Top criminal barristers Jeremy Dein QC and Sasha Wass QC revisit the complex case against a Victorian auctioneer accused alongside his brother and two others of murdering his wife.

Penge, 1877. On 12 April a desperately frail woman was taken on an arduous journey from rural Kent to Penge on the outskirts of south east London. That woman was 36-year-old wealthy heiress Harriett Staunton. Moaning and barely conscious, she had to be carried the final stretch to her lodging house. Medical help was sought, but nothing could be done. By the following afternoon, Harriett was dead.

Her body was found to be in an emaciated state, filthy and riddled with lice. The cause of her death was starvation and neglect, and suspicion soon fell on her husband, 26-year-old Louis Staunton. He was charged along with three other people: his brother Patrick, Patrick’s wife Elizabeth, and Elizabeth’s sister Alice Rhodes, who was also Louis’s mistress.

The trial of Louis Staunton attracted huge public attention and relied upon contentious medical evidence. The four accused desperately pleaded their innocence, but after seven days the jury returned a verdict of guilty, and Louis Staunton and his three family members were sentenced to death. But the story didn’t end there.

Nearly 150 years later, Louis Staunton’s grandson Nigel sought justice. He had been researching the case against his grandfather for 14 years and strongly questioned the original conviction. He enlisted the help of the barristers to explore whether there truly was a compelling motive and to closely examine the complex medical evidence that proved central to the case. The barristers then tried to put together a compelling argument to persuade Judge Radford that Louis Staunton’s case was a miscarriage of justice.

Now, a year on from that initial investigation, Jeremy and Sasha catch up with Nigel to discover that the case is far from closed. Nigel is on a mission to determine the cause of Harriet's death in the hope of clearing his grandfather's name for good. Show less