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The foggy streets of Edwardian London were alive with cads, swindlers, ladies of dubious reputation and all manner of lowlife who fed on human frailty. In 1895, Adolph Beck was arrested and convicted of the crimes of deception and larceny. Using the alias Lord Winton de Willoughby, he had entered into the apartments of several ladies, some of whom preferred, for obvious reasons, not to give their names. The ladies gave evidence, as did a handwriting expert, and Mr. Beck was imprisoned. But an utterly bizarre sequence of events culminated in a judge declaring that, since he could himself determine perfectly whether or not the accused is of the criminal classes, juries should never be allowed to decide the outcome of a trial. The account given here is of one of the strangest true stories in British legal history.