ABSTRACT
The most plausible alternative to direct evidence encompasses ballads recorded at a later date—typically in eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century Scotland—which seem to be independent of broadsides, and which display the traditional narrative features which may be taken as evidence of a significant period of oral transmission. In the ballads belonging to the complex the respective narrative trajectories of lover and sweetheart describe a double helix, crossing in a series of decisive encounters. In that substantial majority of murdered sweetheart ballads which are crime and execution broadsides, the story of the murdered sweetheart is accordingly encompassed within, and subsidiary to, that of the murderous lover. To judge from the better-documented nineteenth-century instances of actual sweetheart-murders, as a given case emerges, the primary journalism of newspaper reports and occasional prose pamphlets inevitably tells the story, the "breaking news," of the investigation: the discovery and identification of the body; the identification, pursuit, arrest, and trial of the perpetrator.
