I have 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.

In 1938, as the world readied for war, my widowed dad met a woman while holidaying on the Isle of Wight who had been the central figure in one of the decade’s most notorious criminal cases. Her name was Carmen Swann, and two years previously, in March 1936, she had been sentenced to death for the murder of her eight-year-old daughter Valerie.

Carmen Vasilescu was born in 1903 in Asnières, France, to a French mother and a Romanian father, and had been brought to Britain when still a small child after her mother’s death from tuberculosis. This disease was the scourge of the era and carried off millions of Europeans in their prime. At the time there was no drug to cure it, and the only treatment was prolonged bed rest in a........

© The Spectator