Mamie Stuart and George Shotton

Not a great deal is known about the murky, itinerant life of George Shotton. One certainty is that by the time of his death in 1958, he had managed to get away with the murder of his first wife, Mamie, in 1919. But did Shotton go on to kill again?

Shotton was a naval engineer who wed Mamie Stuart in 1918, despite already being a married man, only to be caught and convicted of bigamy two years later. Though suspected of Mamie’s disappearance around this time – not least because of a trunk full of her possessions found dropped off at a Swansea hotel – he managed to evade conviction. It wasn’t until 1961, when divers discovered human remains in a cave near Caswell Bay, that he was posthumously sentenced for the crime.

The case that the investigative team are looking at in conjunction with Mamie’s death is a 1934 incident known as the Brighton Trunk Murder, in which a dismembered body was found split between two trunks in train stations in Brighton and London. Given the similarities between this murder and that of Mamie Stuart, the team believes that Shotton could be a prime suspect for this murder too.