On Devonshire Road in the residential north of Blackpool, away from the piers and the crowds, an elderly widow of seventy-nine lived alone in a bungalow she owned outright. In the spring of 1953 she took in a married couple to keep house for her. Within a fortnight she had signed a new will in their favour. Within a month she was gone. How did one of those strangers come to speak of the old woman's home as already her own, days before the end came?

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This is the strange, small story of Sarah Ann Ricketts, a tiny and difficult widow with a fondness for sweet jam, and of Louisa May Merrifield and her frail husband Alfred, the couple who answered her advertisement. It follows the doctor who would not sign the certificate, the report from the forensic laboratory, the missing tin that was never found, and the words Louisa spoke to an acquaintance named Jessie Brewer while the owner still sat in her own front room. From the bungalow to Manchester Assizes, the appeal and the final morning at Strangeways, this is how a resort town's respectable, propertied fringe produced one of its most talked-of cases.

Sources:
North-Western Forensic Science Laboratory report, April 1953
Coroner's inquest and post-mortem examination, Blackpool, April 1953
Proceedings at Manchester Assizes, July 1953
Court of Criminal Appeal, September 1953

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