Catch up TV

Series 3: Episode 9

Leading criminal barristers Sasha Wass and Jeremy Dein investigate the fatal poisoning of a 49-year-old wealthy lodger at a family mansion.\n\nLondon, 1911. Insurance salesman Frederick Seddon arranged a hasty funeral for his tenant, spinster Eliza Barrow, who had, it was initially believed, died from diarrhoea and exhaustion after a brief illness. Miss Barrow's relatives were shocked to discover not only that the family had not been informed, but that Eliza had signed over her extensive assets of East India trading stock and property to the landlord she had known for less than a year in the belief that he would look after her recently adopted 10-year-old son, Ernest Grant.\n\nEliza's body was exhumed and found to contain fatal levels of arsenic. Frederick Seddon and his wife Margaret were arrested and charged. Seddon claimed Miss Barrow accidentally killed herself by consuming the poison from flypaper in her living quarters. Mrs Seddon was acquitted and returned to the couple's five children, but in March 1912 Frederick Seddon was convicted of murder at the Old Bailey and sentenced to death. But was this a miscarriage of justice based on circumstantial evidence and a questionable motive?\n\nNow, 107 years later, Frederick Seddon's relative Paul wants to learn if the controversy associated with his family is justified. Was Frederick Seddon capable of murder?\n\nSasha and Jeremy explore the toxicology evidence, examining the very flypaper artefacts from the trial, which today are held in New Scotland Yard's crime museum. They also examine the forensic accountancy that surrounded the coincidental transactions between Miss Barrow and Frederick Seddon immediately prior to her death.

Source: BBC 1