The Trial of Mrs Merryfield - 1953

Edgar Lustgarten used to open his hugely popular True Crime BBC programme in the 1950s with the words "Have you ever murdered anyone? Perhaps you'd rather not say". Up to six million listeners tuned in every week to hear Lustgarten drily recount the details of major trials. It is probably fair to say that he invented the True Crime audio genre.

The Chiron True Crime series was recorded by Lustgarten in a London studio in Dolby quality in 1976. Lustgarten's voice is austere but not without wit, gripping yet somehow addictive. The voice of a top Barrister presenting the facts of the case with the hangman's noose waiting silently in the shadows.
"Plain, homely, middle-aged Mrs. Merrifield, says Edgar Lustgarten, at first glance the very image of grandmotherly respectability, cruelly and with a great deal of premeditation, committed murder by poison, and with a particularly nasty poison too-yellow phosphorus. Her motive was pure avarice-not passion, not vengeance-and thus all the more horrific. The atmosphere of her trial, and the impression Mrs. Merrifield made under cross-examination are here brought back to life. Her trial was, as Mr. Lustgarten puts it "entirely satisfactory-by the right means it arrived at the right end".Students of forensic science will also find some enlightening passages about the action of yellow phosphorus upon the human body."