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The Real Peaky Blinders: Style, Struggle, and Street Warfare in 1890s Birmingham
“Surely all respectable and law-abiding citizens are sick of the very name of ruffianism in Birmingham…” – Letter to the Birmingham Daily...


“Mob Rule in Omaha: The Lynching of Will Brown and the 1919 Courthouse Riot”
“If you must hang somebody, then let it be me.” — Omaha’s Mayor, just before a lynch mob strung him up. That was Sunday, 28 September...


The Horrific Crimes and Whole-Life Sentence of Wedding-Day Killer, Arthur Hutchinson
On a quiet Sunday in October 1983, the Laitner family home in Dore, an affluent suburb of Sheffield, had been filled with joy. They were...


Paradise Lost: The Story of a Group of Europeans who Tried to Find Utopia on a Remote Galápagos Island in the 1930s
In 1929, long before the Galapagos Islands became synonymous with eco-tourism, conservation cruises, and Instagrammable marine iguanas,...


Arthur Barry: The Gentleman Thief Who Dazzled the Jazz Age and Robbed Its Richest with a Smile
If you ever find yourself romanticising the glitzy outlaws of the 1920s, spare a thought for Arthur Barry, a polite burglar whose life...


The Curious Crimes of Jeffrey Manchester: Escaped Prison And Secretly Lived Behind The Bikes At Toys R Us For Months
Most career criminals make headlines for their violence or brash defiance. Jeffrey Manchester, however, earned his notoriety by being...


The Killing of Dr Barnett Slepian: A Chilling Chapter in the History of Anti-Abortion Violence
In the autumn of 1998, a tragic act of violence in suburban New York captured the growing tension at the heart of America’s abortion...


The Madman of Chicago: The Life and Violent Times of Sam Giancana
It’s often said that Chicago built its empire on the backs of immigrants and the muscle of men willing to do what others wouldn’t dare....


The Mysterious Death of God’s Banker: Roberto Calvi and the Scandal That Shook Italy and the Vatican
In the early summer of 1982, Roberto Calvi, chairman of Italy’s largest private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, vanished from the intricate world...


The Attempted Murder Of Hustler Founder, Larry Flynt
In the 1970s, Lawrenceville, Georgia, was hardly the sort of place you’d expect to see splashed across national headlines. It sat about...


Rebecca Bradley — The Texas “Flapper Bandit” Who Held Up a Bank With Charm and an Empty Gun
On a crisp Saturday morning, 11 December 1926, the quiet farming community of Buda, Texas — some fifteen miles south of Austin —...


The Unsolved Mystery of the Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders
In the quiet hours before dawn on 13 June 1977, the peaceful summer routine at Camp Scott in Mayes County, Oklahoma, was shattered by a...


Frankie Yale: The Brooklyn Don Who Taught Capone the Game
On a warm Sunday afternoon in July 1928, the roar of engines and gunfire shattered the quiet streets of Brooklyn’s Borough Park. A sleek,...


The Birmingham, Alabama Church Bombing That Killed Four Black Schoolgirls
On the morning of Sunday 15 September 1963, an anonymous phone call to the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, delivered a...


Leonard Lake: The Bunker, the Murders, and the Mind of a Sadistic Survivalist
“What I want is an off-the-shelf sex partner. Slave. There’s no way around it.” — Leonard Lake It started, as so many grim tales do, with...


The Tulsa Race Massacre: When Black Wall Street Burned in 1921
In the early summer of 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a place of contradictions. It was a city on the rise, oil-rich, bustling with new...


How the CIA Helped Kill a Dictator—And Failed to Kill Another
In the early years of the Cold War, the CIA dreamed of a Caribbean sweep, one bullet for Trujillo, another for Castro. Only one found its...


When Innocence Ends: The Case of Mary Bell and the Scotswood Murders
In the summer of 1968, as children ran barefoot through the derelict streets of Scotswood, a working-class neighbourhood in Newcastle...


The Photographer Who Might Have Been a Serial Killer: The Chilling Case of William Bradford
When police raided William Bradford’s Los Angeles apartment in 1984, they weren’t just looking for evidence of two murders. What they...


The Eviction of Mary Filan: When The Trump Organisation Ousted a Widow from Her Home
For more than 30 years, Mary Filan — a widowed 74-year-old woman semi-paralysed from a recent stroke — had lived in Apartment 6B, 143-15...


Phil Hartman And The Night He Was Killed By His Wife
It’s hard to imagine a man so gifted at delivering joy being consumed by such a grim ending. Phil Hartman wasn’t just another comic in...


The Prince of Fraud: Anthony Gignac and the $8 Million Royal Ruse
In the summer of 2017, the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach — one of the most iconic luxury destinations in America — nearly welcomed a...


The Chilling Case of Diane Downs: The Mother Who Shot Her Children to Win Back a Lover
"My mom." That’s all eight-year-old Christie Downs needed to say. After surviving a stroke and slowly regaining her ability to speak,...


The Bath School Disaster: America’s Deadliest School Massacre
“Criminals are made, not born.” That was the message painted on a charred wooden sign left behind on the fence of Andrew Kehoe’s farm in...
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