Murder on the Bluff

The Carew Poisoning Case

In a small white house by a remote Welsh cove, a 90-year-old woman died, full of secrets, on June 27, 1968. What no-one ever guessed was that the dignified and distant old lady, who kept a liveried chauffeur and bred Bedlington terriers, was a convicted murderess. More than half a century before, in Yokohama, Japan, she had been sentenced to death by hanging for the murder of her husband. Daughter of the Mayor of Glastonbury, and a relative of Winston Churchill, Edith Carew had married unwisely, and, reaching the end of her tether, the 28-year-old wife and mother of two rid herself of her swarthy diplomat husband -- the "dirty dog"Walter -- by poisoning him with arsenic. She was sentenced to death, but escaped the hangman. She was brought back to England and imprisoned alongside the celebrated Victorian murderess, Florence Maybrick. The Carew case has never been properly investigated before and Molly Whittington-Egan now reveals the answers to such puzzles as the identity of the 'woman in black' who bought arsenic from the Japanese chemist; the 'mysterious visitor', who stood crying at the door of the House on the Bluff, and would not give her name; of who wrote the strangely- anonymous letters which said that 'dead men tell no tales, nor dead women either'. Few such notable crimes remain untouched, and, until now it has been one about which no real information was available, and no book about it has been written. The author has succeeded not only in obtaining rare documentation from Japan, providing full data about the arrest and trial in Yokohama, but has also done a massive research job in tracing the hitherto hidden aftermath history of the murderess. She has, too, most unusually found Edith Carew's diary for 1896, the year of the murder. It is miraculously intact.