Since her execution at Holloway prison in 1923, Edith Thompson has haunted the conscience of the nation. Grave doubts were expressed at the time about the extent to which she was responsible for her husband’s murder in Ilford by her handsome young lover Frederick Bywaters. The Home Office files on the case were marked not to be opened for 100 years.
Edith Thompson was possessed of an irresistible zest for life. The case against her rested largely on the evidence provided by some seventy letters which she wrote to Bywaters. Her correspondence has been admired by some for its romantic ardour and vivacious intelligence, while many of her contemporaries shied away from its candid intimations of sensuality, sexual betrayal, and conjugal oppression. The truth is that these letters offer a unique insight into the workings of an overwrought romantic imagination, ultimately unable to free itself from the constraints of a suburban marriage and respectability. Through this correspondence and a painstaking reconstruction of the era, the author argues that Edith Thompson was innocent. In the end she was the victim of a moral climate that cast her in the role of a femme fatale who seduced a younger man and thereby brought herself, him, and her husband to perdition. Not only her death, but the manner of her death, has long been the subject of rumours and bitter controversy. As a study of that tragic life Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson is also an indictment of a society that refused to acknowledge female sexuality.
While researching this book in the 1980s the author was granted unrestricted privileged access by the Home Secretary to all closed files on the case of Thompson and Bywaters.
