Convicted
1860–1865 · United Kingdom
Constance Kent
A three-year-old taken from his cot in a Wiltshire country house in 1860. Five years later his half-sister walked into Bow Street and confessed.
Era
Late Victorian and Gilded Age (1860–1899)
25 cases from 1860–1899.
25 cases18 solved2 unsolved1860–1896
Convicted
Executed
1864–1865 · United Kingdom
Dr Edward Pritchard
A Glasgow doctor poisoned his wife and her mother while nursing them, and in 1865 became the last man hanged in public in the city.
Executed
1865 · D.C.
Lincoln Assassination
Good Friday, 1865: an actor shoots the president at Ford's Theatre, a manhunt crosses two states, and a military court hangs four conspirators.
Convicted
1866–1874 · United Kingdom
Tichborne Claimant
A bankrupt butcher from Wagga Wagga said he was a lost English baronet. A grieving mother believed him; two juries and 188 court days did not.
Convicted
1868–1895 · Texas
John Wesley Hardin
A preacher's son who killed a deputy on his 21st birthday served sixteen years, came out a lawyer, and was shot from behind in an El Paso saloon in 1895.
Executed
1872–1873 · United Kingdom
Mary Ann Cotton
A County Durham nurse buried husbands, children and a lover to 'gastric fever'. A seven-year-old stepson's death finally brought arsenic to light.
Unsolved
1874–1875 · Pennsylvania
Charley Ross
In 1874 two men lured a four-year-old into a buggy in Germantown and demanded $20,000. Charley Ross was never found, and America learned to fear strangers.
Convicted
1875–1888 · Northern California and southern Oregon
Black Bart
A polite robber in a flour-sack mask held up Wells Fargo stagecoaches for eight years. A laundry mark on a dropped handkerchief led detectives to his door.
Executed
1876–1879 · United Kingdom
Charles Peace
A limping Sheffield burglar shot two men, let an innocent one take the blame, and lived as a respectable gentleman in Peckham until a Blackheath break-in.
Killed before trial
1876–1882 · Missouri
Jesse James
Northfield's townspeople broke the James-Younger gang in seven minutes in 1876. Six years later a new recruit shot Jesse James in his own parlour.
Killed before trial
1877–1878 · Texas
Sam Bass
Sam Bass took $60,000 in new gold coins from a Union Pacific train in 1877. A year later an informer led him into a Ranger trap at Round Rock, Texas.
Killed before trial
1878–1881 · New Mexico Territory
Billy the Kid
Convicted of killing a sheriff, Billy the Kid shot his way out of the Lincoln jail in 1881. Eleven weeks later Pat Garrett found him in a dark bedroom.
Executed
1878–1880 · Australia
Ned Kelly
Three police dead at Stringybark Creek, two bank raids and a last stand in plough-iron armour: how the Kelly outbreak ended on a Melbourne gallows.
Executed
1881–1882 · D.C.
Garfield Assassination
A disappointed office-seeker shoots President Garfield in a Washington railway station in 1881. The doctors' probing may have done the rest.
Acquitted
1881 · Arizona Territory
Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
About thirty shots in thirty seconds on Fremont Street, Tombstone, in 1881: three Cowboys dead, the Earps charged with murder, and a month-long hearing.
Acquitted
1886 · United Kingdom
Adelaide Bartlett
A London grocer died on New Year's Day 1886 with liquid chloroform in his stomach and no burns in his throat. His wife was tried for murder and acquitted.
Unsolved
1888 · United Kingdom
Jack the Ripper
Five women killed in ten weeks in London's East End in 1888, a name invented in a letter, and a killer the police never identified.
Killed before trial
1889–1908 · Bolivia
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
From Telluride to the Wild Bunch, Patagonia and a mule with the wrong brand: the trail that ended at San Vicente, Bolivia, in November 1908.
Disputed verdict
1889–1904 · United Kingdom
Florence Maybrick
An American wife, a Liverpool cotton broker who dosed himself with arsenic, and a verdict so doubtful the Home Office reprieved her within weeks.
Executed
1891–1896 · Ontario
H. H. Holmes
Swindler, bigamist and killer of at least nine people, hanged in 1896. The '200 victims' and the murder castle of legend are another matter.
Executed
1891–1892 · United Kingdom
Thomas Neill Cream
A McGill-trained doctor gave strychnine to young women in south London in 1891-92, then wrote blackmail letters that led Scotland Yard straight to him.
Killed before trial
1892–1907 · Kansas
Dalton Gang at Coffeyville
On 5 October 1892 the Dalton gang tried to rob two Kansas banks at once in a town that knew their faces. In about ten minutes eight people were dead.
Acquitted
1892–1893 · Massachusetts
Lizzie Borden
Andrew and Abby Borden were killed in their Fall River home in 1892. A jury took barely an hour to acquit his daughter Lizzie. No one else was charged.
Disputed verdict
1894–1906 · France
Dreyfus Affair
A torn note from a wastebasket, a Jewish captain sent to Devil's Island, and the real spy acquitted in three minutes: the injustice that split France.
Executed
1896 · United Kingdom
Amelia Dyer
For £10 'Mrs Harding' promised a mother's love to babies born outside marriage. In 1896 the Thames at Reading gave up what she had done with them.