This true crime biography reveals the full story of a remorseless serial killer once proclaimed the most dangerous man in Britain—and where he is now. For a few days in the winter of 1975, it looked as though police had unmasked a serial killer whose reign of terror was unprecedented in British crime history. Convicted of three killings, suspected of another eight, Patrick Mackay was dubbed the Monster of Belgravia, the Devil’s Disciple, and simply The Psychopath. The Nazi-obsessed alcoholic had stalked the upmarket streets of West London hunting for victims, and gruesomely murdered a priest he had once befriended in Kent. Yet many of his suspected murders remain unsolved to this day. Not long after his conviction, the public outrage at his crimes faded. Now, after more than forty years behind bars, Mackay has been allowed to change his name and transfer to an open prison—steps that put him closer to freedom. For the first time, Britain’s Forgotten Serial Killer reveals the full, untold story of Patrick Mackay and the many still-unsolved murders linked to his case.Serial killer Patrick Mackay was dubbed the most dangerous man in Britain when he appeared in court in 1975 charged with three killings, including the axe murder of a priest. The Nazi-obsessed alcoholic had stalked the upmarket streets of West London hunting for victims and was suspected of at least eight further murders. Now, after more than 40 years behind bars, where he has shunned publicity, Mackay has been allowed to change his name and win the right to live in an open prison - bringing him one step closer to freedom. For the first time, Britain’s Forgotten Serial Killer reveals the full, untold story of Patrick Mackay and the many still-unsolved murders linked to his case.

This book was the inspiration for the ITV drama Dark Angel. As one of the UK’s leading commentators, David Wilson shows how some serial killers stay in the headlines whilst others rapidly become invisible - or “unseen”. Yet Mary Ann Cotton is not just the first but perhaps the 1st’s most prolific female serial killer, with more victims than Myra Hindley, Rosemary West, Beverly Allit or male predators such as Jack the Ripper and Dennis Nilsen. But her own north east of England (and criminologists) apart, she remains largely forgotten, despite poisoning to death up to 21 victims in Britain’s ‘arsenic century’. Exploding myths that every serial killer is a ‘monster’, the author draws attention to Cotton’s charms, allure, capability, skill and ambition - drawing parallels or contrasting the methods and lifestyles of other serial killers from Victorian to modern times. He also shows how events cannot be separated from their social context – here the industrial revolution, growing mobility, women’s emancipation and greater assertiveness. And concerning the reticence of ‘human nature’, like Dr Harold Shipman, Cotton was allowed to go on killing despite reasons to suspect her. The book contains other resonances to aid understanding of how serial murderers can go undiscovered despite such things as coincidence, gossip, whispers or motives that become more obvious with the benefit of hindsight. It is also a detective story in which the persistence of a single individual saw Cotton tried and executed, events analysed first-hand from the archives and location visits as the author fills the gaps in a remarkable story. By a leading expert on serial killers; Meticulously researched and highly readable; Fresh interpretations mean this book is destined to be the definitive title on Mary Ann Cotton. ‘An enthralling read David Wilson does not write generic ‘true crime’, but history of the highest order’: Judith Flanders, best-selling author, journalist and historian. David Wilson is Professor of Criminology and Director of the Centre for Applied Criminology at Birmingham City University. An ex-prison governor he has broadcast for the BBC, Channel 4, Sky and Channel 5 (where he presents ‘Killers Behind Bars’). His books include Serial Killers: Hunting Britons and Their Victims 1960-2006 (2007) and Looking for Laura: Public Criminology and Hot News (2011).

This true crime investigation into the notorious case of Kieran Kelly reveals “new twists that add further intrigue to the mystery” (Irish Post). On the evening of August 21,1983, Metropolitan Police detectives raced to London’s Clapham Police Station to find a prisoner dead. His cellmate sat quietly in the corner. Kieran Kelly, a laborer from Ireland, calmly confessed to strangling the prisoner—and then stunned officers by confessing to dozens of unreported and unsolved murders over the previous 30 years. Kelly may have been Britain’s most prolific serial killer, yet he was convicted on just two of his admissions. In 2015, a former police officer who worked on the case made a bombshell accusation: that Kelly' crimes were covered up by the British Government. Strangulations, murders on the London Underground, an internal Metropolitan Police review—as the story’s elements whipped the international news media into a frenzy, journalist Robert Mulhern set off from London to rural Ireland on a methodical search for the truth. Could Kieran Kelly really have murdered 31 times?

