This is exactly right.

The courtroom isn't just about justice. It's about power and money and some truly bizarre loopholes.

I'm Michael Foote. And I'm Melissa Malbranche, and we've got a brand new show called Brief Recess, Illegal Podcast.

Every week, we talk about wild tales from court, trials gone wrong, and cases and rulings that shape our world.

Today we're going to be talking about stolen antiquities, all the weird things Melissa found at in a state sale, the crazy conversations I had with the bouncer and J.K. Rowling. We make the complicated clear and the serious, surprisingly fun. From the exactly right network, new episodes of Brief Recess drop every Thursday. Watch Brief Recess on YouTube. Listen to Brief Recess on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

This seemed so anomalous, and the house had seemed so well secured with the great wall around it, and it seemed like the safest place to have a child and to protect a child.

I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas.

I'm also the host of the historical true crime podcast, Tenfold War Wicked, and the co-host of the podcast, Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled around the world interviewing people for the show,

and they are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true crime stories, and now we want to

tell you those stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More Wicked

Presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make good and bad. It's a deep dive

into the stories behind the stories. The brutal murder of a three-year-old shocked

Victorian England not only because of how it happened, but because of who the police

suspected. Could one of Britain's most famous detectives solve the case?

Author Kate Somerscale tells us the story at the center of her book, The Suspitions of Mr. Witcher.

Let's start with where we are in time.

What year are we talking about and where does the central action take place in your story?

This murder took place in a village in the English countryside in Wiltshire in 1860.

So it was the height of Victoria's reign over Britain and a time when the domestic ideal was at its height as well, the idea of the

sanctity of the home and the perfection of the sort of bourgeois middle-class family.

Tell me a little bit about the village because we have a largely American audience who I'm

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