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Edith
Jessie THOMPSON
Date of murder:
October 3, 1922
Victim profile:
Method of murder:
Stabbing with knife
Location: London,
England, United Kingdom
Status: Executed
by hanging in Pentonville Prison on January 9, 1923
(25 December 1893 – 9 January 1923) and Frederick Edward Francis
Bywaters (27 June 1902 – 9 January 1923) were a British couple who
were executed for the murder of Thompson’s husband Percy. Their case
became a cause célèbre.
Early life
and events leading to the murder
Born Edith Graydon at 97 Norfolk
Road in Dalston, London, the first of the five children of William
Eustace Graydon (1867–1941), a clerk with the Imperial Tobacco
Company, and his wife, Ethel Jessie Liles (1872–1938), the daughter of
a police constable.
During her childhood, she was a
happy, talented girl who excelled at dancing and acting, and was
academically bright, with a natural ability in arithmetic. Upon
leaving school, she found employment as a bookkeeper for a fabric
importer. She quickly established a reputation as a stylish and
intelligent woman and was promoted by the company several times, until
she became their chief buyer and made regular trips to Paris on behalf
of the company.
In 1909 she met Percy Thompson, and
after a six-year engagement they were married in 1916. They bought a
house in the fashionable town of Ilford in Essex and with both their
careers flourishing, lived a comfortable life.
The couple became acquainted with
Freddy Bywaters in 1920, although Bywaters and Edith Thompson had met
nine years earlier when Bywaters had been a school friend of Edith’s
younger brother.
By 1920 Bywaters had joined the
merchant navy. Edith was immediately attracted to Bywaters, who was
handsome and impulsive and whose stories of his travels around the
world interested Edith. By comparison Percy was a staid, conventional
person, and Bywaters represented a more dashing figure to her, and
more closely resembled her romantic ideal. He was welcomed by Percy,
and the trio, joined by Edith’s sister, holidayed on the Isle of
Wight. Upon their return, Percy invited Bywaters to lodge with them.
Edith and Bywaters began an affair
soon after, and when Percy realised this he confronted them. A quarrel
broke out and when Bywaters demanded that Percy divorce Edith, Percy
ordered him from the house. Edith later described a violent
confrontation with her husband after Bywaters left, and said that her
husband struck her several times and threw her across the room. From
September 1921 until September 1922, Bywaters was at sea, and during
this time Edith Thompson wrote to him frequently. Upon his return,
they met again.
The murder
On October 3, 1922 the Thompsons
attended a performance at the Criterion Theatre in London’s Piccadilly
Circus and were returning home, when a man jumped out from behind some
bushes near their home, and attacked Percy.
After a violent struggle, during
which Edith Thompson was also brutally knocked to the ground, Percy
was stabbed. Mortally wounded, he died before Edith could summon help.
The attacker fled. Neighbours later reported hearing a woman screaming
hysterically, and shouting “no don’t” several times, and by the time
police arrived she had still not composed herself.
At the police station she appeared
distressed and confided to police that she knew who the killer was,
and named Freddy Bywaters. Believing herself to be a witness, rather
than an accomplice, Thompson provided them with details of her
association with Bywaters.
As police investigated further they
arrested Bywaters, and upon discovering a series of more than sixty
love letters from Edith Thompson to Bywaters, arrested her too. The
letters were the only tangible evidence linking Edith Thompson to the
murders, and allowed for the consideration of common purpose, namely
that if two people wish to achieve the death of a third, and one of
these people acts on the expressed intentions of both, both are
equally guilty by law. They were each charged with murder.
The trial
The trial began on December 6, 1922
at the Old Bailey. Bywaters co-operated completely. He had led police
to the murder weapon he had concealed after the murder, and
consistently maintained that he had acted without Edith’s knowledge.
The love letters were produced as evidence.
In these Edith Thompson
passionately declared her love for Bywaters, and her desire to be free
of Percy. She said on one occasion she had ground a glass light bulb
to shards and had fed them to Percy mixed into mashed potato, and on
another occasion had fed him poison. Not only had he failed to die, he
had failed to become ill, and Edith now implored Freddy to “do
something desperate”.
