Today, 99 Magdalen Road in Cowley, Oxford is a slightly neglected three-storey late Victorian house, in an area that is today popular with the city’s university students. For decades, though, it was home to the Gardner family.

Richard Gardner and Elizabeth Ann Matthews had married in 1856, when Richard was 27 and his bride just 17. He was from Kings Sutton, near Banbury, the son of an agricultural labourer; she was from the village of Stanton St John, a few miles outside Oxford. They initially settled in Richard’s home town, where, in 1858, Richard was working as a sergeant of the militia – and presumably this job was why they found themselves living in Dover, Kent in 1860. They then returned to Kings Sutton, before relocating to Oxford by 1871, with the family initially settling near the London Road turnpike gate at Headington Quarry, before moving to Magdalen Road. They were at this property by 1881, and after Richard’s death, Elizabeth continued to live there with various children until her death in 1914. After her own death, her daughter Lucy, and son-in-law George, would stay living at the house.

The Gardners’ lives were lived in sometimes difficult circumstances, as archival records reveal. They were part of Oxford’s working-class community: after Richard’s stint as a militiaman, he worked as a labourer (on some of his children’s marriage records, it is claimed that he was a land surveyor, but there is no other evidence for this), while Elizabeth worked as a laundress. They had 11 children – although seven would be dead by the time of the 1911 census, and at least three had died young: Fanny, born in 1858 but dead within two years; Edmund Robert, who died as a baby in 1871, and Richard John, dead three years later, aged five. After Richard’s death, it was down to Elizabeth to provide for her family. It was imperative for the children to be able to work as soon as they were able, to help contribute to the family coffers.

This was, though, a female-dominant family, which restricted the type of work the children could take on. Son Thomas Matthews Gardner worked as a porter; but what could his sisters, Emily, Lizzie, Lily, Fanny and Lucy, do? Things weren’t helped when Lizzie Gardner, then aged 22, gave birth to an illegitimate child, Bertram, known as Bertie, in 1890. However, the family stuck together, with Bertie being baptised at the local church, and living with his mother next door to the rest of the family, at 97 Magdalen Road.

Marriage was obviously an option – Emily Ellen married a local labourer, Edwin Ayres, in 1880, when she was barely 21. But this had dangers, too: Lily Gardner married George Pullin in 1896, but was dead just five months later. At the time of her wedding she had been pregnant; her son George Douglas was born exactly two weeks before his mother was buried. George Douglas would also be dead by the end of 1897.

It seemed as though the youngest daughter, Lucy Mary, might have a happier ending. At the age of 19, on 30 September 1895, she married George Strange. George was the only child of his own parents’ second marriage – they had both been widowed when they married in 1872. His father was a publican in Oxford, while his mother had grown up working first as a plaiter – she was from the Hertfordshire/Bedfordshire borders, where straw-plaiting was a popular industry – and then, after her first husband died, as a charwoman. George himself had worked initially as a college servant at the university, before becoming a waiter. During his marriage to Lucy, he had a peripatetic lifestyle in that he would go on to work at army bases, working in the mess to help provide food for soldiers. When he worked away, Lucy would stay at home in Cowley, even though it meant they could be separated for months at a time. Like most of the women in her family, she needed to work despite her marriage, and so, like her mother, she worked as a laundress.

In this vein, family life continued. Lucy – and George when he was around – lived with her widowed mother at 99 Magdalen Road, while her family members still lived locally. They seem to have been close: Lucy and George were the witnesses at her sister Lily’s wedding; and Lucy’s sister Fanny was a witness at her own. They had more than their fair share of tragedy – not only the death of Richard prematurely, but also the deaths of Lily and her baby son. In 1906, at the age of 16, Bertram Gardner also died. When Elizabeth Gardner died in 1914, she was buried in the same grave as her grandson.

These tragedies were superseded, however, in 1915, when Lucy Mary Strange, now aged 40, was found murdered in the kitchen at 99 Magdalen Road. She had been living there on her own, now that her mother was dead, for George had been working down in Aldershot for the previous few months, but someone had been in the house with her, and had battered her to death, leaving her with a badly fractured skull and multiple injuries.

Reading about the Gardner family, it’s clear that they had little time to be concerned with the lingering perceptions of morality from the Victorian age. They lived as they felt fit; they had relationships, they loved, they gave birth to illegitimate children or married when pregnant because they lived as we do now. However, it’s also clear from press coverage of Lucy’s horrible murder that rumours about her own morality and way of life affected how her death was covered, and the likelihood that the perpetrator would be convicted of her murder.

This is not to say that a man was not identified and charged with the offence – one Alfred Holland, a 24-year-old gardener, was duly sent to the Oxford City Court, and then remanded into custody at Oxford Prison to await trial at the Oxfordshire Assizes. However, the trial, and the subsequent press coverage, made much of Lucy’s lifestyle. The fact that her husband was absent for long stretches was itself a point of comment; but so too were the rumours and allegations that she had had regular ‘male visitors’, including Alfred. In court, Alfred’s defence mainly rested on his own allegations that Lucy had been having an affair with a man named Jack, who had been living with her at the time of her death, and who Alfred had heard arguing with her. It was Jack, not him, who had been responsible for her murder, he insisted.

To modern minds, this seems rather convenient. Alfred did not know this man’s full or real name, or any more details about him. He did know, or his lawyers certainly did, that a jury might be willing to believe that if a married woman was living on her own, she might have one or more lovers, and that a woman of ‘that type’ might be drawn to men with a tendency towards violence, any of whom might resort to murder. Alfred’s story was seen as more valid than one from Lucy’s family, and Lucy herself, of course, could not protect her own reputation in court. The jury believed Alfred’s version of events and he was acquitted.

Nobody was ever brought to justice for the murder of Lucy Strange. However, her case, and how it was dealt with, brings up issues that are still valid today, about how the press reports murder cases, which ones are seen as newsworthy and which ones less so, and how this perception of newsworthiness relates to how the victim is perceived. In Lucy’s case, she was a middle-aged, working-class woman who – it was alleged – sought male company when she was alone, her husband working away. She was not a young innocent, or a ‘respectable’ wife, and therefore the press was not quite sure how to depict her. Alfred’s relationship with her, and his suggestions of other relationships, meant that once he was acquitted, there seems to have been little desire to follow up on other suspects, or to fight for Lucy’s murderer to be caught. Perhaps there was still a belief that Alfred was guilty – in which case, at the time, he could not have been brought to trial again later, even if more evidence had been found, due to double jeopardy rules. This might help explain the lack of coverage after his acquittal, when Lucy’s name disappears from the newspapers. But one also can’t help but wonder whether, if Lucy had been from a wealthier, more educated, family, or if she had lived a life that the press and public saw as more befitting a lady, people might have fought a bit harder for her.

Today, we still have these debates about how publicity and newspaper coverage varies according to who the victim of a crime is: young, white, middle-class women still tend to get more coverage than a working-class woman, a BAME woman, or a woman who is a sex worker. Judgements are made, whether conscious or subconscious, about which individual is worthy of extensive press coverage, of campaigns to find their killers, of sympathy. Lucy Strange’s case suggests that not much has changed over the course of the past century.