This is a list of major crimes in the United Kingdom that garnered significant media coverage and/or led to changes in legislation.
Contents |
| Date | Name | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1812 | The assassination of Spencer Perceval |
London, England | Shot by John Bellingham Only British Prime Minister to have been assassinated. |
| 1978 | The assassination of Abd ar-Razzaq an-Naif |
London, England | Abd ar-Razzaq an-Naif was Prime Minister of Iraq in 1968. He was assassinated on July 9, 1978, in London. His gunman was quickly captured and sentenced to life imprisonment in 1979; Naif was reportedly killed on order of Saddam Hussein. |
| Date | Name | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1940 | The Death of Jack Avery | Hyde Park, London, England | War Reserve Constable Jack William Avery was a war reserve police officer who was murdered in Hyde Park, London, on 5 July 1940, having served less than one year with the Metropolitan Police Service.
Avery was stabbed in the groin by Frank Stephen Cobbett, after Avery approached him having been advised by a member of the public that Cobbett was acting suspiciously. 42-year-old Cobbett, of no fixed address, was originally sentenced to death for murder, but after an appeal served fifteen years penal servitude for manslaughter instead. In 2007 Ian Blair, then Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, unveiled a memorial to Avery close to the place where he was attacked in Hyde Park. |
| 1984 | The shooting of WPC Yvonne Fletcher |
St. James's Square, London, England | Yvonne Fletcher, a young police officer, was killed by shots fired from the Libyan embassy in London while she was policing a demonstration outside. |
| 1984 | The Murder of Brian Bishop | Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, England | PC Brian John Bishop was a police officer who was shot in the head by an armed robber in Frinton-on-Sea, Essex, on 22 August 1984, four months after the murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher. He died from his injuries five days later in a London hospital. |
| 1999 | The Murder of Raja Ahmed | Miles Platting, Manchester, England | PC Raja Bashrat Ahmed was a police officer serving with Greater Manchester Police who was murdered when his motorcycle was deliberately rammed into the path of a moving lorry. |
| 2005 | The Murder of Sharon Beshenivsky | Bradford, West Yorkshire, England |
Sharon Beshenivsky was the 89th police officer and the sixth female officer to die in the line of duty in England and Wales, the second female officer to be fatally shot (the first was Yvonne Fletcher in an incident involving the Libyan Embassy in 1984), and the first female officer to die in an ordinary gun crime. Beshenivsky was a West Yorkshire Police constable shot dead by a criminal gang during a robbery in Bradford, West Yorkshire, England. Another police officer, PC Teresa Millburn, was also shot in the incident, receiving serious wounds to the chest. PC Millburn had joined the force less than two years earlier. Closed-circuit television cameras in Bradford tracked a car rushing from the scene and used an automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) system to trace its owners. This led to six suspects being arrested and convicted. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1823 | The Radlett murder | 1 | Radlett, England | William Weare was shot and his throat cut by John Thurtell, the son of the mayor of Norwich. The body was disposed of in a pond in Elstree. 17 books were written about it in the following year.[1] |
| 1856 | The trial of William Palmer | 1+ | Rugeley, England | Doctor who was convicted of one murder and suspected of more in one of the most notorious cases of the 19th century. The Central Criminal Court Act 1856 was passed to allow him to have a fairer trial in London rather than in his home town. |
| 1867 | The murder of Fanny Adams | 1 | Alton, Hampshire | Fanny Adams was a young English girl murdered by solicitor's clerk Frederick Baker in Alton, Hampshire. |
| 1886 | The Pimlico Mystery | 1 | Pimlico, London, England | Following the suspicious death of Thomas Edwin Bartlett, his wife Adelaide was charged with murder. It was found that Bartlett's stomach contained a fatal quantity of chloroform, although this had not caused any damage to his throat or windpipe. Adelaide Bartlett was later acquitted, possibly because the prosecution were unable to explain the death, or how she could have committed the crime. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1910 | The Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen case |
1 | Holloway, London, England | Hawley Harvey Crippen, an American-born doctor, used his position in a London pharmaceutical company to poison his wife before fleeing the country with his mistress. However, due in part to the newly developed wireless communication, Crippen was apprehended by Scotland Yard detectives onboard the SS Montrose shortly before its scheduled arrival in Quebec. |
| 1929 | Podmore Case | 1 | Southampton, England | During a murder investigation regarding the discovery of the body of Vivian Messiter, an insurance agent for the Wolf's Head Oil Company, pathologist Sir Bernard Spilsbury used early forensic techniques to conclusively prove guilt and convict William Henry Podmore. |
