The case could not name a killer — but it still destroyed nearly everyone it touched. This week, what became of them all.
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Previously: a barrister is poisoned in his own bed, four people in the house have reasons to be glad of it, and the evidence gave one of them a strong alibi. No one is ever charged. But the case does not need a courtroom to ruin a life.
Here is where it left them.
Florence — the wife with the fortune and a scandalous past. Money could not save her. The court didn’t try her, but the press did. When she testified, women and children were sent from the room so the sordid details of her life wouldn’t corrupt them. She left Balham for the coast and drowned her sorrows in drink. Two years later, she was dead at thirty-three, abandoned by her family who could not forgive her. The forty thousand pounds she’d inherited from her first husband bought her nothing in the end, not even a good name.
Dr. Gully — the doctor, decades her senior, whose one affair had ruined him. He had been one of the most fashionable physicians in England, and his list of A-list patients included Charles Darwin and Alfred Lord Tennyson. The inquest dragged the affair into public view and permanently stained his distinguished reputation. From then on, Gully’s name was inseparable from the scandal.
George Griffiths — the fired coachman, and the first to fall under suspicion. Dismissed before the wedding, stripped of his home, and heard in a Balham pub threatening that Bravo would be dead within months, he had also previously purchased the same compound that killed Charles. But he’d been gone from The Priory since before the marriage, and said he’d disposed of the antimony when he left. More importantly, he was working in Kent on the night Charles fell ill. Motive and means, yes. Opportunity, no. Suspicion moved on, and Griffiths faded from the case.