Thompson’s counsel urged her not to
testify, stressing that the burden of proof lay with the prosecution
and that there was nothing they could prove other than that she had
been present at the murder. By this time Thompson seemed to be
enjoying the publicity she was attracting and insisted that she would
take the stand.
Her testimony proved damning, and
she was caught in a series of lies. Her demeanour was variously
flirtatious, self pitying and melodramatic and she made a poor
impression on the judge and the jury, particularly when she
contradicted herself. In answer to several questions relating to the
meaning of some of the passages in her letters, she said “I have no
idea”.
Her counsel later stated that her
vanity and arrogance had destroyed her chances for acquittal. Her
testimony negated the positive testimonies of neighbours who had heard
Thompson crying out in horror during her husband’s murder, and the
statements from police who dealt with the immediate investigation
stating that Thompson appeared to be in a genuine state of shock and
disbelief and attested to her assertions of “Oh god, why did he do
it?” and “I never wanted him to do it”.
Bywaters stated that Edith Thompson
had known nothing of his plans for the simple reason that he had not
intended to murder Percy Thompson. His aim was to confront him, and
force him to deal with the situation, and when Thompson had reacted in
a superior manner, Bywaters had lost his temper.
Edith Thompson, he repeatedly
stated, had made no suggestion to him to kill Percy, nor did she know
that Bywaters intended to confront him. In discussing the letters,
Bywaters stated that he had never believed Edith had attempted to harm
her husband, but that he believed she had a vivid imagination, fuelled
by the novels she enjoyed reading, and in her letters she viewed
herself in some way as one of these fictional characters.
On December 11, the jury returned a
verdict of guilty, and both Thompson and Bywaters were sentenced to
death by hanging. Thompson became hysterical and started screaming in
the court, while Bywaters loudly protested Thompson’s innocence.
Imprisonment and execution
Before and during the trial,
Thompson and Bywaters were the subjects of a highly sensationalist and
critical media commentary, but after they were sentenced to death,
there was a dramatic shift in public attitudes and in the media
coverage. Almost one million people signed a petition against the
imposed death sentences.
Bywaters attracted admiration for
his fierce loyalty and protectiveness towards Thompson. Thompson was
regarded as a foolish woman, but attracted sympathy as it was
generally considered that to hang a woman was abhorrent, and no woman
had been executed in Britain since 1907.
Thompson herself stated that she
would not hang, and when her parents were allowed to visit her she
urged her father to simply take her home. Despite the petition, and a
new confession from Bywaters in which he once again declared Thompson
to be completely innocent, the Home Secretary, William Bridgeman, did
not extend them a reprieve.
A few days before their executions
Thompson was told of the date which had been fixed, and lost her
composure. She spent the last few days of her life in a state of near
hysteria, crying, screaming and moaning, and unable to eat. On the
morning of her execution she was heavily sedated, but remained in an
agitated state. On January 9, 1923 in Holloway Prison, Thompson was
half carried to the scaffold where she had to be held upright while
the noose was fitted to her.
In Pentonville Prison, Bywaters who
had tried since his arrest to save Thompson from execution, was
himself hanged. They were hanged simultaneously at 9.00 am, only about
half-a-mile apart - Holloway and Pentonville prisons are located in
the same district. Later, the bodies of Thompson and Bywaters were
buried within the walls of the prisons where they had been executed.
Edith Thompson was one of only 17
women hanged in the United Kingdom during the 20th Century.
Critiques of the case and the trial
Rene Weis echoes a trend of recent and older
suggestions that Edith Thompson was innocent of murder. The main basis
for this argument is that there was no evidence that Edith was party
to arranging the murder on the night in question, but the issue is
bound up with his perception of what it means to be "principal to
murder in the second degree" (i.e. support, assist, instigate,
command, agree, murder) and also his perception of Edith's true
character, although he concedes she was an adulteress and no saint.
As to her character, the trial Judge, Mr. Justice
Shearman KC, and her Counsel, Sir Henry Curtis Bennett KC, differed.
