I've been combing more recent additions to Trove to see what (if any) further information I can locate about The Bridgewater Mystery which is, for obvious reasons, my most intriguing Family History Mystery. I came across a rather unusual article titled "Crumbs" in The Observer. It appears to be random snippets intended to be either humorous or providing commentary on recent news stories, but frustratingly these are mostly one sentence at a time, all mixed in together.
I've sifted through, and extracted the following which I believe to be about Ellen Cunningham's murder:
The first Bridgewater mystery is not cleared up.
Ellen Cunningham was a slim intelligent comely girl.
Jane Cunningham is a rather prepossessing young woman.
Would a body that had been submerged for a fortnight have a skin like parchment?
It would be difficult to persuade many of the old hands at Bridgewater that the body was not planted in the creek.
According to a late English paper, an autopsy on the body of a young man, who dived into deep water and sank, showed no evidence of drowning. The only conclusion was that the shock of the water on a weak heart had been fatal.
This plainly suggests the author had his suspicions about the case: that Ellen was murdered elsewhere and the body planted at the creek, and that the story about a weak heart had been inspired by recent news paper reports rather than reality.
I wonder if I will ever find out what happened.
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