Sidney Harry Fox

However, in 2021, an episode of Murder, Mystery and My Family suggested that his conviction was 'unsafe', stating it likely that his mother died of heart failure and the fire was indeed accidental.

[3] Learning from his association with people of quality, he later developed a role as a plausible, genteel con-man until World War I, when he obtained a job in a London bank and proceeded to forge cheques on the accounts of his customers.

Fox was arrested on several charges, imprisoned for the jewellery theft and released in March 1929; he and his mother found it convenient to renew their travelling life.

In April 1929 Fox persuaded his mother to make a will in his favour, despite her poverty, and on 1 May insured her life against accidental death, the policy to expire on 23 October.

Although a doctor certified suffocation and shock as the cause of death, and Rosaline Fox was buried in Norfolk a week later, the insurance investigators had examined the room and were suspicious.

Sir Bernard Spilsbury and Dr Roche Lynch[7] performed the post-mortem and deduced that Mrs Fox had been strangled, due to a bruise on her larynx, and the absence of soot in her lungs showed that she had been dead before the fire had started.

In 2021, in an episode of Murder, Mystery and My Family, the strangulation theory that ultimately condemned Fox was challenged - instead attributing the "bruising" seen by Spilsbury to be a Prinsloo-Gordon Hemorrhage.

The defence were unable to challenge the evidence given by Spilsbury since the bruise on Mrs Fox's larynx had disappeared due to decomposition by the time their experts had examined it.