Case File

Edward Culshaw, Prescot, Lancashire, 1784: The Torn Edge

Every episode, one real case. You get the evidence right when the detectives did. Can you solve it before the reveal?

The case

Case: Edward Culshaw
Where: Prescot, Lancashire, England
When: January 1784
County: Lancashire
Evidence terms: muzzle-loading pistol, paper wad, newsprint wad, gunshot wound, torn edge

In January 1784, Edward Culshaw, a house carpenter from Prescot in Lancashire, was found killed by a single pistol shot on the road running out of Liverpool. When the wound was examined, a small crushed scrap of paper was drawn out of it, the wad that had been packed down the barrel to seat the powder. Opened out, the scrap was printed newspaper with one ragged torn edge. That same evening a saddler named John Toms was taken up and searched, and a torn piece of paper was found in his pocket. You get the evidence in the order the investigators got it, and you lock in your reading before the reveal.

How this one works

True crime you play along with, clue for clue, right beside the detectives.

Episode transcript

0:00

Wait until you hear this one.

More than two hundred and forty years ago, a torn scrap of paper was drawn out of a wound and smoothed open. Just a scrap. And that little torn scrap is the reason a killer was caught, and the reason you and I are sitting down together tonight. One scrap of paper. This is how that happens.

0:30

Hello, friend.

Pull up a chair. If this is your first case with me, here is the whole game in one breath. I hand you the evidence in the order the detectives got it, nothing rearranged, nothing held back. You play along. At some point I am going to stop everything and ask you to lock in what you think happened. Then, and this is the part that matters, we check your work together, honestly. I tell you what you could have caught, and what you never could have. That is Cluestruck.

This one is short, an easy first case to get your feet under you, and we are going to finish it tonight, start to end, so you can see the whole shape of the thing. One difference worth knowing before you play a real one. On a real case I hold a piece back, and it is always the same piece: whether anybody ever answered it. That comes a week later, whichever way it goes. Not tonight. Tonight you get all of it. Let's work it.

1:15

The year is 1784. The place is Lancashire, in the north of England, on the road that runs from Liverpool.

Our man is Edward Culshaw. He was a house carpenter from the town of Prescot, the kind of man who worked with his hands and traveled the roads for the work. On a January day in 1784, Edward Culshaw was on that Liverpool road, and he did not come home. He was found there, killed by a single pistol shot.

That is where the detectives start, and so that is where you start. A carpenter, dead on a country road, one shot, and no one standing over him to say who fired it. Guns in 1784 do not leave much behind. There is no camera, no fingerprint kit, no lab. There is a body, a road, and whatever the wound itself is willing to tell you. So let's do what the men on that road did. Let's look closer.

2:45

Here is the first thing they find, and I want you to hold it.

When they examine the wound, there is something in it. Not just the ball. In 1784 a pistol is loaded from the front. You pour your powder down the barrel, and then you pack in a wad, usually a bit of crushed paper, to seat the powder and hold the ball in place. When the gun fires, that paper wad can travel right along with the shot. And in this case, it did. Lodged in Edward Culshaw's wound is a small, crushed piece of paper. When the wound is examined, that scrap is drawn out.

3:50

Now stay with me, because this is the piece the whole night turns on.

Opened out, that little wad is not blank. It is a torn scrap of newspaper. Printed paper, with a torn edge where it was ripped from a larger sheet.

Sit with that for a second the way they had to. A torn piece of newspaper, packed into the gun that killed this man. What would you do with that? It is not much. It is a scrap. But it is a scrap that came out of the murder weapon, and a torn edge is a very particular thing. A torn edge is not a clean cut. It is ragged, one of a kind, the exact shape of the tear that made it.

4:50

Suspicion, that same evening, falls on a man named John Toms. A saddler. I will be honest with you about something, because honesty is the deal here. The record does not fully spell out why the constables looked at Toms first that night. That part of the trail is theirs, not ours, and I am not going to invent it for you. What the record does tell us is what happened when they took him up and searched him.

5:45

In John Toms's pocket, there is a torn piece of paper.

That is it. That is everything you get. So let me set the board for you plainly, because you now have exactly what they had. One: a torn scrap of newspaper, pulled out of the wound, packed into the gun. Two: a torn piece of paper, sitting in the pocket of the man they have just arrested.

Two torn pieces of paper. One from the weapon. One from the suspect.

6:40

This is the pause.

You have everything the detectives had that January night. I am not going to hand you anything else. So say it out loud, or type it where you can find it later. Two questions. What is the clue that ties John Toms to the shot that killed Edward Culshaw? And what does that clue actually prove?

Take your beat. Lock it in. Then we will go and check it together.

The answer

How the torn edge was matched, and what a physical match does and does not prove

7:20

Here is how they broke it.

They took the torn wad from the wound, and they took the torn paper from Toms's pocket, and they held the two torn edges together. And the edges fit. Ragged tear to ragged tear, they matched, the way two halves of the same ripped page match and nothing else does. Those two scraps had been one sheet of paper, torn apart. Which means the paper packed into the gun that killed Edward Culshaw came from the very sheet in John Toms's own pocket.

That was the case. On the twenty-sixth of March, 1784, John Toms was tried at the Lancaster Assizes and found guilty. A torn edge did that.

And this is why I opened the whole show with a small, strange case from 1784. It is one of the earliest cases anyone ever wrote down of a killer caught by a physical match, two things shown to have once been one. The move you just made in your chair, holding two torn edges up and asking whether they fit, is close to where a whole way of solving crimes begins.

Now, your honest scorecard, the way I promised.

The strike, the torn edge, was yours to catch. You were handed both halves before the pause, the scrap from the wound and the scrap from the pocket. If you thought, do those two fit, then you solved this the exact way the court did. That one was catchable, and if you caught it, well done, you're a Cluestruck now.

Why the constables looked at Toms first that evening, that was never yours to get. It is not clearly in the record, and I was not going to fake it to make you feel behind. That piece was theirs.

And this is the one almost everybody misses, then and now, and it is worth more than the case itself. In 1784, two edges fitting together felt like the end of all argument. Case closed. And a physical match like this, fitting torn edges back into one, is still one of the sturdier things forensic science does. But there is a careful line under it that the 1784 courtroom never drew. A match tells you two things fit. How sure anyone can ever be that nothing else on earth could have fit, that is a different and harder question, and it is one forensic science is still working out to this day. It does not undo John Toms. It just means we have learned to say what a match is, and what it is not. Hold onto that. It comes back in almost every case we will ever work.

9:00

John Toms was hanged three days after his trial, on the twenty-ninth of March, 1784.

But leave the last thought with Edward Culshaw. A house carpenter from Prescot, a man who worked the roads for his living, and who, for a long time, might have been just a body found on a country road that January with no name attached to the answer. He got his answer. It came out of a torn scrap of paper, drawn from the very wound, and read closely by the people who bothered to look. That is the whole promise of this show. Look closely. The clue is almost always right there.

9:45

That's the story of the torn edge, the scrap of paper that spoke for Edward Culshaw when no one else could. If it stuck with you, bring it to someone who would sit with it too. And come find the Board, and tell me: what struck you?

I'm Shane Waters. Stay curious, friend, and stay struck.