The dark secrets behind a hundred years of the most notorious crimes in England.

New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of London's Metropolitan Police, houses the notorious Black Museum, a unique collection of exhibits, photographs and other items connected with some of the most famous crimes of the last century. Fifty of those crimes were murders and they are explored in detail in this compelling book. Recently renamed The Crime Museum the author Gordon Honeycombe was given privileged access to its darkest secrets. His book spans a hundred years of murder, manslaughter and attempted assassinations and reveals the true facts behind some of the country's most notorious murder cases, including Jack the Ripper, Dr Crippen and the Krays. This is the ultimate guide to the most incredible crimes ever committed, featuring contemporary photographs never seen outside Scotland Yard. • Closely researched and objective, this book is a fascinating guide to murder and a grim insight into the minds of those who practice it. Honeycombe takes an unflinching look at why people murder and asks important questions about this most appalling of crimes, execution and the law itself.

From the files of Scotland Yard's "Black Museum" (open only to police officers) come true crime stories of some of the most infamous murder cases of the 19th and 20th centuries--the Lambeth Poisoner, "baby farmer" Amelia Elizabeth Dyer, the Gentleman Vampire of Bournemouth, the Brides in the Bath Murders, the Rillington Place murders and many others. Along the way, investigators pass a number of crime-solving milestones, included the first use of fingerprint technology, the early use of photography and the first time "The Yard" enlisted the press to help hunt down a killer.

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death offers readers an extraordinary glimpse into the mind of a master criminal investigator. Frances Glessner Lee, a wealthy grandmother, founded the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936 and was later appointed captain in the New Hampshire police. In the 1940s and 1950s she built dollhouse crime scenes based on real cases in order to train detectives to assess visual evidence. Still used in forensic training today, the eighteen Nutshell dioramas, on a scale of 1:12, display an astounding level of detail: pencils write, window shades move, whistles blow, and clues to the crimes are revealed to those who study the scenes carefully. Corinne May Botz's lush color photographs lure viewers into every crevice of Frances Lee's models and breathe life into these deadly miniatures, which present the dark side of domestic life, unveiling tales of prostitution, alcoholism, and adultery. The accompanying line drawings, specially prepared for this volume, highlight the noteworthy forensic evidence in each case. Botz's introductory essay, which draws on archival research and interviews with Lee's family and police colleagues, presents a captivating portrait of Lee.

A New York Times bestseller, The Midnight Assassin is a sweeping narrative history of a terrifying serial killer--America's first--who stalked Austin, Texas in 1885. In the late 1800s, the city of Austin, Texas was on the cusp of emerging from an isolated western outpost into a truly cosmopolitan metropolis. But beginning in December 1884, Austin was terrorized by someone equally as vicious and, in some ways, far more diabolical than London's infamous Jack the Ripper. For almost exactly one year, the Midnight Assassin crisscrossed the entire city, striking on moonlit nights, using axes, knives, and long steel rods to rip apart women from every race and class. At the time the concept of a serial killer was unthinkable, but the murders continued, the killer became more brazen, and the citizens' panic reached a fever pitch. Before it was all over, at least a dozen men would be arrested in connection with the murders, and the crimes would expose what a newspaper described as "the most extensive and profound scandal ever known in Austin." And yes, when Jack the Ripper began his attacks in 1888, London police investigators did wonder if the killer from Austin had crossed the ocean to terrorize their own city. With vivid historical detail and novelistic flair, Texas Monthly journalist Skip Hollandsworth brings this terrifying saga to life.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, London was gripped by the supposed curse of Tutankhamun, whose tomb in the Luxor sands was uncovered in February 1923 by the British archaeologist Howard Carter. The site was plundered, and over the next few years more than twenty of those involved in the exhumation or in handling the contents of the tomb perished in strange and often terrifying circumstances, prompting the myth of the 'Curse of Tutankhamun'. Nowhere - particularly London's West End - appeared to be safe for those who had provoked the ire of the Egyptian death gods. A blend of meticulous research and educated conjecture, historian and screenwriter Mark Beynon turns armchair detective as he uncovers a wealth of hitherto unpublished material that lays bare the truth behind these fatalities. Could 'London's Curse' be attributed to the work of a macabre mastermind? It soon becomes apparent that these deaths were not only linked by the ominous presence of Tutankhamun himself, but also by a murderer hell-bent on retribution and dubbed by the press as 'The Wickedest Man in the World'.

'EXCELLENT WRITING AND RESEARCH' - RUTH RENDELLThe Crime Museum of New Scotland Yard - invariably known as 'the Black Museum' - houses a remarkable collection of exhibits, photographs and documents connected with some of the most notorious crimes in this country's history. Although the museum is closed to the general public, Gordon Honeycombe was granted privileged access to its classified records, and his book reveals the stories behind 21 murders committed in Britain between 1835 and 1985.The author's painstaking research, which reaches beyond the Black Museum to other archives, as well as contemporary newspaper and similar reports, allows him to give searching accounts of the murders and manslaughter committed by such infamous characters as William Palmer, Charles Peace, Donald Nielson (the 'Black Panther'), the serial killer Dennis Nilsen, and Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Here too are John Lee, the Man They Could Not Hang, George Chapman, a London publican who poisoned his wives, and the murder by IRA bomb of four soldiers of the Household Cavalry in London's Hyde Park, in a work that provides a fascinating, if uncompromising, insight into the minds and methods of those who practise murder.The well-known writer and former ITN newscaster Gordon Honeycombe is also the author of Murders of the Black Museum: 1875-1975 (John Blake Publishing, 2009).