The memoir of a man wrongfully convicted of murder and his 27 years spent in the U.K. prison system until his conviction was overturned. On September 12, 1973, seventeen-year-old, naïve gardener Stephen Downing returned from his lunch break to discover the badly beaten, unconscious, thirty-two-year-old Wendy Sewell lying on the footpath of Bakewell Cemetery close to Catcliff Wood and the consecrated chapel where she had been attacked. Stephen ran to the nearby workmen’s building, and in the meantime Wendy’s attacker returned and dragged her body to a second location where she was subsequently found soon after. Despite having learning difficulties, Downing was immediately taken into custody, questioned at length without a solicitor, and eventually signed a false confession statement. Wendy died some two days later from her injuries. Following a very biased, three-day trial during February, 1974, Downing was found guilty by a jury, convicted, and sentenced to what was eventually a full life sentence. Just eight months later during October, 1974, there followed an appeal with fresh evidence from an eye witness who saw Wendy Sewell alive after Downing left the cemetery for lunch. However, the prosecution trashed this evidence, and the appeal failed. In the years following Downing’s incarceration, he was moved from prison to prison, continuing to maintain his innocence—and in doing so, jeopardizing any chance of parole, as he was “In Denial of Murder”—until eventually his plight reached journalist Don Hale. Hale’s tireless efforts led to an appeal in which Downing was released after some twenty-seven years, the longest miscarriage of justice in the United Kingdom’s legal history.

The 1980s. The Falklands War. The IRA. The Miners' Strike. Cruise Missiles. Anti-Nuclear Protests. And in the thick of it all, beautiful Claire Oldham, the revolution's poster girl - until the day she turns up brutally murdered. A young, troubled drifter, Martin Grove, is swiftly prosecuted and jailed for the crime. Fast forward twenty years: Martin Grove walks free, cleared by advances in forensic science, seemingly the victim of a miscarriage of justice. Fast forward a few more years, come right up to date: Martin Grove is shot dead in his reclusive home, 'executed' at close range. DCI Jacobson and his team are on the case. But which case? And do the answers lie in the dangerous past or in the even more terrifying present?

Fact is never more strange than fiction than when it comes to crime, and the crimes described here are so bizarre it's inconceivable that they could have been made up. In this all-new collection of truly unusual crimes, a sequel to the bestselling Mammoth Book of Bizarre Crimes, Odell and Donnelley tell the extraordinary stories of criminal acts far stranger than any fiction, including the murder of Italian fashion designer Gianni Versace by spree-killer Andrew Cunanan and the killing of intern Chandra Ann Levy, who had had an affair with US Representative Gary Condit, though he was cleared of any involvement in her murder. They reveal how Danilo Restivo was eventually convicted of the murder of Heather Barnett in England after the ritualistic placing of hair connected him to another murder in Italy. They tell the terrible story of the inexplicably brutal murder, over a number of days, of 15-year-old Kristy Bamu by his sister and her lover because they believed him to be practising 'witchcraft'. They also give a chilling account of the thirty-one-year-old mother-of-two, Joanna Dennehy, who killed three men. 'I started killing,' she said, 'to see if I was as cold as I thought I was. Then it got moreish and I got a taste for it.'

Don Hale's fight to clear Stephen Downing of murder, and the trail of clues the authorities want to hide. In 1973, a woman was brutally murdered in a graveyard in a picturesque market town. Stephen Downing, aged seventeen but with the mental age of eleven, was working as a gardener in the graveyard. He was charged with the crime and served 27 years in prison. Six years ago, Don Hale, the editor of the local newspaper, began his own investigation into the murder. This is the story of one man trapped in a web of evil, and of another's courageous fight to free him.

There is no such thing as the perfect crime. Yet within these pages are 13 20th-century murders whose perpetrators have - so far - escaped justice. Some may still be alive, cold cases awaiting new forensic leads but others have taken their chilling secrets to the grave.