I think the simplest and best plan will be to give my own investigations, and notes of my various visits to Rugeley and many enquiries there, extending from 1859 to 1920. Then a general history of Palmer's family and life and murders, ending with the murder of John Parsons Cook when he was only thirty years old, for which he was tried at the Central Criminal Court and hanged in June 1856.

I have not only made a lifelong study of the whole of Palmer's life and various murders, as well as his trial, but I have had exceptional opportunities of looking into the whole matter, and perhaps not made as good a use of my chances as I now wish I had.

My earliest recollections begin with Cook coming to Bromsgrove (where my father practised as a doctor), when I was a schoolboy, and I carried his cricket-bag to the ground in the summer of 1855. And I remember my father strongly upbraiding him, a fine young man about twenty-seven years of age, telling him he was wasting his substance and his health in riotous living, racing, and general dissipation, adding, "Even now you are on your way to Worcester Races with a set of blacklegs and idlers, the worst of whom is that dissolute Dr. Palmer, who will rob you again and again"; and mother chimed in with a lot more to the same effect.