| 1931 | The Vera Page Case | 1 | Notting Hill, London, England | In yet another case investigated by Sir Bernard Spilsbury, the body of Vera Page was found after she had been raped and strangled. Although Percy Orlando Rush was named as a prime suspect, no one was charged with Page's murder and it remains unsolved. |
| 1934 | Brighton trunk murders | 2 | Brighton, England | Two unrelated, although similar murders took place in Brighton. A dismembered woman was found in an unclaimed trunk at a local railway station in June 1934. A second body was discovered later that year, following the disappearance of local prostitute Violet Kaye. When police conducted a house-to-house search near the railway station, her body was found in a trunk in the possession of her boyfriend Tony Mancini. Mancini had since fled the area. He was eventually apprehended by authorities, but was found not guilty. |
| 1935 | The Francis Rattenbury murder | 1 | London, England | Rattenbury was murdered in his sitting room by blows to the head with a carpenter's mallet. His wife confessed, but chauffeur George Percy Stoner admitted to the housekeeper that it was actually he who had carried out the deed. |
| 1946 | The Thomas John Ley case (The Chalk Pit Murderer) |
1 | Wimbledon, London, England | While residing in London, former Australian politician Thomas John Ley abducted the supposed lover of his mistress, barman John McMain Mudie, with the help of two other men. They tortured him before dumping his body in a Surrey chalkpit. Ley and accomplice Lawrence John Smith were arrested soon after, and sentenced to death. Both men's sentences were commuted with Smith sentenced to life imprisonment, while Ley was declared insane and sent to Broadmoor Hospital, where he died within months. Investigators were able to amass substantial evidence among his belongings as well as forensic evidence to convict him. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1952 | The Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig case |
1 | Croydon, Surrey, England | Derek Bentley and Christopher Craig were arrested by the Metropolitan Police following a shootout with police in which one constable was killed and another wounded. Although Craig shot and killed the constable, his accomplice Derek Bentley was charged with the murder and hanged. |
| 1955 | The Ruth Ellis case | 1 | Hampstead, London, England | Ruth Ellis, a London nightclub manager, shot and killed her fiance David Blakely outside a Hampstead public house where she surrendered to police upon their arrival. Despite evidence of the involvement of another lover, Desmond Cussen, she was tried and convicted of murder for which she would be the last woman to be executed in the United Kingdom. |
| 1959 | The Guenther Podola case | 1 | Kensington, London, England | Podola, a German petty criminal, shot a police officer while trying to escape. He was executed for the murder, the last person in Britain hanged for killing a policeman. |
| 1961 | The James Hanratty case (The A6 Murder) |
1 | Clophill, Bedfordshire, England | An unidentified man abducted scientist Michael Gregsten and his assistant Valerie Storie, with whom Gregsten had been having an affair. The man forced them to drive him around suburban North London before having them stop at a lay-by on the A6 where he shot the pair. Only Storie survived the attack. A police investigation led to the eventual arrest of car thief James Hanratty. Although later convicted of the murder, the Hanratty case has since been disputed. |
| 1975 | The Murder of Lesley Molseed | 1 | Rochdale, Greater Manchester | Lesley Susan Molseed (born Lesley Susan Anderson) was an eleven-year old schoolgirl from Turf Hill, who was murdered on 5 October 1975 on Rishworth Moor between Rochdale and Ripponden in West Yorkshire. Stefan Ivan Kiszko (1952–1993), a local tax clerk of Ukrainian/Slovenian parentage, served 16 years in prison after he was wrongly convicted of her sexual assault and murder. The circumstances of his ordeal was described by one MP as "the worst miscarriage of justice of all time" [1]. Ronald Castree was eventually found guilty of the crime on 12 November 2007. |
| 1979 | The Murder of Teresa de Simone | 1 | Southampton, England | This case led to one of the longest proven cases of a miscarriage of justice in British legal history. The murder occurred outside the "Tom Tackle" pub and was the subject of a three-year police investigation which resulted in the arrest of Sean Hodgson. Over the course of his 15-day trial it was revealed that Hodgson was a pathological liar and had confessed to numerous crimes, including crimes that he could not have committed and crimes that did not appear to have happened. Hodgson was convicted of the murder by a unanimous jury verdict in 1982 and was sentenced to life imprisonment. After serving 27 years in prison he was exonerated and released in March 2009. DNA analysis of semen samples which had been preserved from the original crime scene showed that they could not have come from him.
