The Merry Widow Of Bicester
True Crime Historian
Richard O Jones
4.4 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 26 April 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Strange crime of the Mary Widow of Bister. |
| 0:05.0 | Fast sleuthing by Scotland Yard solved one of the most gruesome murders in more than a decade. |
| 0:15.0 | A tradesman first discovered the bodies of the three women sprawled about in the tall grass of the |
| 0:24.3 | quiet orchard bordering a small cottage at Matfield near Tunbridge and Kent, England. |
| 0:30.6 | His first reaction was that these three were victims of an air raid, but he could see no signs of a bomb explosion. Fearizing that they must have been victims of a strafing by some low-flying Nazi reconnaissance plane, |
| 0:43.3 | he mounted his bicycle and sped back to the nearby village, spreading the alarm as he rode. |
| 0:50.3 | By the time the local constable arrived on the scene, the orchard was fast filled with the morbidly curious and the alarmed. |
| 0:59.0 | The three dead women were well known in the vicinity. They were Mrs. Dorothy Fisher, her 20-year-old daughter, Frida, and Charlotte Saunders, their maid. |
| 1:09.0 | The maid lay some distance from the other two, apparently |
| 1:12.8 | having been done in just as she started to cross the yard to serve a tray of tea and cakes |
| 1:18.3 | to her employers. She had fallen forward across the tray and lay amid a welter of smashed |
| 1:25.2 | crockery and pulverized cookies. |
| 1:28.3 | It did not require a second glance for the constable to determine that the three women were |
| 1:32.6 | not victims of machine gun bullets, but of blasts from a shotgun fired at close range. |
| 1:38.6 | A cursory examination of the wounds disclosed that at least six loads of buckshot had been distributed between the three victims. |
| 1:47.0 | This looks like murder, declared the constable. It's a case for Scotland Yard. |
| 1:53.0 | So it happened recently that while the mass murder of war was taking its toll in bomb-racked London, |
| 2:00.0 | A's detectives from England's famed Scotland |
| 2:03.0 | yard set about solving one of the strangest, most cold-blooded homicide cases in years. |
| 2:10.2 | It involved the unraveling of a complicated domestic tangle, wherein a wealthy publisher |
| 2:15.8 | and his wife had lived for a time under the same roof with |
| 2:19.9 | their respective lovers, and resulted in the spectacular trial and conviction of the |
... |
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