On Saturday, October 16, 1888, twelve year-old Emily Roberts saw her mother and father quarrelling in the street outside 4 Essex Place in Hackney Road. They were both drunk. First her mother knocked her father to the ground with her hand, and father returned the favour by knocking mother to… You must be a paid …
Category archives: Historical Murders
Year of the Ripper: Frances Wright
The suburb of Canonbury in Islington seemed an ideal place for a 69 year-old bank clerk like Charles Cole Wright. Once a land of open fields, grazing cows, a 14th century manor house and a tranquil pond, by the 19th Century it was a well-to-do part of London comprising villas,… You must be a paid …
Year of the Ripper: Emma Wakefield
Twenty-one-year-old Emma Wakefield was described in newspaper reports as “a good looking, well-conducted girl” with a steady job as a shell box maker at a factory in Charrington Street. She was engaged to her boyfriend of five years, Thomas Price, and was due to get married the following May. He… You must be a paid …
Year of the Ripper: Frank Reynolds
Mary Ann Reynolds was by all accounts a kind and affectionate mother to her four children. However, shortly after her youngest, Frank, was born in around March 1888 her mental health appeared to rapidly deteriorate. Her sister, who attempted to persuade her to go to the doctor, described her as… You must be a paid …
Year of the Ripper: George Best
In 1888 Clare Market was still just about clinging to existence between Lincoln’s Inn Fields and the Strand, just to the west of the new Royal Courts of Justice (officially opened by Queen Victoria in 1882). One observer described it as an area of “streets and lanes, where the shops… You must be a paid …