As a result of Hodgson's appeal Operation Iceberg was created by the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC) with the aim of using DNA evidence in pre-1990 rape or murder cases. This led to the review of 240 other convictions. The CCRC also requested that the Crown Prosecution Service identify and review similar murder cases from the time before DNA testing was available. In September 2009, on the basis of DNA evidence from his exhumed body, police named David Lace as the likely killer. Lace, who was 17 at the time of the murder, had confessed to police in 1983 that he had raped and killed de Simone but officers refused to believe him. Lace committed suicide in December 1988. |
| 1986 | The murder of Linda Cook | 1 | Portsmouth | Linda's murder was committed on 9 December 1986. The subsequent trial led to a miscarriage of justice when Michael Shirley, an 18 year-old Royal Navy sailor, was wrongly convicted of the crime and sentenced to life imprisonment. In 1992 his case had been highlighted as one of 110 possible miscarriages of justice in a report presented to the Home Office by the National Association of Probation Officers and justice groups Liberty and Conviction. His conviction was eventually quashed in 2003 by the Court of Appeal after the DNA profile extracted from semen samples recovered from the victim's body was proven not to be his. It was also the first occasion in which the Criminal Cases Review Commission supported an appeal on the basis of newly available DNA evidence. After serving the minimum tariff of 15 years, Shirley would have been released from prison had he confessed the killing to the parole board, but he refused to do so and said: "I would have died in prison rather than admit something I didn't do. I was prepared to stay in forever if necessary to prove my innocence." |
| 1991–1992 | The Michael Sams case | 1 | Michael Sams a rapist, kidnapper, extortionist and murderer who kidnapped 18-year-old Leeds resident Julie Dart on 9 July 1991 and the kidnapping of Stephanie Slater on 22 January 1992, though she was later released. In July 1993, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of Julie and the abduction of Stephanie. Sams had originally denied murdering Dart but later confessed. Sams had denied the charges in court but confessed to police in prison three days after he was found guilty. | |
| 1992 | The Rachel Nickell murder case | 1 | Wimbledon Common, London England | Rachel Nickell was the victim of a sexual assault and murder on Wimbledon Common, London, on 15 July 1992. She was stabbed 49 times. On 18 December 2008, Robert Napper, pleaded guilty to Nickell's manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Colin Stagg had earlier been charged and then acquitted in relation to this murder. |
| 1993 | The murder of Stephen Lawrence | 1 | Eltham, London | A Jamaican-born architecture student, Stephen Lawrence, and a friend are attacked by a group of white males and stabbed to death while waiting for a bus in Eltham, an area in south-east London. Although several people were arrested for the attack, none was brought to trial due to lack of evidence. |
| 1999 | The Jill Dando Murder | 1 | Fulham, West London, England | Jill Dando, a television presenter for the British Broadcasting Corporation and host of Crimewatch, is murdered by an unknown gunman outside her home in West London. After a high profile investigation by the Metropolitan Police, neighbour Barry George was convicted and sentenced to life. In July 2008 he was acquitted after the jury found the police's case too weakly founded. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 | The Murder of Ross Parker | 1 | Peterborough, England | Ross Parker was a 17 year old white male, murdered in an unprovoked racially motivated attack by a Muslim Asian gang of Pakistani origin. The attack occurred in the aftermath of the September 11th Attacks. Shaied Nazir, Ahmed Ali Awan, and Sarfraz Ali were all found guilty of his murder in unanimous verdicts and sentenced to life imprisonment. |
| 2005 | The Murder of Sally Anne Bowman | 1 | Croydon, South London England | Sally Anne Bowman was violently murdered and raped near her home in Croydon, South London, just two weeks after her 18th birthday. |
| 2006 | The Murder of Nisha Patel-Nasri | 1 | Wembley, north London | Nisha Patel-Nasri was a Metropolitan Police special constable and business owner who was stabbed to death outside her Wembley, north London home on Thursday 11 May 2006 before midnight. Her widower, Fadi Nasri, was arrested on Tuesday 27 February 2007 as a suspect. On Wednesday 28 May 2008 he was found guilty of organising her murder. |
| 2007 | The Murder of Garry Newlove | 1 | Warrington, Cheshire, England | Garry Newlove was an English man beaten to death in August 2007 in the UK whose murder launched an upset in the UK over the two offenders who had been drinking underage. Former Chief Constable Peter Fahy called for the legal age of buying alcohol to increase to the age of 21 as a result of his murder. His widow Helen Newlove condemned the Government for failing to get to grips with youth disorder afterwards. Mr Newlove was attacked outside his house in Warrington, Cheshire, on 10 August 2007, having gone outside to confront a gang of youths who were vandalising his Renault Scenic car. He died in hospital two days later. |
| 2008 | New Cross double murder | 2 | Sterling Gardens, New Cross in South East London, England | Two French research students, Laurent Bonomo and Gabriel Ferez, were murdered in Sterling Gardens, New Cross in South East London, United Kingdom. The victims, who were apparently playing computer games when attacked, were bound and stabbed more than 240 times. |
