The Croydon arsenic poisonings
Edmund Duff, Vera Sidney and Violet Sidney: three members of one family, dead within ten months.
Three members of one Croydon family, Edmund Duff, Vera Sidney and Violet Sidney, died within ten months in 1928 and 1929. Exhumations found arsenic in all three bodies and two inquest juries found it had been administered by another person. Nobody was ever charged.
What is not in dispute.
Edmund Duff died in April 1928 after a short illness that was put down to natural causes. In February 1929 his sister-in-law Vera Sidney died, and in March 1929 her mother Violet Sidney died.
The deaths were close enough together, in one family, to force exhumations. All three bodies were found to contain arsenic.
Three inquests were held. Each returned arsenic poisoning. In two of them the jury found that the arsenic had been administered by another person.
No one was ever charged with any of the three deaths.
Where the record stops.
Who administered it. The surviving members of the household have been written about for ninety years and nothing has ever been proved against any of them. This is the most recent of the eight cases and the rules on how we treat real cases set the limit there deliberately.
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.
- A Death in the Family 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. Edmund Duff, Vera Sidney and Violet Sidney: three members of one family, dead within ten months.
- 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.
A Death in the Family
Three deaths, one family, one house, and a set of inquests that said murder and stopped.
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.