John Thomas Straffen - England's longest-serving prisoner - was the first patient to escape from Broadmoor Hospital. He killed within hours. Prior to this, at his home in Bath, he was dismissed as an imbecile, a loner, a 'child trapped in an adult's body'. On the afternoon of Sunday July 15, 1951, John Straffen strangled 8-year-old Brenda Goddard as she picked flowers. Three weeks later he committed a similar murder before inadvertently confessing to the police. Faced with a serial killer with a mental age of 10, Straffen was admitted to Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital. But on April 29, 1951, having spent only six months at the institute, he escaped during a meticulously planned bid for freedom that should have been impossible. During his six hours on the run, he murdered 5-year-old Linda Bowyer in an attempt to 'annoy' the police. Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister, and his beleaguered government personally intervened to make sure that Straffen would never walk free. But was Straffen insane? Benefitting from previously unpublished documents, including classified government papers, author Gordon Lowe paints a vivid picture of a man whose crimes shocked a nation.

"What drives someone to commit an act of terrible violence? Drawing from her thirty years' experience in working with people who have committed serious offenses, Dr. Gwen Adshead provides fresh and surprising insights into violence and the mind. Through a collaboration with coauthor Eileen Horne, Dr. Adshead brings her extraordinary career to life in a series of unflinching portraits. In eleven vivid narratives based on decades of providing therapy to people in prisons and secure hospitals, an internationally renowned forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist demonstrates the remarkable human capacity for radical empathy, change, and redemption."--Provided by publisher.

From the bestselling author of John Christie of Rillington Place. “If you have an interest in post war crime and criminals this is one for you!” —Robert Bartlett, author of Blood Royal The trial of the year in 1950 was of Donald Hume, a North London petty thief accused of stabbing car dealer Stanley Setty to death, of cutting up his corpse and dropping his body parts from an airplane. The press and public were horrified and fascinated by the details. But Hume was convicted and jailed as an accessory—he later claimed his wife was guilty of the crime. He then fled to Switzerland, taking up with a Swiss woman in Zurich, but he needed money to finance his lavish lifestyle and he returned to robbery. He carried out two armed robberies, shooting a member of the bank staff, but getting clean away. Then in 1959 his attempt to rob a bank failed and he shot dead a bystander. Arrested, he stood trial and was sentenced to life, but was later deemed criminally insane and was returned to Britain and to Broadmoor. Jonathan Oates’s compelling account of Hume’s notorious life of crime is based on extensive primary research. It sheds new light on Hume and his crimes, especially the murder of Setty, and gives the reader a rare insight into the criminal underworld of the time.

Winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Book! From the internationally bestselling author, a deeply researched and atmospheric murder mystery of late Victorian-era London In the summer of 1895, Robert Coombes (age 13) and his brother Nattie (age 12) were seen spending lavishly around the docklands of East London -- for ten days in July, they ate out at coffee houses and took trips to the seaside and the theater. The boys told neighbors they had been left home alone while their mother visited family in Liverpool, but their aunt was suspicious. When she eventually forced the brothers to open the house to her, she found the badly decomposed body of their mother in a bedroom upstairs. Robert and Nattie were arrested for matricide and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. Robert confessed to having stabbed his mother, but his lawyers argued that he was insane. Nattie struck a plea and gave evidence against his brother. The court heard testimony about Robert's severe headaches, his fascination with violent criminals and his passion for 'penny dreadfuls', the pulp fiction of the day. He seemed to feel no remorse for what he had done, and neither the prosecution nor the defense could find a motive for the murder. The judge sentenced the thirteen-year-old to detention in Broadmoor, the most infamous criminal lunatic asylum in the land. Yet Broadmoor turned out to be the beginning of a new life for Robert--one that would have profoundly shocked anyone who thought they understood the Wicked Boy. At a time of great tumult and uncertainty, Robert Coombes's case crystallized contemporary anxieties about the education of the working classes, the dangers of pulp fiction, and evolving theories of criminality, childhood, and insanity. With riveting detail and rich atmosphere, Kate Summerscale recreates this terrible crime and its aftermath, uncovering an extraordinary story of man's capacity to overcome the past.