| 2010 | 2010 Northumbria Police manhunt | 2 | Northumberland England | The manhunt for Raol Moat was major police operation in North East England in which armed police officers were under the command of the Northumbria Police force to attempt to apprehend a dangerous felon, who had been recently released from Durham Prison. Moat, armed with a sawn-off shotgun, shot three people two days after his release: his ex-girlfriend Samantha Stobbart, her new partner Chris Brown, and police officer David Rathband. Brown was killed, while Rathband remained in hospital for nearly three weeks and was permanently blinded. Seriously injured Stobbart also remained hospitalised. After six days on the run, Moat was recognised by police and contained in the open, leading to a standoff. After nearly six hours of negotiation, Moat shot himself in the early hours of the following morning, and was later pronounced dead at Newcastle General Hospital. The operation took place across the entire Northumbria Police area, which covers both the metropolitan county of Tyne and Wear and the county of Northumberland. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1915 | The George Joseph Smith case (Brides in the Bath Murderer) |
3 | Leicester, East Midlands, England | George Joseph Smith, a con artist and polygamist, murdered three of his wives before being arrested and executed on 13 August 1915. |
| 1951–1952 | The John Thomas Straffen case | 3 | Bath, Somerset Broadmoor England |
John Thomas Straffen who was the longest-serving prisoner in British legal history. Straffen killed two young girls in the summer of 1951. He was found to be unfit to plead and committed to Broadmoor Hospital; during a brief escape in 1952 he killed again. This time he was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. Reprieved because of his mental state, he had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment and he remained in prison until his death more than 55 years later. |
| 1966 | The Shepherd's Bush Murders | 3 | Shepherd's Bush, West London, England | Three plainclothes police officers of the Metropolitan Police's CID Division are killed while questioning three criminals parked near Wormwood Scrubs Prison. |
| 1970–1974 | The Ronald Jebson Murders | 3 | Epping Forest Greater London England |
Ronald Jebson killed Susan Blatchford (11), and Gary Hanlon (12). Their bodies were discovered in a copse on Lippitts Hill, after they went missing from their homes in Enfield, north London, in March 1970. 30 years after the murders, Jebson confessed to the crimes and was already serving a life sentence for the 1974 murder of 8 year old Rosemary Papper. |
| 1993–2004 | The Peter Bryan case | 3 | East London, England | Peter Bryan is a cannibal who committed several murders between 1993 and 2004. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | Eastbourne manslaughter | 1 | Eastbourne, England | 15-year-old Reginald Cancellor died at the hands of his teacher, Thomas Hopley. Hopley used corporal punishment with the stated intention of overcoming what he perceived as stubbornness on Cancellor's part, but instead beat the boy to death. The case became an important legal precedent regarding the use of corporal punishment in schools. |
| 1953 | Teddington towpath murders | 2 | Notting Hill, London, England | 2 girls went missing in Teddington and were found the next day, having been murdered and raped. After the country's biggest manhunt at the time, Alfred Charles Whiteway was arrested and charged. He was found guilty at his subsequent trial and hanged. The case was described at the time as "one of Scotland Yard's most notable triumphs in a century".[2] |
| 1968 | The Mary Bell case | 2 | Newcastle upon Tyne, England | Mary Flora Bell was convicted in December 1968 of the manslaughter of two boys, Martin Brown (aged four years) and Brian Howe (aged three years) earlier that year. Bell was ten years old at the time of one of the killings, and eleven at the time of the other. |
| 1978 | The Carl Bridgewater Case | 1 | Wordsley, West Midlands, England | The body of 13-year-old paperboy Carl Bridgewater was found in the house of a local elderly couple who had been out for the day. It was presumed by police that Bridgewater had disturbed a burglar while delivering a newspaper to their home and was dragged into their livingroom where he was killed with a shotgun blast to the head. The following year, a group of men - widely referred to in the press as the Bridgewater Four - were convicted of the crime, three for murder and a fourth for manslaughter. The defendant convicted of manslaughter subsequently died in prison but the three convicted of murder were released in 1997 when they convictions were quashed on appeal. |
| 1983 | Murder of Colette Aram | 1 | Keyworth, Nottinghamshire England | Colette Aram, a 16-year-old trainee hairdresser who was abducted, raped and strangled as she walked from her home to her boyfriend's house in Keyworth, Nottinghamshire, on 30 October 1983. The killer, Paul Stewart Hutchinson, was finally brought to justice more than 25 years later, receiving a life sentence for murder in January 2010. |
| 1993 | The Murder of James Bulger | 1 | Walton, Merseyside, England | Two-year-old James Patrick Bulger was killed in February 1993 by two 10-year-old boys, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, after luring him away from a shopping centre to a nearby railway line where they violently tortured and beat him before leaving him on a railway track to die of his injuries. After the discovery of Bulger's body two days later, Venables and Thompson were found guilty of murder in November of that year and spent eight years in custody before being released on life licence. |
