The Moors murders were carried out by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between July 1963 and October 1965, in and around Manchester, England. 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.
Harry 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.
Sarah Evelyn Isobel Payne, was the victim of a high-profile abduction and murder in West Sussex, England in July 2000.
Ronald Joseph Ryan was the last person to be legally executed in Australia. Ryan was found guilty of shooting and killing warder George Hodson during an escape from Pentridge Prison, Victoria, in 1965. Ryan's hanging was met with public protests by those opposed to capital punishment. Capital punishment was abolished in all states by 1985.
Lesley Molseed, an 11-year-old schoolgirl, was abducted and murdered on 5 October 1975 in West Yorkshire, England. She was on an errand to the local shop. Stefan Kiszko, an intellectually-disabled young man who lived near Molseed in Greater Manchester, was wrongly convicted of sexually assaulting and murdering her, and served 16 years in prison before his conviction was overturned. His mental and physical health had deteriorated in prison and he died 22 months after his release in February 1992 – before he could collect the money owed to him for his wrongful conviction. His ordeal was described by one British MP as "the worst miscarriage of justice of all time." Evidence that Kiszko could not have committed the crime was suppressed by three members of the investigation team, who were initially arrested in 1993 before charges were dropped. However, in 2006, a DNA match led to the arrest of Ronald Castree for Molseed's murder; he was convicted the following year and sentenced to life in prison.
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.
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 22 violent crimes, eight of which resulted in deaths.
Wrongful execution is a miscarriage of justice occurring when an innocent person is put to death by capital punishment. Cases of wrongful execution are cited as an argument by opponents of capital punishment, while proponents say that the argument of innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of the death penalty.
The towpath murders was a case in which two teenage girls were murdered on the towpath near Teddington Lock in Richmond upon Thames, London, England, on 31 May 1953. Alfred Charles Whiteway was found guilty and hanged for the murders, which attracted much press attention, the case being described at the time as "one of Scotland Yard's most notable triumphs in a century".
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.
Anthony Allen Shore was an American serial killer and child molester who was responsible for the murder 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. A former fairground worker employed at the Rainbow pub in the Digbeth area of the city, Smith killed his victims over a four-day period in November 2000, befriending two of them at the Rainbow before carrying out the crimes. All three victims were mutilated almost beyond recognition, but Smith was quickly identified as the killer because of the overwhelming evidence linking him to the deaths.
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. This 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.
The Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery is the main prison cemetery of the U.S. state of Texas, located in Huntsville and operated by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ). The colloquial name for the cemetery is Peckerwood Hill. The name originates from "Peckerwood", an African-American insult towards poor white people, because many of those buried at the cemetery were poor.
Richard Westall Rogers Jr., known as The Last Call Killer, is an American serial killer who murdered and dismembered at least two gay and bisexual men between 1992 and 1993. His modus operandi consisted of luring inebriated 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. He is suspected of murdering several other men in Maine, Florida, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New York from the 1970s to the 1990s.
