John and Judith, Their Crime and Why They Didn't Get to Enjoy It

Good evening. This is Crime Classics. I am Thomas Hyland with another true story of crime. Listen. That was a wind. An English wind of the winter of 1684. A shutter rattler of a wind. And it gets under doors and into houses and into rooms.

And when it does this, it's known as a searching wind. It worries a door all night long, and tingles crockery hanging on hooks, and searches some more. And finally, it finds what it was looking for.

This particular wind just found John and Judith and made them cool, and made them shiver, and made them hate each other. As a matter of fact, this particular wind made them sorry they'd ever killed anybody and gotten into this situation in the first place.

So tonight, my report to you on John and Judith, their crime and why they didn't get to enjoy it. Crime Classics. A series of true crime stories from the records and newspapers of every land, from every time.

Your host each week, Mr. Thomas Highland, connoisseur of crime, student of violence, and teller of murders. Now once again, Mr. Thomas Highland. Our scene is the country town of Snitten in the parish of Bitterley, near the confluence of the team and Corps of River, the scene in fact later immortalized in Henry Luddy's

singing stanzas. Indeed, it was a veritable Henry Luddy setting which concerns us here. Summer, header, gorse, larks on the bow and on the wing, primroses, violas and maidenfern, squirrels gathering and putting away gophers and quail, summerly and a smile, a luddies very words.

And in the middle of this sonnet of summer, right in the middle of it where the sun shone the most golden, there was a house. And in this house was a kitchen, and in the kitchen was a maid, a hired help that is.