The Musical Milkman Murder

Description

On October 8, 1920 the body of a young woman named Kate Lilian Bailey, aged 22, was discovered. It transpired that her husband, George Arthur Bailey, had poisoned his seven-months pregnant wife with prussic acid, and with a whiff of the same chloroform he used to ease her final anguish, sedated his three-year-old daughter whom he placed in bed next to the corpse. Fourteen hours later, he fled the cottage, taking his child to relatives in Swindon before being arrested three days after the murder, at Reading Station with four kinds of poison in his pockets. Police also found a note suggesting that Bailey had intended to kill his little girl as well as himself and his wife. So was this simply the botched suicide pact of a devoted couple that had gone tragically out of control? All would be revealed at a sensational 1921 trial at Aylesbury Assizes; a shabby record of forgery, fraud, theft, false information and army desertion. Bailey – also known to the police as George Cox...