About this episode
In October 1892, a young woman arrived quietly at a respectable house in Putney.Within four days she was dead.The death certificate appeared entirely straightforward — embolism, thrombosis, and chronic kidney disease. Natural causes. The body was buried, and the matter might easily have ended there.But suspicion soon began to grow.Within weeks the Home Secretary ordered the grave to be opened, and what Victorian forensic surgeons discovered during the post-mortem revealed that the medical certificate had told a very different story.A doctor and his wife were arrested.An undertaker was accused of helping conceal the truth.And the man believed to have carried out the fatal operation — Dr Richard Freeman — had already vanished.The newspapers soon gave the case a name:The Putney Mystery.Tonight we explore the strange death of Ellen Matilda Franklin — the hurried burial, the evidence hidden inside the coffin, and the sensational Old Bailey trial that followed when Victorian forensic science began to expose what had really happened in a quiet house in Chelverton Road.
