Courtroom Ghosts

Britain’s most prolific serial killer of the modern age, whose photo I will not be sharing here, worked for a number of years at The Surgery at 21 Market Street, in the small Tameside town of Hyde. The town has the unfortunate distinction of being associated with two of the 20th century's most notorious cases of serial murder, for it was here that Ian Brady and Myra Hindley were living at the time of their arrest in October 1965. Just under thirty-three years later, Harold Shipman, a popular local GP, was arrested for the murder of one of his patients by means of the powerful opiate diamorphine; like the Moors Murderers, Shipman would be handed a whole life order. Shipman was caught because he forged the will of a patient, making changes to award himself a great deal of money. The patient, Kathleen Grundy, was a well-known figure in the local community who had once been the Mayoress of Hyde, and who had died in June 1998 at the age of 81. When her GP, Dr Shipman, told her family t...

Sheffield Evening Telegraph , 13th June 1919 It began in the January in Glasgow. Violence erupted between Black and white sailors waiting in a yard on James Watt Street, hoping to be hired. As the Black sailors fled, a mob of hundreds pursued them, armed with guns and blades. The police took thirty of the Black sailors into 'protective custody' and then  charged them with riot ; no white men were arrested. The two white sailors who were hurt were taken to hospital, while Tom Johnson, a Black man who had been stabbed, was taken straight to court. Over the next few months violence was perpetrated in cities across the UK, including in London, Liverpool, and Hull. On 6th June 1919, a Black man was attacked in Newport, South Wales, and the attack escalated as a white mob descended on anybody perceived to be non-white. Businesses and lodging houses were burned and eight houses were wrecked. Furniture belonging to two of the households was burned in the street. The day before, in Live...

  In 1981, fury, fear, and frustration reverberated across the capital's streets. In many retellings of these events, the 'racial tensions' of those early years of Thatcher's Britain 'erupted' into 'riots'. But 'racial tensions' seems a peculiar way of framing what was in fact many individual communities who all felt terrorised not only by white supremacist groups like the National Front, but also by racist police officers and the entire institution of rotten law enforcement. The Macpherson report, published in 1999 in response to the murder of Stephen Lawrence, condemned the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist, a reality that was not news to the ethnic minority population of the capital. Indeed, the lived experienced of over-policing was viscerally felt by multiple generations. But that over-policing was only one side of the coin; prejudicial policing not only criminalises marginalised groups, it also fails to protect them.  Saturday n...

Harriet Richardson, later Harriet Staunton Harriet Richardson likely had learning difficulties. She had inherited £5000 from a great-aunt, equivalent to around £500,000 in today's money, and lived a comfortable lifestyle with her mother. In 1873, things became rather complicated. Harriet had a cousin named Thomas who had married a widow and gained two step-daughters. The elder step-daughter, Elizabeth, had married a man named Patrick Staunton and Patrick Staunton had a brother, Louis. Elizabeth's younger sister was fifteen-year-old Alice Rhodes and twenty-three year old Louis was in love with her. Thus there were in effect two couples/ pairs of siblings - Patrick and Elizabeth Staunton, and their respective brother and sister, Louis Staunton and Alice Rhodes. But when Louis Staunton met Harriet Richardson through Harriet cousin, Alice Rhodes' step-father, he began to form a plan. Harriet's mother, who had remarried after the death of her husband and now went by the name...

Amelia Dyer was tried before Justice Henry Hawkins at the Old Bailey in 1896, just two years before the judge retired. His judicial career spanned more than twenty years and he himself is an interesting topic to explore, not least because he gained a reputation as a ‘hanging judge’ - in other words, disinclined to recommend mercy in capital cases. When Hawkins died in 1907, the  Times ran an extensive obituary, which informed the reader that 'it cannot be said that Hawkins was a great judge [...] and he was sometimes charged with undue severity in criminal cases'. The obituary continued in somewhat more generous terms by describing Hawkins as 'acute and penetrating', before remarking that the memoirs Hawkins had had published in 1904 were 'two bulky volumes' which could not be said to 'constitute a valuable contribution to legal literature'. It continues that, 'the book, in fact, hardly deserves to be called amusing, for many of the stories, told at...

Amelia Dyer A note at the beginning to say that most of the illustrations I have included in this post come from the  The Illustrated Police News , a tabloid which ran from the 1860s through to the 1930s and is a goldmine of weird and wonderful cases, complete with equally bizarre illustrations. The British Library have some examples  here  and you can find even more on Google Images.  While women who killed their own new-born  infants increasingly generated sympathy among the public and within the judicial system, there was one class of baby-killers who most certainly did not. As I mentioned last week, the introduction of the 1834 Poor Law left women who were pregnant outside of marriage in an even more dire situation than had been the case previously. If a woman wanted to continue working and stay out of the workhouse, she would need to make alternative arrangements for the care of her child. And this is where the baby farmers come in. On 16 th  May 1...