Mar 6, 2025
Madness, Melancholy, or Murder: An Ancient English Farm’s 50-Year-Old Mystery
What happened in those hours, between the gunshot at dawn waking Robbie and Frances and their final moment in the garden must have been pure hell.
In our new Longreads essay, Andrew Chamings goes back to his childhood farm in England to investigate the violent deaths of three local siblings—deaths that have been shrouded in folklore and superstition for the last 50 years.
Writers breathlessly described Devon’s lonely and isolated farms as a land of tyrannical puritanism. Dispatches from London told of cursed families and the slow, backward way of life in the villages.
Read this gripping true crime tale on Longreads here.
