Episode 14: Hilda Marchbank and Susan May, Part 1. The Crime and the Case

On the morning of the 12th of March 1992, Susan May arrived at her aunt's house on Tandle Hill Road in Royton with a sandwich for lunch. She found Hilda Marchbank dead. She was eighty-nine years old, and she had been beaten and suffocated in her own bed. Susan had cared for Hilda almost every day for years. She described her as a second mother. Eighteen days after the murder, she was arrested and charged with killing her. The case against her rested on three marks on the wall of Hilda's bedroom, a lie she had told police, and questions about money. But behind the forensic evidence presented to the jury lay a series of decisions - about what was tested, what was disclosed, and what was pursued - that would take decades to fully come to light. This is Part 1 of a two-part episode, covering the murder, the investigation, and the trial. Part 2 follows Susan into prison, and through the long fight to prove what she always maintained: that she didn't do it.