The St Mellons Mystery: The Murder of Susan Gibbs (1874)

Step back into Victorian Wales, where quiet lanes and morning mist concealed one of the era’s most disturbing disappearances. In 1874, Susan Gibbs — a hardworking Cardiff housekeeper — travelled to St Mellons to meet her young husband, James, a butler with ambition and secrets to protect. Three weeks later, her body was discovered beneath a tangle of briars, so hidden and decomposed that even the cause of death was uncertain.

What followed was a landmark investigation built not on forensics, but on behaviour: unanswered letters, midnight movements, missing belongings, and a chain of lies that revealed far more than any single piece of evidence.

Tonight we explore the life Susan hoped for, the double life James was living, and the extraordinary inquiry that led to one of Wales’s most chilling convictions. And in our Further Particulars, we lighten the gaslamps for a brief detour into Victorian chaos—this time involving a hotel, a missing parrot, and entirely too much commotion in Bath.

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