The Moors murders were a series of child killings committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley in and around Manchester, England, between July 1963 and October 1965. The victims were five children—Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey and Edward Evans—aged between 10 and 17, at least four of whom were sexually assaulted. The bodies of two of the victims were discovered in 1965, in graves dug on Saddleworth Moor; a third grave was discovered there in 1987, more than twenty years after Brady and Hindley's trial. Bennett's body is also thought to be buried there, but despite repeated searches it remains undiscovered.
Harold Bernard Allen was one of Britain's last official executioners, officiating between 1941 and 1964. He was chief executioner at 41 executions and acted as assistant executioner at 53 others, at various prisons in England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands and Cyprus. He acted as assistant executioner for 14 years, mostly to Albert Pierrepoint from 1941 to 1955.
Circumstantial evidence is evidence that relies on an inference to connect it to a conclusion of fact—such as a fingerprint at the scene of a crime. By contrast, direct evidence supports the truth of an assertion directly—i.e., without need for any additional evidence or inference.
Sarah Evelyn Isobel Payne was the victim of a high-profile abduction and murder in West Sussex, England in July 2000.
William Palmer, also known as the Rugeley Poisoner or the Prince of Poisoners, was an English doctor found guilty of murder in one of the most notorious cases of the 19th century. Charles Dickens called Palmer "the greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey".
HM Prison Manchester is a Category A and B men's prison in Manchester, England, operated by His Majesty's Prison Service. It is still commonly referred to as Strangeways, which was its former official name derived from the area in which it is located, until it was rebuilt following a major riot in 1990.
The Podmore Case was a controversial landmark English criminal case. It involved a murder conviction based on a painstaking police investigation, and from careful evaluation of the forensic evidence.
HM Prison Shrewsbury was a category B/C men's prison in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England. It was decommissioned in March 2013, and is now open to the public.
Alfred Edward Stratton (1882-1905) and his brother Albert Ernest Stratton (1884-1905) were the first men to be convicted in Britain for murder based on fingerprint evidence. They were both executed at 9 am on 23 May 1905 at HM Prison Wandsworth. The case, otherwise known as the Mask Murders, the Deptford Murders or the Farrow Murders, was one of the earliest convictions using forensic science.
Buck Ruxton was an Indian-born physician convicted and subsequently hanged for the September 1935 murders of his common-law wife, Isabella Ruxton, and the family housemaid, Mary Jane Rogerson, at his home in Lancaster, England. These murders are informally known as the Bodies Under the Bridge and the Jigsaw Murders, while Ruxton himself became known as The Savage Surgeon.
Eric Edgar Cooke, nicknamed the Night Caller and later the Nedlands Monster, was an Australian serial killer who terrorised the city of Perth, Western Australia, from September 1958 to August 1963. Cooke committed at least 20 violent crimes, eight of which resulted in deaths.
Gordon Frederick Cummins was a British serial killer known as the Blackout Killer, the Blackout Ripper and the Wartime Ripper, who murdered four women and attempted to murder two others over a six-day period in London in February 1942. He is also suspected of committing two earlier murders in October 1941. Convicted of the murder of 34-year-old Evelyn Oatley, Cummins was sentenced to death and hanged at HMP Wandsworth on 25 June 1942.
It is possible to convict someone of murder without the purported victim's body in evidence. However, cases of this type have historically been hard to prove, often forcing the prosecution to rely on circumstantial evidence, and in England there was for centuries a mistaken view that in the absence of a body a killer could not be tried for murder. Developments in forensic science in recent decades have made it more likely that a murder conviction can be obtained even if a body has not been found.
Nur Maznah binti Ismail, known professionally as Mona Fandey, was a Malaysian pop singer and murderer. She was executed on 2 November 2001 at the age of 45, after being convicted of the murder of Batu Talam state assemblyman Mazlan Idris in 1993.
Anthony Allen Shore was an American serial killer and child molester who was responsible for the murders of one woman and three girls. He was active from 1986 to 2000, and became known as the "Tourniquet Killer" because of his use of a ligature with either a toothbrush or bamboo stick to tighten or loosen the ligature. The instrument was similar to a garotte or a twitch, a tool used by farmers to control horses. Shore was sentenced to death in 2004, and executed by lethal injection on January 18, 2018.
Philip John Smith is an English spree killer serving a life sentence for the murders of three women in Birmingham in November 2000. A former fairground worker employed at the Rainbow pub in Digbeth, Smith killed his victims over a four-day period. All three victims were mutilated almost beyond recognition, but Smith was quickly identified as the killer on the strength of overwhelming evidence.
The murder of June Anne Devaney is a British child murder which occurred on 15 May 1948 when a girl aged 3 years 11 months was abducted from her cot while an inpatient at Queen's Park Hospital in Blackburn, Lancashire. The child was removed to the grounds of the hospital, where she was raped, before suffering extensive blunt force trauma to her skull when her head was repeatedly swung into a sandstone wall. The assault caused extensive internal injuries and multiple skull fractures, causing the child to develop a fatal state of shock. Her murderer, 22-year-old Peter Griffiths, was arrested three months after the crime and was subsequently tried and convicted of June Anne's murder. He was hanged on 19 November 1948.
Roger Reece Kibbe was an American serial killer and rapist known as the "I-5 Strangler". Kibbe found all but one of his victims on freeways around Sacramento, California. In 1991, he was sentenced to 25 years to life imprisonment for the death of Darcie Frackenpohl.
David Smith is an English repeat murderer, rapist and suspected serial killer who came to national prominence in 1999 when he was convicted of murdering a sex worker six years after having been acquitted of an "almost identical" murder. Cleared of the murder of 33-year-old west London sex worker Sarah Crump in 1993, Smith was found guilty in 1999 of the killing of 21-year-old Paddington sex worker Amanda Walker. Smith has since been linked to a number of other murders of sex workers across Britain.
Richard Westall Rogers Jr., known as The Last Call Killer, is an American serial killer. After being acquitted for the murder of a college student in Maine, he moved to New Jersey, where he murdered and dismembered two gay and bisexual men in 1992 and 1993. His modus operandi consisted of luring the men from piano bars in Manhattan, murdering and dismembering them at an unknown location, and dumping their bodies in garbage bags along highways in New Jersey.
