Inside Forensic Science · Leverhulme Research Centre for Forensic Science

Series 3, Episode 5: The Experiments

·45 min·5 clips

The investigation opens with the Monsons living close to a fortune that had not yet been inherited. Ardlamont is still presented as a beautiful, picturesque Scottish estate, but the charm sits beside a blunt question: was the whole setup too good to be true? The central question stays the same: was Hambra killed by Monson, by Scott, or by Hambra himself? The episode does not hurry that answer. It keeps circling the gunshot and treats the wound as a stubborn fact that has to be faced carefully. Dr Henry Duncan Littlejohn comes first, and his evidence anchors the forensic debate. Saunders and Hay describe experiments at different distances and the effects on blackening, singeing, and pellet spread. Their reading points to a shot fired from probably under three feet and certainly not over four. That matters because it turns guesswork into measurement, which is what the case keeps coming back to. Dr Macmillan then returns from his earlier certainty that the death was accidental. He says he tried different guns, positions, and angles, and still could not reproduce a wound like Hambra’s. His sheep head experiments make the point plainly enough: at close range, the damage was a smashed-up mess. He also refers to cadaver experiments in Edinburgh and to what others reported seeing there. The testimony keeps returning to one stubborn idea, that a close shot should have shattered bone far more dramatically. The episode lets those claims sit beside one another instead of forcing them into a tidy consensus. That makes the listening better, not worse. Each witness is trying to solve the same physical problem from a different angle. The show keeps returning to the gun, the skull, and the limits of what experiments can prove about a real death. Even the evidence feels physical, with diagrams, muzzle distance, and the blunt violence of what happens when shot meets bone. The result is a forensic argument built from the ground up rather than fitted on afterward. The episode ends by preparing the listener for the final decision still to come. Duncan clearly believes Monson is guilty. The evidence, though, has not finished arguing with itself. The series leaves the verdict open for the next and final chapter, where the audience gets to decide whether to side with Duncan or reach a different conclusion.

As heard by us

A methodical forensic argument where distance matters.

A disputed death on a Scottish estate becomes a careful study of how forensic certainty is built, tested, and argued over. The episode works best when it stays close to the physical problem at its center: how far the gun was, what the wound should have looked like, and why the…

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Why you'd press play

You want the gunshot evidence tested until the story stops hiding.

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