisiting old cases too, though hers were suitcases, on Unseen Adventures (ITV) — a collection of outtakes from her travelogues.

The difficulty is that La Lumley is such a consummate television performer that most of what she taped had found its way straight onto the screen. We saw a minute or two of her slip-sliding on the deck of an ice-breaker in northern Japan, and a sequence with an over-friendly mongrel in the deserted nuclear town of Fukushima, but it wasn’t hard to understand why these bits were left out of the shows.

She was in her element, though, in the natural spas of Nagano. Neck deep in steaming water, Jo was quick to explain she was wearing a ‘beige modesty towel — I wasn’t delighted at the idea of cavorting naked in front of a very lecherous camera crew’.

The problem was, she added, that she had to keep her bare knees from floating above the water-line . . . lest viewers mistake them for a pair of ‘saggy’ breasts. Really, such coarseness.