After his third bride had died in this way, suspicions were aroused and he was charged with murder. Proving how he managed to drown the wives in a domestic bath in houses full of people taxed the pathologist Bernard Spilsbury, but a dramatic demonstration in court convinced the jury of his guilt and he was sentenced to death.

Seeing past the apparent

The second case is that of Kenneth Barlow. Barlow used drowning as a way of masking the true cause of his wife’s death; massive injections of insulin that induced coma and made drowning an easy matter of slipping his wife under water.

Seeing past the drowning to the cause of death exercised the minds of Britain’s finest scientists, but eventually the case was brought to court and a guilty verdict was passed.

• Read about the Murder in Lovers' Lane