Not Guilty: Women Acquitted of Murder in England and Wales the Verdict That Followed Them

They heard "Not guilty." Britain kept trying them anyway.From Victorian poison scares to the interwar scandal press, women accused of murder could leave an English courtroom acquitted - and discover that the public had reached a different verdict.Not Guilty is British historical true crime about twelve women whose cases exposed the gap between criminal justice and public judgment. Drawing on Old Bailey proceedings, law reports, parliamentary debates, contemporary newspapers and modern scholarship, Eleanor Kenward reconstructs remarkable trials and forgotten lives from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Inside the book: - Beatrice Pace - arsenic, a five-month inquest and an acquittal that did not give her old life back.- Adelaide Bartlett - chloroform, a baffling medical mystery and one of Victorian Britain's most discussed murder trials.- Annie Hearn - arsenic, exhumations and a celebrated defence at Bodmin.- Ethel Le Neve - Crippen's companion, tried at the Old Bailey for what she knew after the murder.- Florence Bravo - never charged, yet publicly examined in one of the era's most sensational inquests.- Alma Rattenbury - acquitted of murder, then forced to live with the verdict delivered outside the courtroom. More than a collection of murder casesThis is also a history of Victorian and Edwardian crime, women on trial, the Old Bailey, forensic evidence, insanity, double jeopardy, the popular press and the meaning of an acquittal. It asks a question that remains unsettlingly modern: what is a not-guilty verdict worth when newspapers, neighbours and history refuse to accept it?For readers of British true crime, historical crime, criminal justice, Victorian social history and famous courtroom cases, Not Guilty tells the stories of women who won in court - and then had to live with everything that followed.