18th century… Hanging the Slave Traders 1 Oct 2020 Books with the title of The Newgate Calendar were published as early as the mid-eighteenth century. Mostly they were collections of “Last Dying Speeches” of criminals and short biographies of…
19th Century… A Murder-Suicide in Stephen Basdeo’s Victorian Ancestors: The Case of George Leedham (1871) 15 Aug 2020 By Stephen Basdeo I have been doing a lot of work this past year tracing my ancestors and discovering their history. Imagine how delighted (wrong word, perhaps!) I was when…
18th century… The Fine Art of Murder 24 Jul 202024 Jul 2020 Stephen Basdeo This website usually deals with the 'fun' side of crime history by discussing mobsters, outlaws, and highwaymen. Yet not all portrayals of crime and criminals were wild and…
17th century… “The Truth and Nothing But the Truth”: Its first use in popular culture 20 Mar 2020 By Stephen Basdeo ‘The truth and nothing but the truth’—it’s a well-known phrase used in courts of law and most of us have probably heard it in some police procedural…
16th Century… Gamaliel Ratsey (d.1605): The Man whose Life Kick-started the “True Crime” Genre 18 Mar 2020 By Stephen Basdeo Gamaliel Ratsey was born in Market Deeping, Lincolnshire, during the late sixteenth century.[1] Little is known of Ratsey’s early life; his father, Richard, and his wife had…
1950s… Perverts in Rubber Suits 16 Oct 2019 By Stephen Basdeo Such a man begins to commit actual murder from the first moment that he begins to indulge his sadistic day dreams, from the instant that he deviates…
