Throughout history, familicide is a crime considered most heinous in any society and it draws media fascination almost to the scale that a serial killer trial does. Many cannot decide which is worst – a stranger killing innocent strangers, or a parent killing their child, or children killing their parents. During the last quarter of […]
During the late 1800’s Whitechapel and neighbouring Spitalfields in East-End London was a terrible place to live. It seems as if all of society’s outcasts; the beggars, thieves, unemployed immigrants, prostitutes, orphans, mentally ill and crippled washed out into this gigantic slum, where crime, vice, violence and drunkenness were almost Endemic. A French visitor described […]
In 1998 at a serial killer conference hosted by Liverpool University, I met author Shirley Harrison, author of The Jack the Ripper Diary, Chilling Confessions of James Maybrick, and not only did she sign my copy, she also allowed me to hold the original Diary in my hands. What better way to kick off December […]
Two authors, Patricia Cornwall and Shirley Harrison, tried to unmask Jack the Ripper. Ms Harrison’s candidate is James Maybrick and Ms Cornwall’s candidate is Walter Sickert, whom she also linked to the Thames Torso Murders, a contemporary of Jack’s Whitechapel murders in London in the late 1800’s. A person can be profiled by analysing the […]
Divided by 30 years, two brutal men held a city and a town ransom during a reign of terror. One went undetected by the police for two years yet hid in plain sight, whilst the other committed murder for three years in full sight of the police. One was a low-life White man, whilst the […]
In 1996 South African police sergeant Uyselen Nel killed his wife and two toddler sons in cold-blood, much like the Greek hero committed familicide when in a fit of rage and madness he killed his wife and sons with arrows. Apollo demanded Hercules to master several tribulations before his spirit could be cleansed of the […]
Some time after Stewart Wilken, the cannibal serial killer of South Africa was imprisoned, I received a call from St Albans Correctional Facility summoning me since Stewart was out of control in his cell and he called for me. While I was at St Albans, my colleague, detective Derick Norsworthy, who had secured the confession […]
In the early 19th century, two serial killers, William Burke and William Hare, set up an illustrious business by killing 16 people in Edinburgh, selling the bodies to anatomists since there was a shortage of cadavers. With Edinburgh being a leading European centre of anatomical study, Scottish law prescribed that corpses used for medical research […]