Online talk by Dr Sneha Krishnan as part of Meeting Minds Global. In 1919, Clement de la Hey, principal of Newington College in Madras was shot dead whilst he slept, allegedly by one of his students. The case that ensued was unusual: for one, the alleged murderer was acquitted. At the height of racial tensions in late colonial India, this was extraordinary. For another, the case was shrouded in many layers of gossip, and rumour. What about this murder made it into a story that continued to resonate, and still remains, in some ways poignant as a paradigmatic tale of the violent intimacies of coloniality?