True crime

Here you will find true stories from the shady side of Britain’s past, from murderers and arsonists, poachers and thieves, pickpockets and vagabonds, to the policemen, detectives, prosecutors and hangmen responsible for sending the guilty to their ultimate fate.

Victorian and nineteenth-century crime is perennially popular, and many of the famous cases of this era are featured in books by award-winning and bestselling authors. More contemporary cases of real crime and injustice are covered too, as is regional British crime.

Read more about true crime

Hawkhurst: The story of smuggling in the 18th Century
In the 1740s the notorious Hawkhurst Gang brought the old practice of smuggling to new and dangerous heights
Sex & Drugs and Rock & Roll: The music behind ‘The Microdot Gang’
‘The Microdot Gang’ author James Wyllie shares the ultimate accompanying soundtrack
The Great Train Robbery ‘cold case’ review
Who were the men who slipped through the net?
Valerie’s story: The woman who survived the A6 Murder
Read an extract from Paul Stickler’s The Long Silence, the posthumous autobiography of Valerie Storie
Ask the author: Jeremy Craddock on The Jigsaw Murders
Jeremy Craddock discusses the shocking history behind the murders of Isabella Ruxton and Mary Jane Rogerson
Inside the Cromwell Street murder investigation
Detective Superintendent John Bennett QPM tells his story
The Sweeney & the Dirty Squads: Police corruption and sleaze 70’s style
Crossing the Line of Duty author Neil Root on corruption in London’s Metropolitan Police
Wartime London: A criminal’s paradise?
The chaos of the Blitz along with nightly blackouts made London an easy place to commit crime
The Manchester Martyrs of 1867
A Fenian attempt to free two prisoners led to the death of four
The notorious case of Dr Crippen
The infamous Dr Crippen was executed in 1910 for poisoning and dismembering his wife
Re-examining the case of ‘Jack the Stripper’
A former Flying Squad detective investigates the Nude Murders 50 years on
The ‘Acid Bath’ murders
The trials and liquidations of John George Haigh
How did Fleet Street’s crime journalists get their scoops?
A look at how crime reporters chased their stories from the mid-1930s to the 1960s
Ask the author: Monica Weller on investigating a 50-year-old cold case
On writing about – and solving – the murder of Dr Helen Davidson
Medical detectives: pioneering forensic pathologists
How Britain’s ‘forensic five’ laid the foundations for modern crime scene investigation
The Kalahari Killings
The true story of a wartime double murder in Botswana, 1943
Escape from Broadmoor
Patient John Thomas Straffen’s bid for freedom
Fitted up: The Mitcham Co-op murder
George Thatcher’s fight to prove his innocence
The lost girls of Liverpool
Unsolved child murders in Edwardian Liverpool