The body snatcher who inspired Psycho, the noblewoman known as Countess Dracula, Jack the Ripper, and other killers for whom murder was just the beginning. From Gilles de Rais’ castle in fifteenth-century France to “the Bloody Benders’” eighteenth-century Kansas farm to Jeffrey Dahmer’s quiet apartment in twentieth-century Milwaukee, history is littered with serial murderers whose first impulse was to take a life. For some, it was never enough. The real thrill came after their victims were dead. In this shocking anthology, true crime journalist Nigel Blundell brings together more than two dozen chilling profiles of the world’s most unforgettable fiends, including: Ed Gein, the Plainfield necrophile and inspiration for The Silence of the Lambs; Andrei Chikatilo, the “Rostov Ripper”, whose uncontrollable hunger was satiated by more that fifty victims; Dennis Nilsen, whose London house of horrors so overflowed with body parts that they blocked the drains; Germany’s Fritz Haarmann who killed and consumed more than two dozen men, then peddled the left-over meat on the black market; Hungarian countess Elizabeth Báthory whose lust for the blood of virgins—a body count estimated to be in the hundreds—has branded her the most prolific female serial killer in world history; and many more human monsters whose appetites are still the stuff of nightmares.

A real-life thriller in the vein of The Devil in the White City, Kate Winkler Dawson's debut Death in the Air is a gripping, historical narrative of a serial killer, an environmental disaster, and an iconic city struggling to regain its footing. London was still recovering from the devastation of World War II when another disaster hit: for five long days in December 1952, a killer smog held the city firmly in its grip and refused to let go. Day became night, mass transit ground to a halt, criminals roamed the streets, and some 12,000 people died from the poisonous air. But in the chaotic aftermath, another killer was stalking the streets, using the fog as a cloak for his crimes. All across London, women were going missing--poor women, forgotten women. Their disappearances caused little alarm, but each of them had one thing in common: they had the misfortune of meeting a quiet, unassuming man, John Reginald Christie, who invited them back to his decrepit Notting Hill flat during that dark winter. They never left. The eventual arrest of the "Beast of Rillington Place" caused a media frenzy: were there more bodies buried in the walls, under the floorboards, in the back garden of this house of horrors? Was it the fog that had caused Christie to suddenly snap? And what role had he played in the notorious double murder that had happened in that same apartment building not three years before--a murder for which another, possibly innocent, man was sent to the gallows? The Great Smog of 1952 remains the deadliest air pollution disaster in world history, and John Reginald Christie is still one of the most unfathomable serial killers of modern times. Journalist Kate Winkler Dawson braids these strands together into a taut, compulsively readable true crime thriller about a man who changed the fate of the death penalty in the UK, and an environmental catastrophe with implications that still echo today.

Since May 1966 when Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were sentenced to life imprisonment at Chester Assizes the British public has been absorbed and horrified by the Moors Murders. Ian Brady has often been aptly described as ‘the most evil man alive’ or ‘the Daddy of the Devils’, while Myra Hindley, Britain’s first female serial killer, became the most hated woman in Britain. Here is the definitive account, drawing on exclusive, never-before-seen material. It changes forever our understanding of the Moors couple and their heinous crimes. Why did they do it? What actually happened? Unlikely as it may appear to those detectives, psychiatrists, authors, criminologists, journalists and the victims’ families, who have all sought in their own ways for decades to discover it, this book is possibly as near as we shall ever get to understanding how the victims died. It proves beyond question that the parents of the victims were right all along in their claims about Hindley’s part in the murders. Did Brady give an account to anyone of his life, Myra Hindley and their crimes before he died? Yes, he did - here it is.

Lock the doors and bolt the windows once again, it's time to countdown the one hundred deadliest British serial killers in history. What follows is a darkly fascinating parade of some of the worst and most frightening people ever to hail from Blighty...