Samuel Herbert Dougal was intelligent, talented, and the recipient of a military medal. Outwardly, he seemed to embody all that Victorian England valued most. But he was also a career criminal whose appetite for sex and money propelled him through scandal after scandal; through the courts, prisons and asylums; and from woman to vulnerable woman. In 1903, the unexplained disappearance of Dougal's latest inamorata, a wealthy spinster named Miss Holland, began to excite public speculation. A tireless hunt for the missing lady commenced, but, having been arrested on a sample charge of forgery, Dougal simply decided to wait it out. Meanwhile, on the outside, his real wife, Sarah, who had been the beneficiary of Dougal's schemes over the course of a decade, had her own plans to escape official scrutiny. Would Miss Holland's whereabouts be discovered? And who, if anyone, would be held to account for her disappearance?

Few things are more evocative of Victorian Britain than its criminals; they are, together with railways, gas lamps and swirling fog, vital ingredients in any Victorian melodrama. The truth, however, was often stranger, more thrilling and more horrifying than fiction. In this book, four eminent crime historians reveal the realities of this aspect of Victorian life, illuminating not just the criminals and their victims, but also the policemen, forensic scientists and others who rubbed shoulders with the nineteenth-century underworld. Notorious crimes - the Road Hill Murder, the Balham Mystery and Jack the Ripper - stand alongside long-forgotten, neglected cases; the most shocking and terrifying cases appear next to everyday horrors, some stunning and some merely sad. This unique work of reference deserves a place on every true crime reader's bookshelf.

Jack the Ripper's brutal murders have left an ineradicable stain on the gloomy streets of Whitechapel and surrounding area. Disturbingly, his infamous butchery was just one of many equally deplorable atrocities committed in the area, which collectively cast a shadow over the history of London's East End and shocked the nation as a whole. Cases featured here include that of Henry Wainwright, tried in 1875 for the murder and dismemberment of his mistress, Harriet Lane; Polish-born Israel Lipski, charged with the murder of fellow lodger Miriam Angel in 1887; Myer Abramovitch, executed on 6 March 1912 for the gruesome double murder of Mr and Mrs Milstein at their home at Hanbury Street in 1911; and Harold Hall, who savagely murdered Kitty Roman with a penknife at Miller's Court, Whitechapel in 1909, within sight of the room where Jack the Ripper's final victim, Mary Kelly, was killed.