British True Crime

On Valentine’s Day 1988, twenty-year-old Lynette White was brutally murdered in a dark corner of Cardiff’s world-famous, and infamous, Tiger Bay. Stigmatised by a bad reputation, the area was on the brink of major redevelopment which would change the historic community forever. South Wales Police launched its biggest murder hunt to date, and within weeks detectives released a photofit of a prime suspect seen outside the murder scene, his hands covered in blood. A white man. But as the months passed by and no arrest was made, the police came under inevitable pressure.

In diesem Podcast widmet sich die dänische Journalistin und Krimiautorin Lone Theils sechs der bekanntesten und grausamsten Serienmörder, die es in Großbritannien je gegeben hat. Lone Theils Romane, wie z.B. "Die Rückkehr", sind oft von wahren Begebenheiten inspiriert, doch dieser Podcast beweist, dass die Realität noch viel grausamer sein kann als jede Fiktion.

Killing Goldfinger charts the extraordinary rise and spectacular bullet-riddled fall of John Palmer, the richest, most powerful criminal ever to have emerged from the modern British underworld. Palmer earned his nickname Goldfinger after smelting (in his back garden) tens of millions of pounds worth of stolen gold bullion from the 20th century's most lucrative heist; the Brink's-Mat robbery. Palmer then used his share of the millions to become the vicious overlord of a vast illegal timeshare property empire in Tenerife.

After a wealthy woman was brutally murdered in her Glasgow home in 1908, the police found a convenient suspect in Oscar Slater, an immigrant Jewish cardsharp. Though he was known to be innocent, Slater was tried, convicted, and consigned to life at hard labor. Outraged by this injustice, Arthur Conan Doyle, already world famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, used the methods of his most famous character to reinvestigate the case, ultimately winning Slater’s freedom.

Capital punishment was abolished for murder in Great Britain in 1969, but remained as the punishment for high treason until as recently as 1998, demonstrating how seriously we take the crime of betraying your country. But even with the threat of the noose hanging over them, many still chose the path of treachery during the cataclysmic events of last century. British Traitors examines the lives and motivations of a number of the perpetrators of this most heinous of crimes.

Ever since the 1950s, through its heyday of the '70s & '80s, the Spanish Costas and Islands have been synonymous with figures from the British Underworld. Some on the run, some just for sun and fun, Spain has been magnetic to British criminals.

In today’s world where meeting people for sex can happen with a simple click on your phone, a new type of gay sex called Party N Play or Chemsex has become all the rage. Several young gay men were being found dead, appearing to have overdosed in a city church yard in east London. Soon a popular 41-year-old, Stephen Port, who had appeared on Celebrity Chef UK, would be arrested and charged with four of the young men’s murders by overdosing them with GBH, the date-rape drug.

This book explores the powers, activities, and accountability of MI5 from the end of the Second World War to 1964. It argues that MI5 acted with neither statutory authority nor statutory powers, and with no obvious forms of statutory accountability. It was established as a counter-espionage agency, yet was beset by espionage scandals on a frequency that suggested if not high levels of incompetence, then high levels of distraction and the squandering of resources.

The Crossing is a groundbreaking, unprecedented look inside the UK's newest and most chilling underworld. Wensley Clarkson's insider account reveals the emergence of numerous organised crime networks more powerful and violent than anything ever seen before in this country. These often foreign gangs run elaborate international systems dealing in drugs, people smuggling, prostitution and money laundering, and they have gained a huge foothold in the UK underworld thanks to The Crossing.

A devastating story of coercive control and domestic homicide. Why would an 'ordinary' father murder his family? On 19 July 2016, Claire and Charlotte Hart were murdered in broad daylight, by the family's father, using a sawed-off shotgun. He then committed suicide. Luke and Ryan Hart, the two surviving sons, open up about their experiences growing up and the circumstances surrounding the murders. They hope to highlight the patterns of behaviour in coercive control and its deadly consequences, improving public awareness and leading to informed discussion on domestic abuse.

One of the more unique British serial killers, John George Haigh killed simply because he wanted more. He had an exaggerated sense of entitlement, and would seek out victims who could support his lavish lifestyle. What is most abhorrent in this true crime murder story is not that he killed six people, but rather what he did with them after they were dead. Newspapers and tabloids would shout out headlines of John being a "vampire", a man with a blood lust who drank the blood of those he killed.

This book is a testament to how low human nature can get and offers a comprehensive breakdown of the cases’ key dates before looking into the gritty details. In the chapters, you will learn about the origin of the word “serial killer”, dispel common myths about murderers, and get one step closer to understanding why people kill.