The former labelled her as an adulterer, deceitful and wicked and, by
implication, easily capable of murder. Her letters were full of
"insensate silly affection" and also "...full of the outpourings of a
silly but, at the same time, wicked affection." This was concurred
with by the Court of Appeal. Curtis Bennett attempted to cast her
immorality as defensible in the context of the "glamorous aura" of a
"great love," seeking to overlook the point continually being made by
the Judge at the trial that the case concerned only an adulterer and
an (adulterous) wife.
In his summing up, he had said of Edith: "This is
not an ordinary charge of murder....Am I right or wrong in saying that
this woman is one of the most extraordinary personalities that you or
I have ever met? ...Have you ever read...more beautiful language of
love? Such things have been very seldom put by pen upon paper. This is
the woman you have to deal with, not some ordinary woman. She is one
of those striking personalities met with from time to time who stand
out for some reason or another....You are men of the world and you
must know that where there is a liaison which includes some one who is
married, it will be part of the desire of that person to keep secret
the relations from the other partner. It is not the sort of thing that
they would bring to the knowledge of their partner for life."
"Curtis-Bennett later said: "Was it not proved that
she had posed to him (i.e. Bywaters) as a woman capable of
doing anything - even murder - to keep his love? She had to: Bywaters
wanted to get away from her."
The Court of Appeal endorsed the Judge's
description of the accused as adulterers: "Now, the learned judge, in
his summing-up to the jury, spoke of the charge as a common or
ordinary charge of a wife and an adulterer murdering the husband. That
was a true and appropriate description."
Weis seeks to draw attention to what he considers
to be the inappropriateness of the Victorian morality of Mr. Justice
Shearman KC to the era of the 1920s. However, Young, writing
contemporaneously with the trial, suggests that it was the young of
that generation who needed to learn morality: "Mr. Justice Shearman
frequently referred to Bywaters as "the adulterer," apparently quite
unconscious of the fact that, to people of Bywaters' generation,
educated in the ethics of dear labour and cheap pleasure, of
commercial sport and the dancing hall, adultery is merely a quaint
ecclesiastical term for what seems to them the great romantic
adventure of their lives. Adultery to such people may or may not be
"sporting," but its wrongness is not a matter that would trouble them
for a moment. Sinai, for them, is wrapped in impenetrable cloud. And
if we are not prepared to adapt the laws of Sinai to the principles of
the night club and the thé dansant, I see no other alternative
but to educate again our young in the eternal verities on which the
law is based."
Weis's legal criticisms are better argued by Broad
(below), but both raise the same perennial objection to the fairness
of Edith's conviction that there was no direct evidence of the
involvement of Edith in the planning the murder, or that she had even
consented to its commission on the night in question. The deficit in
evidence as to direct arrangement was conceded by the Court of Appeal.
However, it pursued a line of reasoning to the effect that proof of
instigation of murder in a community of purpose without evidence of
rebuttal raises an "inference of preconcerted arrangement".
The Court of Appeal held that her earlier prolonged
incitement to murder revealed in her letters, combined with her
extraordinary catalogue of lies about what happened on the night of
the murder told to several witnesses, up until her second witness
statement, which was open to being found untrustworthy, her meetings
with Bywaters on the day of the murder, and the content of her last
letter, was sufficient to convict her of arranging the murder.
The Court of Appeal seemed to take a narrower
approach to "principal in the second degree" than the Court, but it is
unclear, because "preconcerted arrangement" admits of different shades
of meaning. The Court of Appeal seemed determined to forestall any
argument based on the mere method or timing of the murder being
unagreed to, if there was other plausible evidence of a preconcerted
object of murder. Its narrow judgment is unsatisfactory to those who
now allege Edith played no part in the murder itself. However, its
judgement is limited in extent to the point it was addressing, which
was continuity of purpose up until the commission of the murder. If
non-agreement as to the means and timing of the murder be conceded,
there was merit to its claim that the case "exhibits from beginning to
end no redeeming feature." Edith and Bywaters were untrustworthy, so
besmirched were their reputations before they had even entered the
witness box. The compact that they had admitted between themselves was
one of "culpable intimacy."
