Author: Richard Jones

On October the 5th, 1888, The Weekly Herald published an opinion piece in which it pontificated about the lessons and morals that could be drawn from the Whitechapel murders:- THE WHITECHAPEL MURDERER The fiendish work of the man […]

Peter Kuerten, who was known as “The Vampire of Dusseldorf” and “The Dusseldorf Monster” was a German serial killer who committed a series of murders between February and November, 1929. According to an article which appeared in The […]

Trawling through the court reports of the 19th century can be both intriguing and depressing. You come upon all manner of stories that show humankind at their best, worst, and most eccentric. I recently found a little story […]

Today we set off to join a procession that made its way through the streets of the eastern City and into the East End of London in 1905. Our guide for this sojourn is The Westminster Gazette, which […]

It is a strange thing to view the attitudes to poverty that many of the reasonably well off and better off Victorian citizens had. There was a consensus that “honest poverty” was good for the soul, and was, […]

A point that was often made in the Victorian newspapers about the East End of London was that poverty and starvation were far bigger killers, and posed more danger to the residents than Jack the Ripper ever did. […]

It is safe to say that interest in the Whitechapel murders – as well as in the identity of the unknown miscreant who was carrying them out, increased dramatically in the aftermath of the murder of Annie Chapman, […]

It is quite easy for what begins as a simple disagreement to suddenly boil over into something far more serious, especially when drink is involved. This is and always has been the case, and, in the past, it […]

In September, 1861, a case was heard at Worship Street Police Court that really did illustrate the mental impact that the hardships faced by the destitute poor of the Victorian era could have on those who found themselves […]

As the Whitechapel murders increased in their numbers and their ferocity, newspapers tried desperately to explain the killer’s possible motivation, and, if they couldn’t do so, they began looking back into history to see if their were any […]