Back from the Crimean War, where he fought with valour, Charles Finch suspected that his girlfriend, Harriet Freeborn, had been sleeping with a man in London while he was on active service. He armed himself with a cut-throat razor, determined to avenge the slight on his dignity. Finch and Harriet were walking across a field
A strong smell of gas prompted patrolling bobby Police Constable Watts to investigate a cheesemongers shop in Bayswater, London, on the night of Wednesday, JULY 28th, 1926. The smell was coming from the grating of the cellar below the shop. Constable Watts shone his torch down through the grating and into his beam of light
The triple execution at Winchester Prison on Tuesday, JULY 21st, 1896, was the last of its kind to be held in Britain. Triple executions were thought to be cruel condemned prisoners often fainted on the drop because of the time they were kept waiting with the ropes around their necks. Philip Matthews, 32, a
Residents on Glasgows Castlemilk estate heard a taxi pull up outside a house on Sunday, JULY 23rd, 1961, heard two men talking, heard the taxis radio crackling then heard the shattering sound of two shots. The curious went to their windows and saw a man running towards the darkness of nearby Glen Wood. They
They were young lovers - they had been going out together since he was 15 and she was 13 - so no one was surprised when they decided to marry. The date was fixed for August 1900, when he was 21 and she 19. Then things started to go wrong. First, Alfred Highfield, the potential
The murder of a priest and the possible involvement of a fellow-priest seems an unlikely scenario - but it is one that surfaced in Bradford in 1953. The murdered priest was Father Henryk Borynski, who vanished on Monday, JULY 13th. Father Borynski had recently been appointed chaplain to the 1,500-strong Polish community in Bradford. He
A pair of soldiers boots, worn in the recently concluded Crimean War, was at the centre of a murder at Western Heights Barracks, Dover, in August 1856. In front of a group of other soldiers the owner of the boots, Private Thomas Mansell, 29, of the 49th Regiment, accused Lance Corporal Alexander McBurney, an Ulsterman,
The international politics of the Cold War entered unexpectedly and dramatically into the case of the Cosy Corner Store, a dilapidated iron shack in Hazlemere, Buckinghamshire, which could itself have come from behind the Iron Curtain. Here, on Saturday night, JULY 8th, 1950, the stores owner William Dearlove, 62, was found dead. A sack had
Following a series of family rows, Frances Stewart, 43, a widow, was asked to leave the house she shared with her daughter and son-in-law. She promptly packed her bags and, while no one was looking, tucked her one-year-old grandson, little Henry Scrivener, under her arm. This was to be Henrys last outing with his gran.
The locals in Stokes Croft, Bristol, used to say that Gertrude Dorothea OLeary, who ran an off-licence in Thomas Street, was loaded with cash. Her killer, no doubt driven by such stories, called in at her shop on Thursday, JUNE 30th, 1949, beat her at least 20 times, strangled her, yet walked out with only