About Sinister Crimes
A guide to established historical crimes: the famous cases, told from the trial record and the newspapers that first reported them, with what is settled kept apart from what is still argued over.
True crime is a crowded genre, and much of it repeats the same legends without checking them. Each case here has a timeline, the people involved with their life dates, a map, the outcome, a plain account of what is disputed, and, for cases before 1929, clippings from the American newspapers of the day, so you can read how the story was first told.
The site is independent, has no advertising yet, and sets no cookies. It is written and maintained with the help of software tools; every case is checked against the sources listed on its page, and the checks are described on the methodology page.
Editorial standards
Only historical cases, only the dead
We cover cases whose events ended at least about 75 years ago. Every named person, whether perpetrator, accused, victim, witness or lawyer, must have died. We check this against Wikidata's date of death for everyone who has an entry there; for people without one, we publish only where the record makes survival impossible (a death date recorded in the case itself, or someone who was an adult more than 110 years ago). A case with anyone who might be alive is held back. We do not name living descendants or relatives. For this reason the 1963 Great Train Robbery and later cases are out of scope.
Guilt only where it is established
We say someone committed a crime only where a court convicted them or the historical record leaves no real doubt (for example, a killer who died before trial after confessing, with corroborating evidence). People who were acquitted are described as acquitted. Where a verdict is widely doubted, or was later overturned or pardoned, the case is marked "disputed verdict". In unsolved cases, named people are "suspects" or the subject of "theories", never "the killer". Legends, such as Sweeney Todd, are labelled as legends.
Established and disputed, kept apart
Every case ends with two lists: what the record settles, and what remains argued over, with the competing positions stated fairly. If sources disagree on a date or detail, the text says so rather than picking one silently.
Dignity for victims, no gore
Victims are named and described as people, with a section of their own, not only as the occasion for someone else's story. We describe violence briefly and factually. We do not publish crime-scene, mortuary or post-mortem photographs, even when they are in the public domain; our image fetcher rejects them automatically and every image is also reviewed by eye. Newspaper excerpts are cut before graphic passages.
Original writing
Case accounts are written for this site from the sources listed on each page. We do not copy text from Wikipedia or elsewhere. Quotations from period newspapers are shown as images and machine-read text from the Library of Congress, with a link to the full page.
Corrections
History gets revised. If you find an error, the case's sources are the best place to start; we re-check facts whenever a case is updated, and record changes in the page's "last checked" date.
What you will not find here
- Recent crimes, or cases in which anyone involved could still be alive.
- Speculation presented as fact, or new accusations against named people.
- Photographs of bodies or crime scenes.
- Third-party trackers, advertising scripts or cookies (see privacy).