KIDWELLY AUTHOR and lecturer Bob Hinton was the guest speaker at Llanelli University of the Third Age’s (U3A) monthly lecture at the Felinfoel Resource Centre, on Wednesday (Mar 9).
The 1920 murder trial of local solicitor Harold Greenwood convulsed the quiet town of Kidwelly.The alleged victim of murder was Greenwood’s wife, Mabel.
Harold Greenwood’s conduct raised eyebrows: He married four months after Mabel’s death and with that marriage a trickle of poisonous local gossip became a torrent.
The unfortunate Mabel was exhumed and was found to contain arsenic.
An inquest was held, and a trial subsequently took place at Carmarthen’s Guildhall, at which Greenwood was represented by Sir Edward Marshall Hall.
Marshall Hall’s devastating cross examination of a key prosecution witness, a local GP who conceded that he could have made a mistake in Mrs Greenwood’s medication, was followed by a defence medical expert suggested that there was no evidence that the arsenic in Mabel Greenwood’s corpse was either a lethal dose or the cause of death.
Greenwood was acquitted, but his career was ruined and he was a pariah in Kidwelly. He left the town shortly thereafter and died a few years later in impoverished obscurity.
On completing his lecture, Mr Hinton asked the audience who they thought had committed the murder.
The responses were quite lively, suggesting that there is nothing quite like a murder in a small town to get people talking, even almost one hundred years on.
Mr Hinton’s published books are entitled ‘From Hell … the Jack the Ripper Mystery’ and ‘South Wales Murders’. He also runs a ‘Crime tour business’.
The next U3A Lecture will be on Wednesday (Apr 13) at the same venue, commencing at 2.00 pm. The he subject of that lecture will have a Shakespearean flavour. The title is ‘The play’s the thing’ and the lecturer is Mrs Julia Evans.
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