Disputed verdict
1811 · United Kingdom
Ratcliff Highway murders
Seven people killed in two East London households twelve days apart in 1811. The suspect hanged himself before trial, and doubts have outlived him.
Era
Regency and early Victorian (1800–1859)
12 cases from 1800–1859.
12 cases6 solved2 unsolved1811–1857
Disputed verdict
Acquitted
1821–1826 · United Kingdom
Gregor MacGregor and Poyais
Gregor MacGregor sold bonds, land and passage to Poyais, a Central American country that did not exist. Most of the settlers who sailed there died.
Executed
1827–1829 · United Kingdom
Burke and Hare
Two Irish labourers killed sixteen people in Edinburgh in 1828 and sold the bodies to an anatomy lecturer. Only one of them hanged.
Executed
1827–1828 · United Kingdom
Maria Marten and William Corder
A Suffolk molecatcher's daughter left home in men's clothes to elope in 1827. Eleven months later her father dug her up from the floor of the Red Barn.
Unsolved
1833 · Germany
Kaspar Hauser
A foundling who claimed a childhood in a dark cell, rumours of a stolen prince, and a stab wound in an Ansbach park in 1833. Murder or self-inflicted?
Convicted
1839–1840 · France
Marie Lafarge
A Parisian bride, a crumbling former monastery in Corrèze, a husband dead of 'cholera', and the Marsh test that made toxicology a courtroom science.
Unsolved
1841–1842 · New Jersey
Mary Rogers
In 1841 New York's 'beautiful cigar girl' was found dead in the Hudson. Her death was never solved, and it gave Edgar Allan Poe a detective story.
Legend
1846–1847 · United Kingdom
Sweeney Todd
The demon barber of Fleet Street was born in a penny serial in 1846. No record shows he ever lived, yet the 'true story' claim has never quite died.
Executed
1849 · United Kingdom
Frederick and Maria Manning
In 1849 a Swiss lady's maid and her husband buried their dinner guest under the kitchen floor, then each tried to cheat the other of his fortune.
Convicted
1855–1857 · United Kingdom
Great Gold Robbery of 1855
In May 1855 four men emptied the bullion safes on the London-to-Folkestone night train and refilled them with lead shot. Nobody noticed until Paris.
Executed
1855–1856 · United Kingdom
William Palmer
A Staffordshire doctor deep in racing debts, a friend's winnings at Shrewsbury, and a strychnine trial moved to London by Act of Parliament.
Acquitted
1857 · United Kingdom
Madeleine Smith
A Glasgow architect's daughter, a secret lover, his bundle of letters and three purchases of arsenic. In 1857 the jury said: not proven.