Both were on record as admitting perjury in
swearing false statements to the police. Everything pointed to Edith
desiring the death of her husband over an extended period, to the day
of the murder itself, as evidenced by her ridiculous cover for
Bywaters after the commission of the murder. What substantive evidence
had the Defence put forward to deny her guilt besides her cry "Don't
Don't!" uttered just as Bywaters was stabbing her husband to death?
One might reasonably posit Edith to have been in some kind of
semi-hypnotic trance cast by Bywaters's malevolent spell, that she was
unable ever to free herself from.
Given Edith's reported unedifying performance as a
witness, Weis does just about concede that her conviction was
inevitable, as does Sir Henry Curtis Bennett KC, although he claims he
could have saved her had she not rejected his advice not to take the
witness stand. His failure to secure her acquittal had affected him
deeply. He appeared to maintain her innocence of murder throughout his
life, claiming that Edith "paid the extreme penalty for her
immorality."
Young takes a similar approach, suggesting that
Curtis-Bennett should have resigned his brief at her insistence on
going into the witness box, although his quest for fame and fortune
could never have allowed it. Curtis-Bennett said to Mr. Stanley
Bishop, a journalist, "She spoiled her chances by her evidence and by
her demeanour. I had a perfect answer to everything which I am sure
would have won an acquittal if she had not been a witness. She was a
vain woman and an obstinate one. She had an idea that she could carry
the jury. Also she realized the enormous public interest, and decided
to play up to it by entering the witness-box. Her imagination was
highly developed, but it failed to show her the mistake she was
making."
One mistake that Edith appeared to make was in
testifying that Bywaters had led her into the poison plots. Delusion
was no defence to murder and this could not save her. Curtis-Bennett
argued a more legally sure but evidentially bankrupt defence based on
Edith acting the part of poisoner, or engaging in a fantasy. Yet she
seemed to nullify this by her evidence of reacting to Bywater's
suggestions.
One of her main lines of defence, that she was
constantly seeking a divorce or separation from her husband, and that
it rather than murder was the main object of the attested five-year
compact between her and Bywaters shown in her letters, was dismissed
by the Judge as a sham. "If you think these letters are genuine, they
mean that she is involved in a continual practice of deceit;
concealing the fact of her connection with Bywaters, and not
reiterating it with requests for her husband to let her go."
As the Defence was left without a reply to the
Judge's antipathy to its attempts to divest her "great love" of moral
accountability and instill it with an aura of majesty - the suffering
of her husband in his life and in his death cried out against it - the
Defence had little of substance to put before the Jury except that she
had not arranged the murder directly. Curtis-Bennett's linking of the
innocence of Edith to that of Bywaters at the end of his closing
speech disclosed the dire straits to which Edith's defence had sunk.
Young avers that the Defence used the wrong
tactics. He said: "If the defence had said on behalf of Mrs. Thompson,
'I did not murder Percy Thompson, I had nothing to do with it. I had
no knowledge of it, and I was stunned and horrified when it took
place, and I defy the prosecution to introduce any evidence with which
that denial is not absolutely compatible,' and had rested on that, I
do not think you could have found a British jury to convict her."
There is certainly an air of a presumption of guilt surrounding her
trial – a presumption that she did little to overturn either before or
during it. However, Young's point, that the burden of proof was on the
Crown, to prove murder, rather than on the Defence to rebut a
presumption of murder, is certainly a valid one.
A criticism can be made of the Court and also the
Court of Appeal that it did not define "principal in the second
degree" sufficiently precisely to give its critics confidence in the
proper administration of justice, especially given that this was a
capital case. The contention of the Crown was wide: "...that there was
an agreement between these two persons to get rid of Mr. Thompson, or
that, if there was not an actual agreement in terms, there was an
instigation by Mrs. Thompson to get rid of him, on which Bywaters
acted so as to kill him.". This does not seem to have been objected to
by the Judge, who averred:
"Now, I am going to ask you to consider only one
question in your deliberations, and that is, was it an arranged
thing between the woman and the man? I quite accept the law of the
learned Solicitor-General that if you hire an assassin and say:
'Here is money,' and there is a bargain between them that the
assassin shall go out and murder the man when he can, the person who
hires the assassin is guilty of the murder it is plain common sense.
