Inside Forensic Science · Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science

Series 3, Episode 3: The Postmortem and the Gun

·44 min·3 clips

Bloody gun wad discovered at scene

The body starts the fight. One witness account has Monson saying young Humber shot himself, but the same material says no gun was lying near the body. That detail is hard to shrug off. The scene handling feels rough beside modern practice too: the body is moved with a rug and cart, and the first view accepts accidental death. Then the gun is handled and tried, and that tidy version starts to wobble. The wound itself is not in dispute. Humber died from a shotgun wound to the head. The harder question is whether the shot travelled in a way that fits the story witnesses first gave. Angle becomes the nuisance that will not go away. The guest notes that the shot could have come downwards rather than upwards, especially if Humber had bent to retrieve a rabbit. The host is caught off balance, usefully so. The science can talk about relative positions, but it still needs people to be truthful about who stood where. Witness evidence does a lot of work here because 1893 leaves no CCTV, no easy check on which gun was used, and no clean way to test whether the accounts match. One companion is Monson, the accused. The other has vanished from the available account. That leaves the postmortem doing only what it can do: name the cause, not rebuild the whole scene. The guns become the next pressure point. If this was an accident, Humber's own gun should make sense. If it was murder, another gun might explain more. The episode handles that carefully. The firearm evidence matters, but it cannot rescue a messy scene, shaky witnesses, or a missing observer.

As heard by us

A Victorian shooting case built on evidence, doubt, and one very inconvenient gun.

The Ardlamont case works best here as an exercise in reconstruction rather than shock: a body on the ground, a shotgun wound to the head, and a version of events that never quite settles.

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Why you'd press play

You get an 1893 Ardlamont shooting case examined through one wound, two shotguns, and disputed witness evidence.

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