The Wyrley Gang

Local myth remembers the outrages to have been enacted by ‘The Wyrley Gang,’ although Conan Doyle believed they were the work of a single person, a local butcher’s boy and sometime sailor called Royden Sharp. Ironically, Conan Doyle’s suspicion was based on circumstantial evidence – it was an over-reliance on this typ of evidence which had resulted in Edalji’s flawed conviction.

Poison pen letters in the name of the ‘Wyrley Gang’ continued for another twenty-five years, but these were subsequently discovered to have been posted from outside the village by Enoch Knowles of nearby Wednesbury, who was arrested and convicted in 1934.