The Ardlamont Mystery
Cecil Hambrough, twenty years old, heir to an encumbered estate.
Cecil Hambrough, twenty, was shot dead while out with a gun at Ardlamont in Argyll in August 1893. His tutor Alfred Monson was tried for murder. The Edinburgh jury returned not proven, the third verdict available only in Scotland, and Monson walked free.
What is not in dispute.
On the morning of 10 August 1893 Cecil Hambrough was shot dead while out with a gun on the Ardlamont estate. Two men were with him: his tutor Alfred John Monson, and a man who had arrived calling himself Scott.
Their account was that Hambrough had shot himself by accident. The wound, and the insurance taken out on Hambrough's life shortly before, were enough to bring Monson to trial for murder, and for an earlier attempt to drown him.
The trial at Edinburgh in December 1893 is one of the first in which expert ballistic evidence was argued at length, with the experts contradicting each other.
The jury returned NOT PROVEN, the third verdict available in Scotland and nowhere else. Monson walked free. The man calling himself Scott was never found.
Where the record stops.
Whether the gun was fired by Hambrough or by somebody else, and what the second man was there to do. Not proven is not an acquittal and it is not a conviction; it is a Scottish jury saying the Crown has not made out its case, and it closes nothing.
What this page is, and is not.
No one was ever convicted of this. What is written above is the part of the record that is not in dispute. Where something is argued over, this page says it is argued over and does not pick a side. No real person is accused here of anything a court did not find, and no confession is invented for anybody.
- Not Proven is not a reconstruction. It is an original crime set in this world, with an invented killer. Every real person at your table is innocent of the murder in the game.
- The victim is a person, not a prop. Cecil Hambrough, twenty years old, heir to an encumbered estate.
- We publish the rules we work to. How we treat real cases sets out the six things this catalogue will not do, including the two cases that were dropped for failing them.
If you think we have crossed a line, the policy page is the standard to hold us to, and the email address is on it.
Not Proven
The verdict itself. A table that has to choose between guilty, not guilty and not proven is in a different argument from a table choosing between two.
Six to twelve people at your table, hosted from a TV and your guests' phones. The evidence arrives a piece at a time and nobody sees the whole of it until the last act. Read the full case file, including the content note for this one.