On July 8, 1940, Florence Ransom asked her brother to show her how to fire his single-shot .410 sporting shotgun, telling him she wanted to shoot rabbits, and took away a dozen cartridges. The next morning she caught the 8:56 train from Bicester. That afternoon, at a cottage called Crittenden in Matfield, in the Kent parish of Brenchley, three women were shot dead: Dorothy Sanders Fisher, forty-six; her daughter Freda Ann Fisher, twenty; and their housekeeper, Charlotte Saunders, forty-eight. Six shots had been fired, which meant the gun had been reloaded five times, and the prosecution later showed the jury that the spent cartridge could not be pulled out with the fingers alone.
Ransom, thirty-four, a widow, lived at Carramore Farm in Piddington, near Bicester, with Dorothy Fisher's husband, whose first name is given in accounts as Walter or Lawrence. The couple had separated on apparently friendly terms, and he had bought the Matfield cottage for his wife and daughter and paid for a housekeeper, but he kept visiting to see how they were. The prosecution said Ransom was jealous, and that Mrs. Fisher would not give her husband a divorce. It suggested she had arrived with the story about shooting rabbits and walked the women out into the garden. Dorothy and Freda Fisher were shot there; the housekeeper, running out, was shot too.
The evidence against her was plain. A leather glove found at Crittenden was traced to her; she said she might have given her gloves to Freda months earlier. Three men from Capel, a charcoal burner, a laborer and a baker, identified her as the woman they had seen hurrying away, and other witnesses saw her between Crittenden and Tonbridge carrying a brown paper parcel, which the prosecution said held the gun. She said she had been at the farm all day. Charged at Tonbridge in the middle of July, she told Detective Inspector Smeed, "I didn't do it, I didn't do it, how could I?" She spent time in the hospital at Holloway prison after a breakdown, and her first Old Bailey hearing, in September, was adjourned so that a neurologist could examine her.
The trial opened at the Old Bailey on November 7, 1940, during the Blitz, and lasted three and a half days. Walter Fisher and Ransom's own mother gave damaging evidence about her behavior on the evening of the murders. She was the only defense witness; she denied any part in it and said her memory of the day was a complete blank, and there was evidence that she had at times been a voluntary patient in hospitals and mental homes. The jury took the gun and a cartridge into the jury room, and after forty-seven minutes, on November 12, found her guilty. She was sentenced to death, insisting to the end that she was innocent.
Before the date set for her execution she was certified insane and reprieved, and she was committed to Broadmoor, where she died in 1966. Dorothy and Freda Fisher are buried together in the churchyard of St. Andrew's at Paddock Wood.