O’Neill Ryan, “The Courvoisier Case,” Washington University Law Review 12:1 (January 1926), 39-46. “English Causes Celebres,” Legal News 14:39 (Sept. Charles Phillips, and His Defence of Courvoisier,” Littell’s Living Age 25:313 (May 18, 1850), 289-311. Fisher, ed., The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1820-1832, 2009. “Trial, Confession, and Execution of Courvoisier for the Murder of Lord Wm. Samuel Warren, “The Mystery of Murder, and Its Defence,” in Miscellanies, Critical, Imaginative, and Juridical, 1855, 237-271. “Remarkable Cases of Circumstantial Evidence,” in Norman Wise Sibley, Criminal Appeal and Evidence, 1908. William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard: A Romance, 1839. Latton Pickering, Report of the Trial of Courvoisier for the Murder of Lord William Russell, June 1840, 1918.

Cummins, Remarkable Trials of All Countries, 1870. Yseult Bridges, Two Studies in Crime, 1959.Ĭlaire Harman, Murder by the Book: The Crime That Shocked Dickens’s London, 2019. Sources for our feature on the murder of Lord William Russell: Lewis Carroll invented an alphabet he could write in the dark. We’ll also marvel at Ireland’s greenery and puzzle over a foiled kidnapping. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll follow the investigation and trial, and the late revelation that decided the case. The evidence seemed to point to an intruder, but suspicion soon fell on Russell’s valet. In May 1840 London was scandalized by the murder of Lord William Russell, who’d been found in his bed with his throat cut.

Crime in Verse by Ellen L. O'Brien