Author: Richard Jones

Dr Jospeh Bell (1837 – 1911) was a surgeon and lecturer at the medical school of Edinburgh University, who was famed for his powers of observation and deduction when it came to diagnosing illnesses and revealing the backgrounds […]

Norton Folgate is an eclectic thoroughfare that nestles, almost in a time-warp, behind the modern high-rise office blocks of Bishopsgate. It is one of a knot of streets that are lined with sturdy 18th-century houses. Nowadays these houses […]

Given its sinister and decidedly gruesome history, Whitechapel really should be haunted. Indeed, so dark and creepy are some of the old streets and alleyways, that it would not come as any great surprise to spot all manner […]

Francis Spurzheim Craig (1837 – 1903) was a journalist and newspaper editor whose name has recently cropped up on the ever-expanding list of Jack the Ripper suspects. In his book The Real Mary Kelly Dr. Weston-Davies makes the claim […]

There is an old song that claims that “A Policeman’s Lot Is Not A Happy One” and, it must be said, that may well have been the case for many of the officers whose job it was to […]

In September, 1898, the dismembered corpse of a young woman was found in a pond in Bridgeport Connecticut, in America. However, the gruesome discovery set in a motion a chain of events that would stretch from Bridgeport to […]

The East End of London, and the district of Spitalfields, in particular, held a great deal of fascination for Victorian journalists, notwithstanding the notoriety it achieved at the time of the Jack the Ripper crimes. On Friday, 3rd […]

Throughout the latter half of the 19th century, London as a whole had a terrible problem with the gangs that infested the streets of the Victorian metropolis. In the early days of the Whitechapel murders, for example, there […]

Reading the numerous newspaper accounts about Whitechapel,  that were published around the time of the Jack the Ripper murders, one could be forgiven for thinking that the district was a den of iniquity where nothing good or enjoyable […]

Amelia Jeffs disappeared in West Ham on the evening of 31st January, 1890. Two weeks later her in an upper room of an empty house in the district. You can read a full article on the murder of […]