SUCH WAS THEIR GUILT

Hardback. True-crime cases which show many and varied patterns of guilt. The central characters in such vivid human dramas afford many sharp comparisons, ranging from a family man who strangled young girls after he had drunk several glasses of beer to a political assassin with an hysterical sense of destiny, from a woman who slew to protect her husband to another who destroyed hers. The men were convicted, the women freed. There is guilt occasioned by a terrible fantasy of a dairy farmer who became a murder machine and guilt that derived from a doctor's great compassion for the suffering; the guilt of the self-deceived and the guilt of the failures whose one success is finding a target for blame. The cases span the civilised world and cover a century and a half, and the majority of them, when heard in the courts, made legal history, sometimes with an impact on the quality of justice dispensed today. Cases include : J Bellingham (1812); Henriette Caillaux (France 1914); Courvoisier (1840); Soderman (Australia 1936); Dr. H. Sander (USA 1950); P.L. Mapleton (1881); Yvonne Chevallier (France 1951); Stanley Graham (New Zealand). 168pp. 8vo. h/back. From the library of true crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. Vg+ in sl. sunned Vg. dw.