Murder in miniature: reconstructing the crime scene in the English courtroom

Exploring the little-known medium of the English crime scene miniature, this chapter removes the roof of the ‘bungalow of death’ and invites us to peer inside. Tiny scale models of murder scenes, like that of the Crumbles bungalow where Patrick Mahon killed Emily Kaye in 1924, appeared in nineteenth- and twentieth-century courtrooms more frequently than the historical record suggests. The result is that these little likenesses have been overlooked in the literature on crime and forensics in the past, underestimating the significance of spatialized understandings of evidence and visual representations of crime scenes in court. This chapter explores the larger methodological implications of murder miniatures for sources about crime and trials in the past, illustrating the effects of investigating crime scenes at scale.