OCTOBER OF 1910 WAS A VINTAGE MONTH FOR murder trials in England. On Saturday, the twenty-second, after a five-day trial at the Old Bailey in London, the expatriate American doctor Hawley Harvey Crippen was found guilty of poisoning his wife Cora, who was best known by her stage name of Belle Elmore. And on the following Monday, Mark Wilde entered the dock in Court Number One at Chester Castle to stand trial for the stabbing of George Harry Storrs. He was the second person to be tried for the murder—the first, Cornelius Howard, a cousin of the victim, having earlier been found not guilty.

The "Gorse Hall mystery," as it became known from its mise-en-scene, the stately residence of the murdered man near the town of Stalybridge in Cheshire, was at that time almost twelve months old; and it had captured the imagination of the British public since the morning of November 2, 1909, when, according to one reporter, "the whole country was thrilled with the news of the outrage." Though Storrs, a wealthy mill-owner, had only a few weeks before erected a massive alarm bell on the roof of Gorse Hall after telling the police of an attempt on his life, it did not save him from being stabbed to death by a mysterious intruder. Storrs died of multiple wounds without revealing anything about his attacker, though it was the impression of persons who came to hisaid that he could have identified his assailant.

Jonathan Goodman, through a painstaking reconstruction and analysis of the case almost threequarters of a century after the event, has come up with strong evidence regarding the motive for the crime and the identity of the murderer.