On Memorial Day 1933, Stanford executive David Lamson found his wife, Allene, dead in their Palo Alto home. The only suspect, he became the face of California s most sensational murder trial of the century. After a judge sentenced him to hang at San Quentin, a team of Stanford colleagues stepped in to form the Lamson Defense Committee. The group included poets Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis, as well as the Sherlock Holmes of Berkeley, criminologist E.O. Heinrich. They managed to overturn the verdict and incite a series of heated retrials that gripped and divided the community. Was Lamson the victim of aggressive prosecutors, or was he a master of deception whose connections helped him get away with murder? Author and Stanford alum Tom Zaniello meticulously examines the details of a notorious case with a lingering legacy."
This chronicle of ten controversial mid-Victorian trials features brother versus brother, aristocrats fighting commoners, an imposter to a family's fortune, and an ex-priest suing his ex-wife, a nun. Most of these trials--never before analyzed in depth--assailed a culture that frowned upon public displays of bad taste, revealing fault lines in what is traditionally seen as a moral and regimented society. The author examines religious scandals, embarrassments about shaky family trees, and even arguments about which architecture is most likely to convert people from one faith to another. Inhaltsverzeichnis Table of Contents Acknowledgments Preface Part I-A Crisis of Victorian Culture 1. The Specter 2. Outside the Law 3. The Court of Lost Causes 4. The Family Tree and Genealogical Puzzles 5. The Victorian Intellectual Aristocracy 6. Architects on the Defensive Part II-Ten Scandalous Court Cases 7. The Ex-Priest and the Nun Who Was His Former Wife: Connelly v. Connelly, 1849-1851 8. The Defrocked Dominican Priest and the Future Cardinal Whose Brothers Were Atheists: Regina v. J.H. Newman, 1851-53 9. The Royal By-Blow, the Wandering Statue, and the Religiously Divided Church: FitzClarence v. Blount, 1851-1852 10. The Medieval Architectural Folly, the Tenth Cousin, and the Earl Who Was a Jesuit: Talbot v. Earl of Shrewsbury, 1857-1867 11. The Convent Scandal, Fatty Mutton, and the Goosebury Fool: Saurin v. Star and Kennedy, 1869 12. The Twenty-Six-Stone Claimant and the Invisible Stonyhurst College Quadrangle: Tichborne v. Lushington, 1872-1873, and Regina v. Tom Castro, 1873-1874 13. The Catholic Lord and the Protestant Vicar in the Valley of Martyrs and Queens: The Duke of Norfolk v. Arbuthnot, 1879 14. The Archbishop and the Jesuit College Building Fund: Eyre-Eyre v. Eyre, 1883 15. The Lord Chief Justice and His Anti-Vivisectionist Son-in-Law: Adams v. Coleridge, 1885-1886 16. The Deathbed Letter and the Secret Codicil of the Perfidious Jesuit: Jerningham v. Caddell, 1888 Part III-The Unbuilt Victorian Church 17. Divided Churches, Divided Souls Chapter Notes Bibliography Index
