George Ernest Thompson Edalji (22 January 1876 – 17 June 1953) was an English solicitor and son of a vicar of Indian Parsi descent in a Staffordshire village.

[1] The difficulty in overturning the conviction of Edalji was cited as showing that a better mechanism was needed for reviewing unsafe verdicts, and it was a factor in the 1907 creation of the Court of Criminal Appeal for England and Wales.

Despite an official inquiry's finding that Edalji was the author of poison pen letters associated with the mutilations, he was allowed to resume practice as a solicitor and lived quietly with a sibling until his death.

The right to make this appointment lay with the bishop, and the Reverend Mr. Edalji obtained the position through the previous incumbent, his wife's uncle, who arranged it as a wedding present.

[2] Many writers have noted that the Edaljis were the first Parsis and the first Indians to move into Great Wyrley, a major contributing factor in the hostile way they were treated in the village.

One was found inside the hall with the envelope wet; the letter was written on pages from the exercise books of the Edalji children.

Brookes and the Reverend Mr Edalji called in the police, and Sergeant Upton again found himself investigating poison pen letters to the vicar.

[2] A police ploy, which was clearly aimed at getting Edalji to incriminate himself as the note writer, brought forth protests from his mother at the way the investigation was focusing on him.

In response to her protests, Chief Constable of the county Captain Anson told Mrs. Edalji that she should make a serious effort to help catch the culprit if she wanted his men to spend more time on the matter, as it was obviously either her husband or son.

[12] A couple of roughs were fined for hitting him while he was on one of his evening walks three miles from his house one night in 1900; the assailants were not from Great Wyrley or known to Edalji.

[2][4][5][3][6] As a result of having agreed to stand surety for a fellow solicitor (who then absconded), Edalji became liable for a debt of nine thousand pounds.

[8]: 17  Isolated cases of livestock maiming were not unheard of as a way of settling scores in farming communities, but the series of attacks provoked a public outcry far beyond the area.

[8]: 96  Inspector Campbell headed enquiries into the maimings and from an early stage considered Edalji a person of particular interest, although there were a number of suspects.

Following this, the seventh attack, Campbell felt sure that Edalji was responsible for the maimings because he reportedly had been seen late that evening in the field where it took place.

Inspector Campbell sent a constable to the railway station where Edalji was waiting to catch his train, asking him to help with inquiries, but he declined and left for Birmingham.

The Reverend said that he had hardly slept that night and knew that Edalji could not have left the bedroom which they shared, the door of which he had locked as usual.

As an astigmatic myopic he was incapable of complicated nocturnal excursions; the vicarage was surrounded on the night of 17 August by a cordon of men through which he could not have penetrated; apparently incriminating dirty razors found in a police search of the vicarage were stained with rust, not blood; putatively incriminating mud found on his clothes and boots did not come from the field where the horse was slaughtered; horse hairs which police claimed to have found on his coat were probably threads; his father’s sworn oath that they had slept the night in the same room behind a locked door was disregarded.

He later said that he had been told by his lawyers that the prosecution case was so weak it was unnecessary to bring up how poor his vision was, but he also admitted that he could move about at night quite well as long as the road was a main one and familiar to him.

[2] The police sergeant and inspector differed on whether there was no watch on the vicarage at all on the night or only one man, but they agreed there was no cordon, and the prosecution modified their allegations to assert the attack on the pony had come in the early hours of the morning.

‘You great hulking blackguard and coward I have got you fixed you dirty Cad – bloody monkey!’”[17] Senior civil servants at the Home Office reviewed the case and reported that there were no serious flaws in the trial and conviction of Edalji.

[2][4] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, then second only to Rudyard Kipling as a celebrated British writer, became the most influential supporter of the public campaign for Edalji's pardon.

The weight that Doyle's opinion on the case carried with the public stemmed from the appeal of his fictional master detective Sherlock Holmes, which associated the author with Holmesian traits of close attention to detail and drawing logical inferences.

Anson thought that a firm conclusion could not have been reached from a neutral standpoint in that amount of time, and that Doyle had obtained his co-operation and an interview by misrepresenting himself as having no settled opinion about the case.

It has been questioned whether the detailed knowledge of incidents at the vicarage and Edalji's professional life that were demonstrated in the letter could have come from anyone not at the centre of those events or part of the investigation into them.

Poison pen letters in the name of the “Wyrley Gang” continued until the 1930s, by an offender who also wrote to people connected to other crimes in the news.

There have been a variety of opinions since about whether he was justified in his belief, although Peter Costello wrote a modern book on Doyle's investigations and concurred with his conclusion.

[2] According to Anson's communications with the Home Office about the case, an assertion was "indisputably false" that Edalji made in a letter published in a newspaper to the effect that he was not abroad after nightfall.

Edalji was granted a pardon for the maiming conviction in May 1907, though the inquiry found that he had brought prosecution upon himself by sending the pseudonymous 'Greatorex' letters to police during the summer of 1903, which meant that he was not given compensation.

[21] An episode of the 1972 BBC anthology TV series The Edwardians about Conan Doyle centres on his involvement in the Edalji case.

[citation needed] A BBC radio drama, Conan Doyle Investigates, part of the Saturday Night Theatre series, was aired in May 1972.