Sister Boniface Mysteries: "There Is No 'i' in Slaughter" (BBC-TV, UKTV, Britbox, PBS, aired September 23, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, February 21) I watched two British mystery shows on KPBS: a Sister Boniface Mysteries episode called “There Is No ‘I’ in Slaughter” (after Great Slaughter, the fictitious town in central England where the show takes place) and a Father Brown show called “The Lord of the Dance.” It annoys me that KPBS’s announcer pronounces Sister Boniface’s last name as “BONEY-fass” when I’ve always assumed it’s “BONNI))-fuss.” “There Is No ‘I’ in Slaughter” was actually a pretty dreary episode – writer Asher Pirie seemed to assume that the way to enliven a show set in the mid-1960’s would be to camp it up in the manner of the 1960’s Batman and other shows of the time. It’s about a so-called “team-building exercise” two central English police forces, one from Great Slaughter and one from a neighboring town, are put through by a particularly obnoxious official named Lowsley (Robert Daws), which gets interrupted when a police official named Horace Winthorpe (Mark McDonnell) is found dead in a locked room. The gimmick Is that next to Winthorpe’s body is found a spinning top (though of course it had long since ceased to spin when Sister Boniface, played as usual by Lorna Watson, shows up on the scene and it’s lying in a pool of Winthorpe’s blood), and the trademark of the gangster who supposedly committed the fictional crime the real cops are investigating as part of their team-building exercise was to leave a similar wooden top next to the bodies of the victims he killed. Even more than usual for amateur detective stories, there’s an air of “step aside, you incompetent professional cops, and let the brainy outsider show you how it’s done.” When Lorna Watson enters as Sister Boniface, there’s a sense of fresh air blowing in from outside the silly rivalries between the two competing “teams.”

I spent a lot of this 45-minute episode nodding off and woke only in time for Sister Boniface to deduce not only the killer’s identity but how he pulled off the trick of making the murder appear to have taken place in the locked room. The killer was Constable Rupert Beagle (Tyler-Jo Richardson), an African-British officer whose quarrel with Winthorpe was that Winthorpe had killed Beagle’s father years before. Ostensibly it was an accident – Winthorpe had fired a gun at Beagle père thinking it wasn’t loaded, but it was, and the shot killed him – and Beagle’s killing Winthorpe was also an accident. They were quarreling and Beagle grabbed Winthorpe and slammed him against the metal foot of the room’s bed, causing Winthorpe’s death. Then, rather than report what he’d done to all the police on the scene, Beagle put the key to the room on a string attached to the top, pulled it through the outside window (which he was able to open from inside even though when the police and Sister Boniface discovered Winthorpe’s body, they checked the windows and they were inoperably locked from both sides), hung the key from the string, and thus dropped the key back in the room along with the top. Unfortunately for Beagle, in pulling the string he cut a wound in his hand, which gave him away to Sister Boniface. When he realizes he’s been discovered, Beagle threatens to commit suicide by jumping off a watchtower on the site of the exercise, but Sister Boniface talks him out of it and he turns himself in instead. Needless to say, the self-important goon who was running the silly contest insists on declaring it a tie because the other police who were participating stopped competing to solve the real-life killing. Despite Lorna Watson’s reliably sprightly appearance in the title role, this Sister Boniface Mysteries episode was pretty lame, and the contrast between the phony investigation and the real one just didn’t come off that well.