| 1994 | The Murder of Daniel Handley | 1 | London | Daniel Handley lured away near his West London home in October 1994 and murdered by Timothy Morss and partner Brett Tyler. They were sentenced to life imprisonment in May 1996 for abducting, sexually assaulting and murdering the nine-year-old boy, whose body was found near Bristol five months after he was last seen alive. The trial judge recommended they should never be set free. When the pair, along with two others, received 50-year tariffs imposed by Home Secretary David Blunkett in 2002, this was overturned within 24 hours by the European Court of Human Rights. |
| 1996 | The Michael Stone Killings | 2 | Kent, England | Michael Stone was convicted of a notorious double-murder which occurred in July 1996. He has continued to assert his innocence since his conviction two years later. His original conviction was overturned on appeal but a second trial resulted in another verdict of guilty after another prisoner claimed that Stone had confessed to the killings while on remand in jail. His most recent appeal, in 2004, also failed. |
| 2000 | The murder of Sarah Payne | 1 | East Preston, West Sussex, England | Sarah Payne, a seven-year-old girl from Surrey, is abducted and murdered by convicted paedophile Roy Whiting in West Sussex. He is found guilty of her murder in December 2001 and jailed for life. |
| 2000 | The murder of Damilola Taylor | 1 | Peckham, London, England | While on his way from Peckham Library, 10-year-old Nigerian-born Damilola Taylor was found with a cut to his left thigh and bled to death within a half hour before arriving at a local hospital. Four teenagers were tried for murder in 2002 but cleared. A second trial in 2006 saw two other suspects - brothers Ricky and Gavin Preedie - found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to eight years in prison. |
| 2001 | The Torso in the Thames case | 1 | River Thames, London, England | The discovery a human torso floating in the River Thames on 21 September 2001 is eventually revealed to be the remains of a recently-arrived Nigerian boy, between the ages of four and seven. Although the child is thought to be a victim of a ritual killing, the London Metropolitan Police Service have yet to apprehend those responsible. |
| 2001 | The Murder of Danielle Jones | 1 | East Tilbury, Essex | The murder of Danielle Jones was an English murder case where no body was found and the conviction relied upon forensic authorship analysis of text messages sent on the victim's mobile phone. Danielle Sarah Jones was last seen alive on 18 June 2001, when she was 15 years old. Her body has never been found. Her uncle Stuart Campbell, a builder, was convicted of abduction and murder on 19 December 2002. Campbell was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder as well as 10 years for abduction. After the trial, controversy arose when it was revealed Campbell had prior convictions for indecent assault on other girls of similar ages. The use of forensic authorship analysis of text messages in the case provoked research into its use in other cases. |
| 2002 | The Soham murders | 2 | Soham, Cambridgeshire, England | Two ten-year-old children, Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, were murdered by local school caretaker Ian Huntley after luring them into his home. The search for the two girls was one of the longest undertaken by British authorities. Their bodies were found two weeks after their disappearance and Huntley was jailed for life for the murders in December 2003. |
| 2002 | The Murder of Amanda Dowler | 1 | Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England | 13-year-old Amanda Dowler went missing on her journey home from school. Her body was discovered six months later in Yateley, Hampshire. The investigation gained national media coverage and was the largest investigation undertaken by Surrey police. Levi Bellfield, who had been convicted of two other murders and an attempted murder (all committed after Amanda's disappearance) in February 2008, was found guilty of the murder in June 2011 and received an additional life sentence. |
| 2003 | The Murder of Jodi Jones | 1 | Dalkeith, Midlothian, Scotland | Jody Jones was a fourteen year old school girl who was murdered by her boyfriend, Luke Mitchell whilst walking down a footpath to meet him not long after school. She was brutally attacked and stabbed. He was subsequently jailed for life. |
| 2003 | The Joel Smith killings | 2 | Kensal Green, London England | On 4 August 2006 Joel Smith was convicted of murdering seven-year-old Toni-Ann Byfield and the man who was thought to be her father, Bertram Byfield, at a bedsit in Kensal Green, London, in September 2003. After being found guilty Smith was jailed for life for both murders, with a recommendation that he should serve at least 40 years before being considered for parole. This sentence is one of the longest recommended minimum terms ever made in England and Wales. |
| 2004 | The Murder of Kriss Donald | 1 | Glasgow, Scotland | Kriss Donald was a 15 year old boy abducted, torturted and murdered by a Pakistani gang in a racist attack. Daanish Zahid became the first person in Scotland to be convicted of racially motivated murder in relation to the attack. Imran Shahid, Zeeshan Shahid, and Mohammed Faisal Mushtaq were all later extradited from Pakistan and also given life sentences. Zahid Mohammed received a 5 year sentence for abduction. |
