Julian Fellows presents...

...a true story of crime, greed and passion worthy of Alfred Hitchcock.

"The idea of my presenting a true-crime documentary first came up post-Oscars-in fact, almost everything that's happened in my life has happened post-Oscars [Fellows won the best screenplay award in 2002 for his quirky whodunnit Gosford Park].
The approach [from production company RDF Media] was made at a time when offers to write were pouting in, but there wasn't much in the acting line and. To be honest, my vanity couldn't quite contemplate my disappearing totally from the nation’s screens.
What this project gave me was the opportunity not just to co-write the script, but to pop up at various point as myself.

As it happens, the murder of Charles Bravo was a case I was familiar with. It's the story of a wealthy Victorian woman, Florence Ricardo, whose reputation has already been blown out of the water by scandal, but who eventually marries an ambitious young barrister, Charles Bravo, attracted by her fortune. He dies from poisoning in mysterious circumstances, but despite the most exhaustive investigations at the time, no one was ever charged with his murder.

My job in the film is to loom out of doorways and dark corners and – hopefully – ask and answer the kind of questions that preoccupy the audience. I also act as an interpreter, putting things in a social context; today for example, we wouldn't think it odd for Florence to want a prenuptial agreement, but Victorian times it would have been viewed as outrageous. In conventional drama, that's the kind of point that has to be put across in dialogue between the characters; however, as sort of ghost from the future, I can explain in more directly.

We were actually able to do some filming at the Priory, the house where the murder happened, it's a rather handsome old building in Balham, south-west London, which by some amazing chance has escaped demolition. It's been divided into flats now, but a very nice woman allowed us to sit in the very room where the couple argued on the night of Charles's death. Normally, I'm about as psychic as a door, but even I could sense a connection with those events across the passage of time.

One of the reasons I found time for this was that always fascinated me. Not random murder, or serial murders, but the kind if situation in which killing someone becomes the only logical way out; where someone decides to execute the man or woman they may have spent half their life with.

At he time, the Charles Bravo case caused a sensation – it had jealousy, money and sex by the bucketload, and the newspaper had a field day. But underneath all that lies a terrible unhappiness, of the kind that tips people over the edge. That, for me, is what's at the heart of the story.

I'd love it if we could do a series of these programmes. We've lined up some wonderful unsolved murders, and in each one I've come to a cast-iron conclusion as to who the killers were. With Charles Bravo, I've reached a definitive verdict – the only snag being that my wife and my son completely disagree with me. Still, that's the great thing about it for certain, but that doesn't stop us trying."

As told to Christopher Middleton.