GET EDALJI

A CRIMINAL CASE ANALYSIS
By Rose H. Schmollek

It’s 1888. Mys­ter­i­ous events keep Great Wyr­ley, a vil­lage in Stafford­shire (West Mid­lands of Eng­land), in sus­pense. Threat­en­ing and anonym­ous let­ters, weird adverts in the loc­al news­pa­pers, and mutil­ated, killed anim­als bring fear and dread to the par­ish. The vicar’s son, George Ernest Thompson Edalji, is at the centre of these unusu­al activ­it­ies, which is reas­on enough for the Stafford­shire police to con­sider him a suspect.

But why should an edu­cated young man, a law­yer in Birm­ing­ham, do some­thing this crazy? Why should any­one ter­ror­ise a par­ish with anonym­ous let­ters, false announce­ments, and faked advert­ise­ments for decades?

In 1903, when George Edalji is sen­tenced to sev­en years of pen­al ser­vitude, many people, includ­ing celebrit­ies such as the author Sir Arthur Con­an Doyle, stand up for the con­vict. Does the chief con­stable, Cap­tain Hon. George Augus­tus Anson, sus­pect George Edalji only for racist motives because his fath­er, the vicar Shapurji Edalji (a Parsee), once came from Bom­bay to England? 

This story has been retold like this since 1907. We researched the crime case of George Edalji in col­lab­or­a­tion with forensic lin­guists, who did ana­lyses sug­gest­ing that Sir Arthur Con­an Doyle was mis­taken in his case assess­ment. We dis­covered answers to ques­tions and con­tra­dic­tions that have been delib­er­ately ignored until today.

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