It
is doubtful professional cold case investigators, no matter what
evidence they might find, could ever solve irrefutably a probable
murder more than half a millennium ago. Absolutely nothing—not
even an indisputably authenticated confession by his successor on the
throne--would be enough to absolve Richard III, King of England, from
the accepted popular assumption he arranged the murder of his two
nephews in the Tower of London.
This
was foretold sadly by Scotland Yard's Alan Grant in 1951 after his
exhaustive probe into historical records pointed the accusing finger
instead at Henry VII. Grant is a fictional character, but this
matters not in the least. The evidence he and his fictional
assistants dug up were found in nonfictional records by his creator,
Scottish playwright/novelist Elizabeth MacIntosh, while researching a
play set in that period. Under the nom
de plume
Josephine Tey she devoted the fifth in her series of Inspector Grant
mysteries to perhaps England's oldest and most controversial real
murder mysteries, known down the ages as The Princes in the Tower.
