My father married a murderer

Ihave a distant cousin in Australia whom I have never met. This lady – her name is Moya – has a hobby researching our family’s history, and our paths first crossed virtually via Ancestry.com. This week, Moya told me an astonishing story she had uncovered about my late father’s second marriage to a dying woman convicted of murdering her own, beloved daughter.

It is a truly tragic tale of Dickensian pathos and misery, but one that, amazingly my dad never mentioned to me. I only learned the brutal facts from Moya thanks to the wonders of the internet. My father was in his sixties when I was born in the 1950s and died when I was 19. I was the late fruit of his third marriage; he had lost his first two wives to cancer and tuberculosis respectively, leaving him with two sons to bring up alone.