Broadmoor. Few place names in the world have such chilling resonance. For over 150 years, it has contained the UK's most violent, dangerous and psychopathic. Since opening as an asylum for the criminally insane in 1863 it has housed the perpetrators of many of the most shocking and appalling crimes in history; including Jack the Ripper suspect James Kelly, serial killers Peter Sutcliffe, John Straffen and Kenneth Erskine, murderer and rapist Robert Napper, the teacup poisoner Graham Young, armed robber Charles Bronson, East End gangster Ronnie Kray, child killer Ian Brady, London nail bomber David Copeland and cannibal Peter Bryan. The truth about what goes on behind the Victorian walls of the high-security hospital has largely remained a mystery, but now with unprecedented access investigative journalist Jonathan Levi and cultural historian Emma French reveal all, after spending 12 months observing and speaking to those on the inside. Based on research from Broadmoor's closely guarded archives, interviews with the staff that work there - including nurses, psychiatrists, therapists, security guards - and above all the patients themselves, Inside Broadmoor is the most comprehensive study of the institution to-date. Published on the dawn of a new era as a £242m, state-of-the-art new building opens, this is the full story of Broadmoor's past, present and future and a dark but enlightening journey into the minds of Britain's most evil and how they are treated.

“A fascinating insight into the country’s most famous asylum for criminals” which reveals Victorian England’s care and management of the mentally ill (Your Family Tree). On 27 May 1863, three coaches pulled up at the gates of a new asylum, built amongst the tall, dense pines of Windsor Forest. Broadmoor’s first patients had arrived. In Broadmoor Revealed, Mark Stevens writes about what life was like for the criminally insane, over one hundred years ago. From fresh research into the Broadmoor archives, Mark has uncovered the lost lives of patients whose mental illnesses led them to become involved in crime. Discover the five women who went on to become mothers in Broadmoor, giving birth to new life when three of them had previously taken it. Find out how several Victorian immigrants ended their hopeful journeys to England in madness and disaster. And follow the numerous escapes, actual and attempted, as the first doctors tried to assert control over the residents. As well as bringing the lives of forgotten patients to light, this thrilling book reveals new perspectives on some of the hospital’s most famous Victorian residents: Edward Oxford, the bar boy who shot at Queen Victoria. Richard Dadd, the brilliant artist and murderer of his own father. William Chester Minor, veteran of the American Civil War who went on to play a key part in the first Oxford English Dictionary. Christiana Edmunds, The Chocolate Cream Poisoner and frustrated lover from Brighton. “Detailed and thoughtful.” —Times Literary Supplement “It challenges preconceptions about mental illness and public reaction to shocking crimes.” —Bracknell Forest Standard

Early on the morning of May 6, 1840, the elderly Lord William Russell was found in his London house with his throat so deeply cut that his head was nearly severed. The crime soon had everyone, including Queen Victoria, feverishly speculating about motives and methods. But when the prime suspect claimed to have been inspired by a sensational crime novel, it sent shock waves through literary London and drew both Dickens and Thackeray into the fray. Could a novel really lead someone to kill? In Murder by the Book, Claire Harman blends a riveting true-crime whodunit with a fascinating account of the rise of the popular novel and the early battle for its soul among the most famous writers of the day.

This collection on crime and criminals includes subjects as varied as alibis, arson, blackmail, con men, headless corpses, hired killers, killer couples, ladykillers, mass murderers, perverts, protection scams, sabotage, stranglers, sleep-walking slayers, victims and vital clues.

This is the story of Kate and Ronnie Kray.

This study by a British psychologist explores the relationship between mental illness, murder, and the Homicide Act of 1957. In 1957, a new bill went before Parliament addressing the use of capital punishment in cases of murder. It sparked a debate—as relevant today as it was then—about how to prosecute a killer who suffers a mental illness or disability. In order to shed light on the terms of this argument, psychologist W. L. Neustatter published this study of recent homicide cases that touched on the subject. Here, Neustatter examines the minds of murderers known to be schizophrenic or psychopathic, or suffer from such conditions as epilepsy or paranoia. He also looks at a case of murder under hypnosis; a man who made, then retracted, his guilty confession; and a variety of other cases that fall into a troubling grey area of culpability.