| 2007 | The Death of Baby P | 1 | London Borough of Haringey, North London | Peter Connelly (also known as "Baby P", "Child A" and "Baby Peter") was an English 17-month old boy who died in London after suffering more than 50 injuries over an eight-month period, during which he was repeatedly seen by Haringey Children's services and NHS health professionals. Baby P's real first name was revealed as "Peter" on the conclusion of a subsequent trial of Peter's mother's boyfriend on a charge of raping a two-year-old. His full identity was revealed when his killers were named after the expiry of a court anonymity order on 10 August 2009. The case caused shock and concern among the public and in Parliament, partly because of the magnitude of Peter's injuries, and partly because Peter had lived in the London Borough of Haringey, North London, under the same child care authorities that had already failed ten years earlier in the case of Victoria Climbié. This had led to a public enquiry which resulted in measures being put in place in an effort to prevent similar cases happening. |
| 2007 | The Murder of Sophie Lancaster | 1 | Bacup, Rossendale Lancashire | Sophie Lancaster was the victim of a brutal attack along with her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, while walking through Stubbylee Park in Bacup, Rossendale in Lancashire. She later died in hospital as a result of her injuries. The police said the attack may have been provoked by the couple wearing gothic fashion and being members of the goth subculture. Two teenagers were later sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder. |
| 2007 | The Murder of Rhys Jones | 1 | Liverpool, England | The murder of 11-year-old Rhys Milford Jones occurred on 22 August 2007 in Liverpool, England, when he was fatally shot in the neck. An 18-year-old youth, Sean Mercer, received a life sentence for the murder in December 2008. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1827–1828 | The Burke and Hare murders | 17 | Edinburgh, Scotland | William Burke and William Hare sold the corpses of 17 victims to provide material for dissection. |
| 1856–1865 | The Catherine Wilson murders | 1-7 | Kirkby, England | Nurse who was sentenced to death for killing one patient, but suspected of six other deaths. Described by the judge as "the greatest criminal that ever lived." 20,000 watched her hang at Newgate Gaol. |
| 1865–1873 | The Mary Ann Cotton murders | 21 | England | Believed to have murdered up to 21 people, mainly by arsenic poisoning. Many of her victims had married her.[3] |
| 1896 | The Amelia Dyer case | 247 (attributed) |
Reading, Berkshire London England |
|
| 1888 | Jack the Ripper | 5+ | Whitechapel, London, England | At least five prostitutes were murdered and mutilated by an unidentified serial killer, dubbed "Jack the Ripper" by the press. The murders eventually stopped and the murderer was never apprehended. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1935–1956 | John Bodkin Adams | 163+ | Eastbourne, East Sussex, England | Dr John Bodkin Adams was arrested in 1956 for the murder of two women, Edith Alice Morrell and Gertrude Hullett.[2] After a 17 day trial at the Old Bailey that gripped the nation, he was controversially acquitted of the first murder and the second indictment was dropped by the prosecutor, an event the judge later termed "an abuse of process".[4] Political intervention has been suspected.[2] Adams was struck off for drug offences, lying on cremation forms and fraud. Pathologist Francis Camps suspected Adams of killing 163 patients between 1946 and 1956, though rumours regarding Adams behaviour had started circulating in 1935.[2] The case established the doctrine of double effect, whereby a doctor giving treatment to relieve pain may shorten life. Secondly, due to the publicity surrounding Adams's committal hearing, the law was changed to allow defendants to ask for such hearings to be held in private. Finally, though a defendant had never been required to give evidence in his own defence, the judge underlined in his summing-up that no prejudice should be attached to a defendant not doing so.[4] |
| 1943–1953 | The John Reginald Halliday Christie Killings | 6-8 | Notting Hill, London | John Reginald Halliday Christie murdered at least six women — including his wife Ethel — by strangling them in his flat at 10 Rillington Place, Notting Hill, London. Christie moved out of Rillington Place in March 1953, and shortly afterwards the bodies of three of his victims were discovered hidden in an alcove in his kitchen. Christie was arrested and convicted of his wife's murder, for which he was hanged in 1953. |
| 1944–1949 | The John George Haigh case (The Acid Bath Murderer) |
6-8 | London, England | John George Haigh murdered six people and disposed of their bodies in drums of sulphuric acid. He then forged documents turning the murder victims' possessions over to himself. Haigh was eventually caught after the disappearance and eventual murder of socialite Henrietta Durand-Deacon. Although apparently believing the police would be unable to prosecute him without her body. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1963–1965 | The Moors Murders | 5+ | Oldham, Lancashire, England | Five children were killed in the area of Greater Manchester over a two-year period by serial killers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley. After being turned in by Hindley's brother-in-law David Smith, the two were convicted of murder with Brady sentenced to life imprisonment before being committed to a mental health institution, while Hindley remained in prison until her death in 2002. |
| 1969 | The Bible John Murders | 3(?) | Glasgow, Scotland | Three women are found to have been strangled between 1968 and 1969 by an unidentified serial killer known only as Bible John. Although police investigated the murders for over twenty years, the murderer was later identified as Peter Tobin on 4 May 2007. |
