Special Constable Sharon Gilbert raised an eyebrow when, in the middle of a murder hunt, volunteer searcher Ian Huntley casually asked her: “How long does DNA last?” Sharon said later: “I just thought it was strange, very strange. It is just not what a normal member of the public says to someone who is sitting
Sarah Butler wasn’t a sex worker. The 20-year-old was from a good family that she loved, and being paid for sex simply wasn’t something that she would normally consider. However, Sarah was also a typical college student, struggling to pay her way, and desperately in need of money to continue her studies at New Jersey
Today Finborough Road in West Brompton, Fulham, south-west London, is an extremely expensive place to live. But just after the Second World War little had changed since the early 1920s when this was a run-down area, and the crazed fantasist Ronald True murdered a prostitute in her Finborough Road flat. In the late 1940s the
Phil Spector’s chauffeur lights another cigarette and watches the smoke coil across a star-struck Los Angeles sky. He’s parked in a warm Mercedes outside the back door of the faux Pyrenean castle where Spector lives – a concoction of tiles and turrets atop a hill in Alhambra, one of the city’s gloomier working-class suburbs. It’s
A bathroom door is carried into court and propped against the witness-box in a trial that will prove a millionaire Irish businessman guilty of killing the beautiful wife he loved. As Brian Kearney stares at it, he remembers that cloudy morning in February 2006 when he woke up in his baby son’s bedroom, knowing for
Believing himself a cut above the fruit and veg salesman job that paid his wages, Keith Rose read books about crime and brooded endlessly over the best way to fulfil his ambition. A bank robbery seemed the logical choice, but it demanded teamwork and profit-sharing, neither of which appealed to him. So he settled on
Within days of being rated the 13th best spot to live in the United States of America, the university city of Gainesville, Florida, was branded “Grisly Gainesville” by the media. And not without reason. The 72-hour nightmare of terror that gripped the community began on the afternoon of Sunday, August 26th, 1990, with the discovery
Pathologist Dr. Elizabeth Peacock studied the body stretched out on a blue plastic trolley in the morgue. The body wore only a bloodstained T-shirt, and there was more blood on its face. The notes on the case said she was a hooker. Mary Ann Pratt, 33, had worked nights in the notorious Star Motel area
America’s most prolific serial killer, Samuel Little, holds court in a California prison cell where he is serving life without parole for murdering three women in the 1980s. He has confessed to 90 other killings, and police in dozens of states across America have spent the last five years proving he’s telling the truth. Little
On the cold, drizzly Monday evening of October 19th, 1970, Sheriff Lieutenant William Shaw and Sergeant John Noren had seen a glow in the leaden sky. The glow came from a hillside above the tiny coastal community of Soquel, and the two patrolling officers figured there was a fire on the ridge above Rodeo Gulch,