Raising the Poisoned Dead

In late 1862, the thin veneer of sedate, rural respectability, layer by layer, was painfully peeled back, to uncover a turbulent world of domestic violence and murder in the Lincolnshire hamlet of Moorhouses, located between Mareham le Fen and Revesby, nine miles from Horncastle. What had started as suspicion, gossip and malicious speculation, slowly curdled into a toxic cocktail, as the decayed bodies of two women were exhumed eighteen months after their deaths to reveal large quantities of arsenic embedded in their viscera. The story of John and Elizabeth Garner filled multiple newspaper columns, stuffed full of the sensational, the lurid and the shocking. It also led to serious questions concerning the competence of a distinguished judge and the naivety of an inexperienced jury, as well as claims of a miscarriage of justice which continued for over a quarter of a century. Raising the Poisoned Dead maps out the complex contours of a still unresolved mid-Victorian murder mystery which challenges the reader to work out just what took place in an obscure corner of nineteenth-century Lincolnshire.