| 1973–1978 | The Robert Maudsley case (Hannibal the Cannibal) |
4 | Robert John Maudsley was a British serial killer responsible for the murders of four people. He committed three of these murders in prison after receiving a life sentence for a single murder. He was falsely alleged to have eaten part of the brain of one of three men he killed in prison, which earned him the nickname "Hannibal the Cannibal" among the British press. | |
| 1975–1981 | The Peter Sutcliffe Murders (Yorkshire Ripper) |
13-20+ | Yorkshire, England | Peter Sutcliffe, known to the press as the "Yorkshire Ripper", murdered seven women in West Yorkshire, as well as up to thirteen others in northern England until his arrest in 1981. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he was imprisoned at Parkhurst Prison until his transfer to Broadmoor Hospital after he was violently assaulted by another inmate. |
| 1978–1981 | The Dennis Nilsen murders | 15+ | London | Dennis Nilsen murdered several men over a period of five years, including foreign students as well as local homeless men and male prostitutes, who were lured to his apartment and strangled before being dismembered. |
| 1982–1986 | The Robert Black murders | 3(?) | Scotland & North of England |
Robert Black is a Scottish serial killer and child molester. He kidnapped, raped and murdered three girls during the 1980s, kidnapped a fourth girl who survived, attempted to kidnap a fifth, and is the suspect in a number of unsolved child murders dating back to 1969 and the 1970s throughout Europe. On December 16, 2009, Black was charged with the murder of Jennifer Cardy, a 9 year old girl whose body was found at McKee's Dam near Hillsborough, County Down in August 1981. |
| 1991–2006 | The Peter Tobin case | 3 known | Margate, Kent | Prior to his first murder conviction, Tobin served ten years in prison for a double rape committed in 1993, following which he was released in 2004. In 2007 he was sentenced to life with a minimum of 21 years for the rape and murder of Angelika Kluk in Glasgow in 2006. Skeletal remains of two further young women who went missing in 1991 were subsequently found at his former home in Margate. Tobin was convicted of the murder of Vicky Hamilton in December 2008, when his minimum sentence was increased to 30 years, and of the murder of Dinah McNicol in December 2009. He is now being investigated for other unsolved cases of murder dating back to the 1960s. |
| 1991 | The Beverley Allitt murders (The Angel of Death) |
4 dead & 9 attempted murders | Beverley Gail Allitt, dubbed by the media the Angel of Death, is an English serial killer who murdered four children and injured nine others while working as a State Enrolled Nurse (SEN), on the children's ward of Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire. Her main method of murder was to inject the child with potassium chloride (to cause cardiac arrest), or with insulin (to induce lethal hypoglycemia). She was sentenced to life imprisonment at her trial at Nottingham Crown Court in 1993 and is currently being held at Rampton Secure Hospital. | |
| 1994 | Fred and Rosemary West case (The Wests House of Horrors) |
12(+?) | Gloucester, England | Between April 1973 and September 1979, Fred and Rosemary West would lure young women into their home where they were sexually assaulted and murdered. In February 1994 they were arrested and dead bodies were found in the garden and under the house at their Gloucester home. It is speculated that the pair murdered other girls between 1980 and 1992, but their only known victim after 1980 was their 16-year-old daughter, Heather, who was murdered in 1987 by Fred West, who hanged himself whilst awaiting trial at Winson Green Prison on New Year's Day 1995. On November 22, 1995, Rosemary West was sentenced to life imprisonment. |
| 1998 | The Harold Shipman murders (Doctor Death) |
250+ | Hyde, Tameside, England | Over a period of three decades, Dr. Harold Shipman murdered approximately 250 elderly women in the area of Hyde, Greater Manchester until his arrest in 1998 after he attempted to forge a new will in the name of one of his victims. Facing 15 consecutive life sentences, he later committed suicide while in custody at Wakefield Prison in 2004. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | The Steve Wright killings (The Ipswich Ripper) |
5 | Ipswich, Suffolk, England | Five women from Ipswich who were working as prostitutes were found murdered around the town. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1987 | The Hungerford massacre | 17 | Hungerford, Berkshire, England | Michael Ryan went on a rampage in a small rural town in England, shooting people at random (including his own mother) with an array of firearms before killing himself. |
| 1989 | The Monkseaton shootings | 1 | Monkseaton, North Tyneside | The Monkseaton shootings occurred on 30 April 1989 in Monkseaton, North Tyneside when Robert Sartin killed one man and left fourteen other people injured during a twenty-minute shooting spree. Sartin, a 22-year-old clerk, took his father's [[double-barrell ed shotgun]] and began shooting at people in nearby gardens, houses, and in passing cars. Witnesses described how Sartin fired indiscriminately at people. He then drove his car towards the seafront at Whitley Bay, followed by an unmarked police car, and was arrested by unarmed police officer Danny Herdman. Sartin was charged with the murder of Kenneth Mackintosh in Windsor Road, Monkseaton and 17 counts of attempted murder. In May 1996, he appeared at Durham Crown Court where he pleaded not guilty due to insanity and he was subsequently detained indefinitely at a secure mental unit. |
