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

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.