I'm David Soucher, and this is Blood Ties.

Hi everyone, welcome back to the Blood Ties podcast. I'm Molly Wansall, but I am not here with my father, Jeffrey Wansel. He is separate to me, safe at home. We're self-isolating.

And in these unprecedented times, sending you a slightly different version of blood ties for a few weeks until we work out how we can keep recording together.

I had a very amusing morning teaching Jeffrey how to record and use all the technical equipment on his own.

I'm sure he's done an absolutely triumphant job.

Enjoy this week's podcast and we'll be back with more news.

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the Blood Ties podcast. This is a rather unusual Blood Ties podcast

because Molly and I aren't actually

sitting opposite one another. We're both self-isolating. More for security and caution than any

other reason, but certainly a wise move, I think, in these testing times. But it's wonderful that

you're listening. We get such wonderful, incredibly enthusiastic responses.

And I can tell you from the bottom of my heart, it really is in these times an absolute joy that you're there.

So we promised to do a podcast about one of the most extraordinary cases in recent British criminal history.

It concerns a boy, a 13-year-old boy called Carl Bridgewater.

He was a paper boy.

We don't have them very much nowadays, but this was 1978, who delivered papers in a village near Stourbridge in the West Midlands, Worcestershire.

He was a very cheerful boy, always smiling. If you Google him, you'll see many pictures of him looking

extremely cheerful. He was a delight, but he was only 13. And on this particular day,

the 19th of September, 1978, he was delivering to a farm called U-Tree Farm, which the occupants were elderly cousins, Mary Poole and Fred Jones, and they were out at the time.

And the supposition was that Carl had knocked on the door to deliver the paper and in the process had disturbed a burglar

because the boy, Carl Bridgewater,

paid literally with his life.

...