| 1996 | Dunblane massacre | 18 | Dunblane, Scotland | A gunman murdered 16 children and their teacher at a primary school in Scotland before shooting himself dead. |
| 2010 | The Cumbria shootings | 13 | Copeland Cumbria England | The Cumbria shootings were a killing spree that occurred on 2 June 2010 when a lone gunman, Derrick Bird, killed 12 people and injured 11 others before killing himself in the county of Cumbria, North West England. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1965–1966 | The Kray-Richardson Gang War | 8 | London, England | A gang war between the Kray twins and the Richardsons resulted in the gangland slayings of several underworld figures, including Frank Mitchell and George Cornell. |
| 1968 | The Krays | 8 | London, England | Jack "the Hat" McVitie, a small-time drug dealer and an associate of the Krays, was attacked and stabbed to death by Reggie Kray after being invited to a private party. Although McVite's body was never found, Reggie and Ronnie Kray were arrested with other members of their organization with the Krays being sentenced to thirty years imprisonment. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1963 | The Great Train Robbery | - | Ledburn, Buckinghamshire, England | After using railway signals to stop a Royal Mail freight train en route to London, Bruce Reynolds leads a 15-man group to storm the train and successfully escaped with £2.3 million. However, because the culprits left their fingerprints behind, police were able to trace thirteen of the robbers to their safehouse in Oakley, Buckinghamshire. Several members of the group, Ronnie Biggs, Ronald "Buster" Edwards and Charlie Wilson, managed to escape from prison soon after their trial. |
| 1983 | Brink's-MAT robbery | - | Heathrow Airport | 6 armed robbers broke into the Brink's-MAT warehouse in Heathrow Airport and got away with £26 million in gold bullion with the inside help of security guard Anthony Black. |
| 2000 | The Millennium Dome raid | - | Greenwich, London, England | On 7 November 2000, a criminal gang attempted to steal the flawless 777 carats (155 g) Millennium Star diamond valued at over 200 million pounds, from an exhibition at the Millennium Dome in Greenwich, London. Five men were later sentenced on various different robbery charges. |
| 2004 | The Northern Bank robbery | - | Belfast, Northern Ireland | £26.5 million is stolen from the Donegall Square headquarters of Northern Bank by a large armed gang. |
| 2006 | The Securitas depot robbery | - | Tonbridge, Kent, England | The largest cash robbery in British history, netting £53,116,760 in cash. The majority of the suspects were arrested. |
| 2009 | Graff Diamonds robbery | - | Bond Street, London | Two men wearing prosthetic make-up steal £40 million (US$65 million) of gems in an armed robbery on Graff Diamonds, a jewellery store in Bond Street, London. |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1988 | The Lockerbie Disaster | 270 | Lockerbie, Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland | In one of the worst terrorist attacks of the decade, a London-New York commercial flight Pan Am Flight 103 crashed near Lockerbie, Scotland as the result of a bomb having been planted in the forward cargo hold. A joint investigation by the Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary and the (U.S.) Federal Bureau of Investigation linked the bombing to Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, a Libyan intelligence officer and the head of security for Libyan Arab Airlines. |
| 2005 | The London Bombings | 52 | London, England | Four suicide bombers detonated high explosives located in camping rucksacks on three underground trains and a double-decker bus |
| Date | Name | Deaths | Type | Location | Summary |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1911 | The Siege of Sidney Street | 6 | Siege | East End, London, England | A shootout between unarmed London constables and a group of Latvian anarchists led by George Gardstein left three officers and Gardstein dead. British authorities then laid siege to the anarchists' safehouse on Sidney Street, meeting fierce resistance from the three anarchists inside. A fire broke out after a six-hour battle and, while the bodies of Fritz Svaars and William Sokolow were found, their leader Peter Piaktow was not located. |
| 2001–2002 | The Antoni Imiela case (The M25 Rapist) |
- | Rape | South East England | West German-born Antoni Imiela, known as the M25 Rapist, attacks and sexually assaults seven woman in Southeastern England before his capture by authorities in 2004. |
| 2005 | The Stabbing of Abigail Witchalls |
- | Stabbing | Surrey, England | Abigail Witchalls was left paralysed after being stabbed in front of her 21-month old son Joseph in Surrey, England, on 20 April 2005. |
| 2009 | The Edlington Attempted Murders |
- | Attempted Murder | Edlington South Yorkshire, England | On Saturday 4 April 2009 an 11 year-old boy was found with critical head injuries near to a brickpit, while his 9 year-old nephew was found wandering nearby with knife wounds. Local residents told the media that both boys had been hit with a brick, slashed with a knife, and burned with cigarettes. On Tuesday 7 April two brothers, aged 10 and 11, who had been arrested on 5 April, were each charged with both the attempted murder and robbery of both of the injured boys.
The two boys responsible, now aged 11 and 12, were sentenced to indefinite detention on 23 January 2010. The Judge in the case ordered that under s.39 of the Children's Act their identities not to be disclosed. |
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