News of the Times - Unlocking the vaults of historical crime

n 1844, the quiet town of Crewe was shaken by a crime that startled even seasoned Victorian magistrates. When Richard Gallop fell suddenly and violently ill, suspicion soon turned to the person closest to him: his young daughter, Mary.

What began as a family dispute over a forbidden romance spiralled into one of the era’s most unsettling arsenic cases. Drawing entirely from surviving inquest testimony, courtroom reporting, and contemporary medical evidence, this episode traces the final days of Richard Gallop, the repeated poison purchases, and the investigation that revealed a carefully executed plan inside an ordinary household.

We also close with a remarkable Further Particulars tale from Northumberland — involving two burglars, a fearless servant girl, an elderly woman armed with a scythe, and the sort of Victorian resourcefulness that belongs in a novel rather than a police report.

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London, October 1880.
A quiet walk in Finsbury Park ends in horror when three gunshots echo across the lake and a young woman collapses to her knees. Her name was Jane Messenger, twenty-nine years old, respectably dressed, navigating a troubled marriage and an increasingly fraught entanglement with her brother-in-law, William Herbert.

What followed was one of the Victorian era’s most startling public murders — a broad-daylight shooting witnessed by families, park-goers, and off-duty officers. In this episode, we trace the tangled domestic history behind the crime, Herbert’s delusional hopes of an Australian inheritance, and the months of emotional turmoil that led to a fatal confrontation on a cold October afternoon.

We explore the police response, the medical findings, the inquest before Dr Hardwicke, and Herbert’s chilling admissions that revealed his intentions long before he walked Jane into the park. The case would grip London, dominate the papers, and end at Newgate with a crowd waiting for the black flag.

And in Further Particulars, we lighten the mood with the story of a gentleman who believed the most effective way to critique the House of Lords was to break a window and demand a publishing contract. As one does.

If you enjoy archival Victorian true crime, forensic history, and carefully reconstructed storytelling, this episode brings together jealousy, delusion, and the darker side of respectability in 1880s London.

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In the spring of 1881, a quiet butcher’s shop in Slough became the centre of one of Victorian England’s most baffling crimes. Mrs Reville, the butcher’s wife, was found murdered in her own back room — no struggle, no witness, and barely a minute in which her killer could have acted.
The shop layout offered no hidden corners. The doors were visible from her desk. Anyone entering would have been immediately seen. And yet, within this impossibly narrow window of time, an assailant struck four blows, removed the money from her pocket, and vanished without leaving a trace.
Suspicion soon fell on the young apprentice, Augustus Payne, whose movements, handwriting, and prior disputes raised troubling questions… but whose innocence the jury ultimately upheld.
Tonight, we walk through the original testimony, the strange timings, the “H. Collins” letter, and the unanswered questions that left Victorian investigators — and later generations — utterly at a loss.
A quiet evening. A familiar shop. An impossible crime.
And still, after more than a century, no one can say how it was done.
In our Further Particulars: a lighter tale from 1881 involving missing cabbages, a suspiciously woolly sheep-dog, and a gardener whose evening surveillance took a most unexpected turn.
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A young wife collapses in agony inside her Warminster cottage, and within minutes she is gone. Arsenic in the house, strychnine in the chemist’s shop, and whispers of fear and family tension stirred a scandal that gripped Victorian England. In this episode, we follow the final hours of Elizabeth Pearce, a 25-year-old newlywed whose sudden death in 1886 set off one of the era’s most troubling poisoning investigations.

With conflicting witness accounts, uncertain forensic evidence, and a household divided by suspicion, the question remains:
Was this a deliberate poisoning, a tragic accident, or a catastrophic failure of Victorian justice?

Join us as we trace the case from Elizabeth’s last meal to the inquest room, examining the powders, testimonies, and courtroom drama that still raise questions nearly a century and a half later.

If you enjoy these deep dives into Victorian and Edwardian true crime, you can find bonus episodes, early releases, and our full archive on Patreon — a lovely way to explore more cases with us at your own pace.

The spring of 1911 brought one of Britain’s most disturbing domestic mysteries into the ancient walls of Lancaster Castle. Three members of the Bingham family died suddenly, each showing the same violent gastric symptoms. As whispers of arsenic poisoning spread, suspicion fell upon the last surviving daughter, Edith Agnes Bingham — a quiet woman already viewed by neighbours as “simple” and vulnerable.
In this episode, we return to the original Edwardian newspaper reports to follow the case exactly as it unfolded: the baffling medical testimony, the exhumations at dawn, and the courtroom drama that gripped the country. Was this truly a triple poisoning, or a tragic sequence of illnesses misinterpreted by early forensic science?
We also look at what became of Edith after the verdict — a fate far quieter, and far sadder, than the headlines suggested.

Plus: today’s Further Particulars brings a musical disturbance from Leamington Spa, where The Blue Danube echoed through a street in the middle of the night… despite no one owning a piano.
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