Author: Richard Jones

The 19th century was a dangerous period in which to be alive. All manner of hazards awaited the unwary as they meandered rtheir way along the rocky road of life – and many of those hazards resulted in […]

It is a fascinating exercise to scour the pages of the Victorian newspapers in search of long ago murders that tell us a little about investigations and the like of the era. I came across the following in […]

In past blogs I have featured some of the characters who graced the Victorian police courts with their presence in the 19th century. Another of these “characters” was featured in The Illustrated Police News on Saturday the 1st […]

Murder cases were regular features in newspapers throughout the 19th century and on into the 21st century. Indeed, if the truth be known, fascination with homicides has continued right into the 21st century. When it came to murder, […]

In 1888, the year of the Jack the Ripper murders, the possibilities of how cameras might be used in criminal and legal cases were being explored. The Sheffield Evening Telegraph, in its edition of Monday the 24th of […]

One of the suggestions made at the height of the Jack the Ripper scare, was that bloodhounds might be used to track the killer through the teeming streets of Whitechapel. Sir Charles Warren, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, had […]

Although the Jack the Ripper murders, so far as we know, ended in November 1888, with the murder of Mary Kelly, for many years afterwards any murder in London was looked at as possibly being the work of […]

In 1894, the residents of the district of Kensington, in west London, were subjected to series of unprovoked attacks by a mysterious veiled woman who stabbed several women with a sharp object. The attacks for a time caused […]

Jack the Ripper aside, the 19th century East End was the epicentre for some pretty major and horrific discoveries, several of which involved the finding of human remains. In September, 1873, a ghastly discovery was made in the […]

I’ve recently been delving into old copies of The Pall Mall Gazette in search of stories that bring the late 19th and early 20th centuries to life. The other day my attention was caught by the following article […]