A rediscovered secret and a 250 year old murder mystery solved.

Foreword

In the summer of 2002, as I was nearing completion of my first history project - 'Auschwitz Diary - A History of Auschwitz-Birkenau 1940-1945', I came across a remarkable gravestone in the nearby churchyard in Wolstanton during an afternoon stroll.

It immediately sparked a quest to discover more about the person buried there. On and off, over the next eighteen months, I scoured the available archives and made some remarkable discoveries.

Having written it all up and prepared an illustrated manuscript (and had no joy with publishers) I had the good fortune to interest Lewis Smith of The Times in the story.

As a result, in The Times of 31 December 2004, the story of Sarah Smith of Wolstanton was published for the first time under the title of, 'Set in stone, 18th-century clue finally yields killer.'

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article407042.ece

Oxfordians might be interested to know that during this research, I first discovered the Sneyd Archive at Keele University.