I also accept the proposition that if a woman says to a man, 'I want
this man murdered; you promise me to do it,' and he then promises
her (she believing that he is going to keep his promise as soon as
he gets an opportunity) and goes out and murders someone, then she
also is guilty of murder."
A five-year compact between Edith and Bywaters was
shown to have lasted throughout the entire course of their exchange of
letters up until the date of the murder. It was obvious that if only
one of its aims had been the death of Percy Thompson, which seemed
tolerably plain from the letters, and from Edith's persistent lying on
the night of the murder, and her subsequent false witness
statement(s), then on the above definition of "principal in the second
degree" as no more than as instigator in a community of purpose, Edith
would be found guilty. This was presumably the basis on which the
Jury's decision rested. It is difficult to see how the Jury could have
arrived at any other conclusion. The Judge, Mr. Justice Shearman KC,
placed much weight on inconsistencies in her evidence, particularly
her statements to the police concerning the night of the murder that
suggested she had intended to conceal her witness of the crime, and
perhaps conversations of criminal intent with Bywaters preceding it,
although she always vigorously denied foreknowledge of it. Broad
states that the Judge's summing up was considered to be at the time
"deadly, absolutely against her" but he does not claim that the Judge
was less than impartial, even though he resolutely argues for her
innocence.
The Defence did succeed in some points, showing
that guesswork by the prosecution over ambiguous content of some of
the letters was fanciful and wrong. An autopsy on Percy Thompson had
failed to reveal any evidence that he had been fed ground glass or any
type of detectable poison. That her letters did not necessarily
reflect her deeds in respect of the so-termed poison plots was fairly
clear. Even though perceived in her favour by Broad and Young, the
Court of Appeal held the poison-plots against her and against him:
"... if the question is, as I think it was, whether these letters were
evidence of a protracted, continuous incitement to Bywaters to commit
the crime which he did in the end commit, it really is of
comparatively little importance whether the appellant was truly
reporting something which she had done, or falsely reporting something
which she merely pretended to do." Moreover "it matters not whether
those letters show or, at any rate, go to show, that there was between
this appellant and Mrs Thompson an agreement tending to the same end.
Those letters were material as throwing light, not only upon the
question by whom was this deed done, but what was the intent, what was
the purpose with which it was done" said the Court of Appeal to
Bywaters.
The impending crime of Bywaters is seen in the
morbid and almost demented possessiveness of his last letters to
Edith. This was at odds with Edith's last letter to him in which she
complained that she was obliged to continue living with her husband as
his "dutiful wife" if only in appearance, because she lacked the funds
to do otherwise. Bywaters was further apprised that, as Percy was now
always suspicious, Bywaters was not going to be allowed to dominate
Edith's life to quite the same extent as before. Combined with Edith's
earlier ambiguous remark to "be jealous of [her husband] so much that
you will do something desperate", it seems that matters reached a
juncture, albeit in a dangerously unstable mind, long since blinded to
the norms of morality by his hatred of Percy. Despite the culpability
of Bywaters, whose only claim to leniency was that he had been led
astray by Edith, which was an unlikely proposition due to his reported
lack of innocence, the press of the day "hardened in favour of
condemnation of the woman and forgiveness of the youth because he was
a weak and often unwilling slave of her stronger will."
The entire folio of letters was later published by
Filson Young in Notable British Trials Series in 1923, although the
letters are not in any kind of chronological order, for which see
Lewis Broad (below).
