Killer Forensics - Bad Science Sends a Young Cook to the Scaffold

Sandra Hempel is at St George the Martyr Church on Saturday 24 October, talking about a case from 1815 that went as wrong as a trial can get. The story centres on Eliza Fenning, a 21-year-old cook who was hanged after being accused of poisoning. Hempel reconstructs the investigation and the trial that followed, which she describes as a travesty.

It's a case that stayed in the public eye long after the scaffold. Charles Dickens wrote about it in 1867, when he pointed out 'the danger of condemning to death on circumstantial evidence alone'. Hempel traces how the case helped shape modern crime scene investigation, and how arsenic became the 19th century's murder weapon of choice.

Hempel is a former Times journalist and the author of The Inheritor's Powder: A Cautionary Tale of Poison, Betrayal and Greed, a Victorian true-crime mystery that was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. The talk draws on that background in true crime and historical research, so it's less a dry lecture and more a reconstruction of a life cut short by a flawed process.

If you're in the mood for a full afternoon of it, the story is dramatised that same day at the church in Eliza's Dumplings, so you can see the case played out on stage and then hear Hempel break down the real-life investigation. The talk runs from 16:15 to 17:00 at St George the Martyr Church, 44 Queen Square, Holborn, London, WC1N 3AH. It's free—just turn up.