Help Us

The basic running cost of the new murdermap website (domain and hosting fees) is roughly £125 a year. These fees have been paid up until the start of 2021.

If you would like to help contribute towards the set-up costs and/or keep us going beyond 2021, please consider a small donation.

We want to fully report a murder trial from start to finish to give the public a better idea of what happens in court and hopefully provide context to any news reports of the case.

It will not be a verbatim transcript – that would take too long to read, let alone write up – but it will be an in depth report of what happened with the most important parts quoted as accurately as possible.

Most murder trials last between two to three weeks. Sending a reporter to cover one trial all day would potentially cost (depending on the reporter or their employer) between £80 and £200 per day.

If the target of £950 is met, we will commit to providing daily coverage of a two-to-three week murder trial* on the blog and a summary of the entire case upon its conclusion. If possible, the case chosen will be one that would otherwise receive very little coverage at all.

All donors will receive a daily report of the trial and a long-read summary at the end of the case (following conviction). We will also give priority to suggestions and ideas from donors on how best to cover the trial.

*subject to legal restrictions such as the Contempt of Court Act and the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act, for example. Explanation of the effect of these will, if possible, be provided in full in the final summary.

The original murdermap was set up in 2010. By the time it was forced to close in March 2018 the map contained more than 1,600 cases of murder and manslaughter in London.

Most were between 2008 and 2018, but there were also some notorious cases dating back to the Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1811.

There are several possible options for restoring the map, depending on the application used (e.g. Google Maps, Leaflet, Yandex, Power BI). However a custom-made case database linked to a map (I.e. an improved version of the original murdermap website) would probably cost up to £20k to set up.

For now, the site features a limited map of London homicides in 2019.

Possible updates include:

1. A map of notorious murder cases (19th Century to c1980s)
2. A historical murdermap (as above, but including all known cases)
3. A modern murdermap dating back to 2003 (using a list of cases released by the police)

Any of these options would involve not only investment in technological solutions but also in time and resources spent developing the database. This is not an easy task, given that there are (and were) more than 100 homicides in London every year, even in the 19th Century.