Welcome to Soho Strangler Week by Murdwell. To accompany the series, here's a few

extra details from the police files and the court records, to aid your enjoyment and

maybe even help you grant the case. This episode is about how the newspapers reporting

of the murders changed eyewitness testimony. Now this is a problem. As the people get

their information from newspapers and the people believe that what they're reading in those

newspapers is factually accurate, then what eyewitnesses to the murder believe they have

seen can actually change when they start to question their own senses based on what

the red in those newspapers. Now I'm going to show you this by taking you back to Stanley

King. So Stanley King was the boyfriend of Dutch Leia, the third victim of the Soho Strangler.

We've got two statements by him here. The first statement on the 9th of May 1936 and the

day that Dutch Leia's body was discovered. It's eight pages long, I won't read you the

whole thing, but what I'll do is I'll read a bit at the start and a bit when he discovered

the body. We can kind of dip into that, but it's it's all pretty much factual. And then

statement number two, and this was on the 13th of May 1936, four days after the body was discovered.

But more importantly, the press had really gone into overdrive around this point. They weren't

factually accurate. They weren't accurate really reporting the murder. What they were doing

was trying to sensationalize it, make it really exciting, start talking about a Soho Strangler,

start talking about a Soho killer or monster. So I'll read his second statement and you'll see

how his details have started to change and how his recollection is based on what he's read in

the newspapers. And it is written right there at the start that he has got this from newspapers.

So let's dip in. The first statement, 9th of May 1936 is Stanley King's first statement taken

on the day when he discovered the body. So it starts off pretty standard as you would expect.

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