England's Triple Arsenic Poison Mystery - The Croydon Poisonings

England's Triple Arsenic Poison Mystery - The Croydon Poisonings In the winter of 1929, a mother and daughter in one South Croydon family died eighteen days apart. The man who had married into that family had died the spring before. All three were exhumed, all three held arsenic, and this British true crime case, the Croydon Poisonings, remains an unsolved murder mystery to this day. Edmund Duff, Vera Sidney and Violet Sidney died between April 1928 and March 1929, in two houses a few minutes' walk apart near Birdhurst Rise. Scotland Yard investigated, Sir Bernard Spilsbury examined the bodies, and three inquests heard more than two hundred hours of evidence. Suspicion settled on the family itself, but the Director of Public Prosecutions refused to bring a case, and nobody was ever charged. In this historical true crime documentary, we go back to the original police file and the coroner's records to separate what happened from what has been repeated for almost a century, including the one verdict nearly every retelling gets wrong. SOURCES Metropolitan Police file MEPO 3/861, The National Archives, Kew Croydon coroner's records COR/1 130 and 132, Croydon Local Studies and Archives Contemporary newspaper reports, 1928 to 1929 Diane Janes, Poisonous Lies: The Croydon Arsenic Mystery (The History Press, 2010) Richard Whittington-Egan, The Riddle of Birdhurst Rise (Harrap, 1975) Subscribe to Crime Residual for historical true crime documentaries told straight from the original records. #CroydonPoisonings #BritishTrueCrime #UnsolvedMystery