Kassia St Clair

He meets a Quaker widow.

It's very inconvenient if you are wooing a Quaker widow to have your lover and her two children around.

So he sets Sarah up in this house in Slough

and pays her child maintenance around about a pound a week.

And he visits her regularly to hand over the money.

You know, it's definitely premeditated.

And that probably would have been it.

He probably would have gotten away with it because, you know, Slough and London, although it's, you know, only an hour apart...

He could have taken off his coat while he was on the train, taken off his hat, and no one would have been any the wiser.

However, Slough Station in 1845 had a relatively new invention, which was the sort of an early model system of the telegraph.

Rather than arresting him on the platform, they decide to tail him.

John gets off.

He kind of wanders around.

He visits a sweet shop and then he wanders to his home, which is relatively near bank.

It's just a few streets away.

It's pretty much an open and shut case.

So the lawyer for the defense, you know, is really up against it.

Some of the evidence heard is kind of, you know, post-mortem.

They did kind of multiple rounds with different kind of testing out different poisons.

They ascertained that it was definitely prussic acid that had killed Sarah by doing this kind of the autopsy.