Edgar Lustgarten, "Verdict in Dispute," 1949,
states on p. 161 that the "The Thompson verdict is now recognised as
bad, and the trial from which it sprang stands out as an example of
the evils that may flow from an attitude of mind." From this it may be
reasonably surmised that his essay is something of an apology for
Edith, whose culpability he diminishes on the basis that "she was a
woman of quality whose talents were frustrated." He adds "She was a
remarkable and complex personality, endowed with signal attributes of
body and of mind. She had intelligence, vitality, a natural grace and
poise, sensitiveness, humour and illumining all these that
quintessential femininity that fascinates the male." He writes "[In
the absence of her letters] all that could be said against her was
that she had lied in a futile attempt to protect and cover Bywaters.
That might make her an accessory after the fact. It could not bring
her into danger of the rope." Given that it was the murder of her
husband that was involved, the more credible view is surely that
her lies had raised immediate suspicion that she was somehow involved.
As the Court of Appeal inferred, the circumstances of the case - two
adulterers and a murdered spouse - were essentially "commonplace" and,
moreover, Edith appears to have foreseen, as she was being led back to
her house by a police sergeant just after the murder, that she would
be implicated, for she had said to him "they will blame me for this."
Although Lustgarten does not allege any defect in
legal procedure, he says that the Court was unable to understand
questions of "sex and psychology" and the consequent possibility of
fantasy.
A critique of the conduct of her trial and the
state of the law was made by Lewis Broad. He argued that it was the
misfortune of Edith Thompson that she was unable to separate herself
from the prejudice due to her immorality whereas, if it had been a
former crime, she was entitled not to have it mentioned. He also
attacked the Judge for using morally prejudiced language to incite the
prejudice of the Jury. He concedes that it was within the rules for
the Jury to decide what the words in Edith's letters meant and what
was intended by them. Broad went on to attack the general conduct of
the trial:
1. She should have been granted a separate trial
in that she was handicapped by having to appear alongside Bywaters.
2. The Judge allowed the Jury to be inflamed by
prejudice on account of her immorality.
3. Suspicion based on prejudice was allowed to
take the place of proof of meaning, motive and intention in respect
of her letters.
Broad also levels criticism against the prosecution
for the unfair use of her letters at trial, covering such matters as:
a) 1500 word extract used at trial from 25000
words in total. Many of the letters were censored by the court
during the trial, because they dealt with subjects such as
menstruation and orgasm, subjects that were not then considered fit
for public discussion.
b) There was only one unambiguous reference to
poison in the five months preceding the murder.
c) The meaning of uncertain phrases were allowed
to be suggested by the Crown and were determined to prejudice the
Jury.
d) The context of the murder suggested no element
of planning.
e) Despite their meandering and casual discussion
of the subject matter, Percy's murder, there is nothing in the
letters that amounted to agreement or one.
f) There was a break in the chain of causation
after Bywaters had indicated he did not want to continue to see
Edith, evidenced from her letters Jun 20-Sept 12 1922.
g) That the letters were part of a fantasy
between the parties was not put forth to the Jury.
The Home Office files were marked not to be opened
for 100 years, which, while adding fuel to growing rumours, has not
stifled criticism of the case.
Burial
The body of Edith Thompson was buried in an
unmarked grave within the walls of Holloway Prison, as was customary.
In 1971, the prison underwent an extensive programme of rebuilding,
during which the bodies of all the executed women were exhumed for
reburial elsewhere.
With the exception of Ruth Ellis, the remains of
the four women executed at Holloway, (i.e., Edith Thompson, Styllou
Christofi, Amelia Sach and Annie Walters) were reburied in a single
grave at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. The new grave (in plot 117)
remained unmarked for over twenty years. It was acquired in the 1980s
by René Weis and Audrey Russell, who had interviewed Avis Graydon
(Edith Thompson's surviving sister) at length in the 1970s. On 13
November 1993, a grey granite memorial was placed on plot 117 and
dedicated to the memory of the four women buried there. The grave and
plot were formally consecrated by the Reverend Barry Arscott of St.
Barnabas, Manor Park, the church in which Edith Thompson was married
in January 1916.
Edith Thompson's details appear prominently on the
face of the tombstone, together with her epitaph: "Sleep on beloved.
Regrets. Her death was a legal formality". The names of the other
three women are inscribed around the edges of the tombstone.
