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In the autumn of 1888 the streets of London were streets of terror.
The cause -- a series of mysterious and apparently motiveless
murders. Respectable citizens cowered behind shuttered windows and
multi-locked doors. Ironically, however, it was not the respectable
who were in danger. The victims were all drawn from the trade which
necessity still compelled to haunt dark alleys and doorways at dead
of night -- the prostitutes. Theories on the identity of the
murderer have been many and various: that he was a fashionable
doctor, even that he was a she - a midwife. Robin Odell has
produced an absorbing factual reconstruction of all the crimes and
a brilliant new theory, based on modern methods of detection, to
solve the greatest mystery in British criminology. Most readers
will accept his theory as the long-sought answer to a baffling
real-life whodunit: as the most likely epitaph on a terror known as
"Jack the Ripper in Fact & Fiction".
Exhumation of A Murder is a comprehensive study of the case of
Major Armstrong, the celebrated Hay Poisoner, one of the most
notorious murderers of the twentieth century and the only solicitor
ever to hang. It is one of those classic old-fashioned English
murders, which hail from the heyday of the courtroom drama when,
with the hangman lurking in the pine-and-panel wings and the black
cap an object of horryfyingly alarming currency rather than mere
symbolism, the loser in 'the black dock's dreadful pen lost all'.
And the Armstrong case was unquestionably one of the best; right up
there in the grand tradition of Dr Palmer of Rugeley, Neill Cream,
Mrs Maybrick, Dr Crippen, Seddon and George Joseph Smith. Contains
a wealth of original photographs and documentation.
You couldn't make it up: incredible real-life criminal cases A
fascinating A-Z of murderous crimes which spans the globe and the
centuries in uncovering the extremes of human criminality in all
its strangeness. This collection of unusual, if not sensational,
murder cases recalls strange crimes of the past and offers insights
into particularly macabre and shocking modern murders. Many of the
cases also shed light on advances in crime detection, law
enforcement and forensic science. Cases include: Krystian Bala, the
Polish writer who killed a rival, and then used the murder as the
plot for a novel; Alexander Pichuskin, who was stopped one short of
killing the 64 victims he needed to 'fill a chess board'; John Lee,
'the man they could not hang' who survived three attempts to
execute him; and Adelaide Bartlett, who was accused of killing her
husband with chloroform, but was acquitted because no one could
work out how she had done it - and she wouldn't say.
The development of forensic pathology in Britain is told here
through the lives of five outstanding medical pioneers. Spanning
seventy years, their careers and achievements marked major
milestones in the development of legal medicine, their work and
innovation laying the foundations for modern crime scene
investigation (CSI). Bernard Spilsbury, Sydney Smith and Professors
Glaister, Camps and Simpson were the original expert witnesses.
Between them, they performed over 200,000 postmortems during their
professional careers, establishing crucial elements of murder
investigation such as time, place and cause of death. This forensic
quintet featured in many of the notable murder trials of their
time, making ground-breaking discoveries in the process. They were
treated as celebrities by the media, and news that they were 'on
the case' featured in numerous headlines. In the best traditions of
scholarship, they also worked as teachers, passing on their
knowledge and experience to future pathologists.
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