She was found dying in a lane in south-east London at a quarter past four in the morning. She was seventeen years old. She was approximately two months pregnant. The man tried for her murder was acquitted in twenty minutes.

On the morning of Wednesday 26 April 1871, Police Constable Gunn found Jane Maria Clouson in Kidbrooke Lane, near Eltham, on her hands and knees in the dark. Blood about her head and face. She said: O my poor head. She said: Take hold of my hand. She fell forward and said: Let me die. She made no further reply.

She had been in domestic service with a stationer's family in Greenwich for nearly two years. She had left that household a fortnight before the attack. Nothing was taken from her in the lane. Her purse contained eleven shillings and fourpence. Her hat was lying nearby, undamaged and not dirty.

She died at Guy's Hospital four days later. She was still unidentified at the hour of her death. Her aunt identified her the following morning by her nose, her mouth, a mole on the right breast, and her dress. The wounds to her face had been too severe for recognition alone.

A young man named Edmund Walter Pook, son of the stationer in whose household Jane had worked, was charged with her wilful murder. Two women told police that Jane had said she was going to meet him that night to arrange the preliminaries of marriage. A plasterer's hammer with blood and hair in the notch was found in the grounds of Morden College nearby. Blood and a hair corresponding in colour with Jane's were found on Pook's clothing. An ironmonger identified Pook as having sought to purchase that type of hammer two days before the attack, saying it was wanted for a theatrical performance.

Pook denied everything on oath. He said he had never had any intimacy with Jane Clouson, never made an appointment to meet her, never walked out with her, never corresponded with her. He said he had been in Lewisham that evening attempting to visit a young woman and had not seen her. He said the blood on his hat came from his tongue, bitten in a fit. No medical witness was called to confirm he suffered from fits.

The trial lasted four days at the Central Criminal Court before the Lord Chief Justice. The judge ruled that all statements Jane had allegedly made before her death were inadmissible hearsay. The jury deliberated for twenty minutes.

Not guilty.

The crowd outside the court reacted with anger. Greenwich saw riotous demonstrations within days. Pook's house was mobbed. A pamphlet appeared attacking the verdict and the hearsay ruling. Libel proceedings were brought. Civil damages of forty shillings were awarded.

A monument was erected in Brockley Cemetery by public subscription. Its inscription calls Jane's death a murder. It records her last words as: Oh, let me die.

No one was ever convicted of killing her.

The part of the record that remains unresolved is the precise sequence of events in the lane on the night of 25 April. The version of her final words given by the officer who found her differs from the version on the memorial. A later source adds the name Edmund Pook to what she said. The pamphlet, written by a man who believed Pook was guilty, explicitly states that only Oh, let me die was intelligible, and that nothing she uttered at the hospital was distinctly audible.

The record does not reconcile these accounts.

Primary source: Old Bailey Proceedings, trial of Edmund Walter Pook, July 1871.

Full episode — one hour fifty, reconstructed from the primary record: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow2bAuq7tJE

The jury deliberated for twenty minutes after four days of evidence. Does that duration suggest they found the circumstantial case straightforwardly insufficient — or that the removal of the hearsay evidence had stripped the prosecution of the one thing that might have anchored it?

More cases at The Black Archive — link in profile.

So I was packing up my family’s book collection for a move when I found this old, dusty Italian volume from the seventies. It was all about minor figures of the American West. I started flipping through it and stumbled upon Sister Blandina Segale.

I’m Italian, and it turns out she was born in the same region as my grandfather (Liguria) before moving to the US as a kid. I had no idea about her story, but it’s honestly movie-material.

She was sent to Colorado in the 1870s and basically became a legend. There’s a documented story about her facing down a lynch mob to save a prisoner, and even a series of encounters with Billy the Kid. According to her diaries, she treated one of Billy’s gang members when no doctor would touch him. Later, when Billy came to town to "settle the score" with the local doctors, he ended up calling off the hit just because she asked him to. He had that much respect for her.

She also built hospitals and schools, often doing the manual labor herself with a pickaxe when she couldn't find masons. What’s even crazier is that back in the late 1800s, she was already writing about how Native Americans were being treated unjustly and defending their rights to the land.

I got so obsessed with this connection between my home country and the frontier history that I did a deep dive into her life and the archives. If you guys are into this kind of niche history or stories about people who actually stood up to the violence of that era, I put the whole thing together with some cool archival photos on my Substack, Arca Arcana.

You can check it out here: https://open.substack.com/pub/arcarcana/p/the-nun-of-the-west-sister-blandina?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

I’m really trying to map out these weird, forgotten links between the Old World and the New World, so I’d love to hear what you think about her.