Representatives of the Home Office did not inform
Avis Graydon of the exhumation and the fact that she had the right to
take control of her sister's funeral arrangements. Avis Graydon died
in 1977, seemingly without ever knowing that her sister had been
reburied in Brookwood. Thus, she never had the opportunity either to
visit the grave or to erect some form of memorial over it.
The remains of Frederick Bywaters still lie in an
unmarked grave within the walls of HMP Pentonville, where they were
buried shortly after his execution in January 1923.
The remains of Percy Thompson are buried at the
City of London Cemetery.
Edith's parents are buried at the City of London
Cemetery. Their grave is number 92743 in Area 197, adjacent to Central
Avenue. In 1973, her devoted sister Avis Graydon, who had previously
dated Freddy Bywaters, gave a long interview to Mrs. Audrey Russell,
the first time she had spoken about the case since the early 1920s.
Avis died on 6 August 1977. She is buried at St. Patrick's RC
Cemetery, Leytonstone. In her will she expressed a wish for mass to be
said for members of the Graydon family every 9 January, the
anniversary of her sister Edith's death. This annual service of
remembrance was restarted after the publication of Weis's book in
1988. Since the early 1990s, an annual service of remembrance has
taken place at St. Barnabas, Manor Park (East Ham) every 9 January at
8:30 am.
The case in popular culture
The Thompson and Bywaters case has provided the
basis for several fictional and non-fictional works and depictions.
The couple are the subject of waxworks at Madame
Tussauds.
Alfred Hitchcock expressed the wish to make a
documentary film on the case, several times commenting that the
Thompson and Bywaters case was the one he would most like to film. At
the start of the 1920s, Hitchcock had been taught to dance by Edith
Thompson's father at the Golden Lane Institute at a time when he
worked for the Cable Car Company.' His sister and Avis Graydon became
close friends later, as they served in the same RC church in
Leytonstone. Hitchcock exchanged Christmas cards with Avis Graydon but
they never discussed the case. He instructed his authorised
biographer, John Russell Taylor, not to touch on the case of Edith
Thompson in case it caused her sister distress, even after all those
years. Some aspects of the case have similarities to the plot of
Hitchcock's 1950 film Stage Fright.
In 1934, F. Tennyson Jesse published A Pin to
See the Peepshow, "a fictional account of the Thompson-Bywaters
case despite the usual disclaimer at the front that all the characters
are imaginary. The title refers to the children's entertainment at
which (she) first met her lover-to-be." This was dramatised on TV in
1973 with Francesca Annis playing Edith, John Duttine as Bywaters, and
Bernard Hepton as Thompson.
A play written in the 1930s by Frank Vosper,
People Like Us, was originally banned by the Lord Chamberlain and
remained unperformed until 1948 when it premiered at the Wyndhams
Theatre, London, in the West End.
There are a number of references to Edith Thompson
in the Agatha Christie novel Crooked House (1949).
In the 1981 British television series The Lady
Killers an episode called Darlingest Boy dealt with the
Thompson and Bywaters murder case. In it Edith Thompson was played by
Gayle Hunnicutt while Frederick Bywaters was played by Christopher
Villiers.
In non-fiction, Lewis Broad wrote The Innocence
of Edith Thompson: A Study in Old Bailey Justice in 1952.
René Weis published a biography of Thompson, titled
Criminal Justice: The True Story of Edith Thompson, in 1988.
Jill Dawson published a fictional version of the
case entitled Fred and Edie in 2000.
Weis' biography, with a new preface about the case
and his letter of appeal to the Home Secretary, appeared in 2001, as
did the film Another Life, which told their story, and in which
Natasha Little played Edith Thompson, Nick Moran played Percy
Thompson, and Ioan Gruffudd played Freddy Bywaters.
In 2006, the writer Molly Cutpurse published A
Life Lived, a novel on how Edith's life might have developed had
she been allowed to live.
P. D. James (The Murder Room, 2004), Dorothy
Sayers, and Anthony Berkeley Cox (writing as Francis Iles) have
written fiction based on their story.