Mrs. Annie Holmes, 38, was delighted when she received a bottle of tonic through the post. She took several spoonfuls and next day she was dead. Two weeks later her body was exhumed after persistent rumours that she hadnt died of natural causes. Traces of strychnine were found in the body, and the man who
The rapist-killer who lurks in ambush for homecoming working girls is surely the personification of evil. Such a killer was waiting for Wendy Knell, 25, when shortly after 11 p.m. on Monday, JUNE 22nd, 1987, she said goodnight to her boyfriend and went to her flat in Guildford Road, Tunbridge Wells. Next day she didnt
A government inquiry into capital punishment was ordered as a result of the botched hanging of Edward Hewitt in Gloucester Prison on Tuesday, JUNE 15th, 1886. The hangman, James Berry, had calculated a drop of six feet, which proved insufficient for the condemned mans weight of 10st 4lb. As a result the drop failed to
The murder of Elizabeth Figg, a 21-year-old prostitute, bore all the hallmarks of the work of Jack the Stripper, the serial killer who terrorised West End vice girls in the mid-1960s. As in some of the Strippers cases, Elizabeths body was found in a secluded part of the Thames riverfront at Dukes Meadow, Chiswick, and,
What can be made of Catherine Ogdens death? She was undoubtedly strangled, and her body was found in undergrowth in Bowling Park, Leeds. But at the inquest on her an open verdict was returned. And asked about her murder at a press conference during the police investigation a senior officer snapped: Who says its murder?
Within an hour of pocketing his weekly wage packet, Thomas Furlonger, a 62-year-old baker, was found beaten to death alongside one of the furnace ovens at the bakery where he worked in Milkwood Road, Herne Hill, south London. The murder weapon, an iron bar, lay beside his body. A fellow-employee, Daniel Gorrie, 30, was acting
A predilection for violence and for sleeping with older women was the preferred lifestyle of Joseph Connor, and it brought him to the gallows outside Newgate on Monday, JUNE 2nd, 1845. Connor, a 20-year-old Irishman, slept regularly with a woman of 60; another woman with whom he habitually had sex was Mary Brothers, a prostitute.
Innuendo, accusation and open suspicion bedevilled the inquest on Agnes Kesson, a young waitress found dead on tree-lined Surrey land between Epsom and Tolworth. It is quite clear that someone knows something, the coroner told the jury. Someone is keeping back something. The whole truth has not been told to you here. Agnes, 20, from
A neighbour told police that she heard a cry of Murder! one evening in early March 1879, and next day the body of 82-year-old Samuel Churchill was found in his cottage, his head and shoulders burned off. His wife Catherine, 55, claimed that it must have been a terrible accident, that he suffered fits and
A client of prostitute Phyllis Spiers, 22, suddenly found himself inexorably mixed up with her murder when her body was found in a Folkestone wood on Thursday, MAY 26th, 1938. He was a labourer who admitted going into the wood with Mrs. Spiers, and agreed that the green scarf with which she was strangled was