News of the Times - Unlocking the vaults of historical crime

A quiet Victorian street. Three sudden deaths. One woman at the centre of them all.
In the spring of 1886, Turner Lane in Ashton-under-Lyne was the sort of place where neighbours knew everything — or believed they did. But when a daughter, a husband, and finally a well-liked young wife died in violent, agonising circumstances, the small community began to sense a pattern too troubling to ignore.
Their suspicions would spark one of the most striking poisoning cases of the Victorian age.
In this episode, we follow the chain of events that haunted the neighbourhood:• the mysterious “mouse powder,”• the late-night spasms and clenched hands,• the uneasy intimacy between households,• the neighbours who noticed what the doctors missed,• and the forensic discovery that dragged the entire affair into the courts.
Was this a tragic series of coincidences — or a deliberate dismantling of every obstacle in one woman’s path?
We also travel to 1887 Croydon in Further Particulars, where runaway horses, broken reins, and unrepeatable language in a country pub raise the eternal question: have youths improved at all? (Spoiler: absolutely not.)
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On a cold November night in 1930, a small saloon car was found blazing on a quiet Northamptonshire lane. Inside lay the charred body of a man, burned beyond recognition. But when police traced the registration number, the supposed victim walked into a London police station — very much alive.
So began one of the most extraordinary investigations of the early 20th century.
Tonight, we follow the case of Alfred Rouse, the travelling salesman with a tangled private life, mounting financial pressures, and a so-called “harem” of women who believed themselves promised marriage. As detectives pieced together witness accounts, petrol traces, and forensic testimony from Sir Bernard Spilsbury himself, a grim picture emerged — one that shocked the nation.
But at the heart of the story lies a question that has haunted true-crime historians ever since:
Who was the man in the car?
Join us as we explore the investigation, the trial, and the final confession, delivered only when the gallows were being prepared.
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In March 1872, a quiet domestic tragedy in Boston, Lincolnshire became one of the most consequential moments in British criminal justice. When William Horry shot his estranged wife, Jane, the case was tragic enough — but what followed would transform the future of capital punishment in Britain.

This episode explores how Horry’s crime became the first test of William Marwood’s new “long drop” method, a calculated attempt to make executions swift, scientific, and far less agonising than the old short-drop approach. It was a turning point that reshaped British practice for more than a century.

We trace:
• the collapse of William and Jane’s marriage and the jealousies that spiralled out of control
• the inquest, trial, and evidence that left the jury with little doubt
• Marwood’s debut on the gallows — and why officials were desperate for change
• how a private tragedy became a national moment of reform
• and the Victorian press reaction that helped cement this case in history

Our Further Particulars this week takes us to Cambridge, where a particularly delicate publican refuses to serve lady cyclists in “rational dress” — proving that in 1898, nothing caused moral panic faster than women in trousers.

Settle in for a story where domestic heartbreak meets legal transformation, and where a single moment on the scaffold marked the beginning of Britain’s modern execution era.

A landmark case that reshaped Victorian justice
In the spring of 1868, Britain crossed a threshold it could never uncross. For centuries, executions had been public events — spectacles that drew tens of thousands, shaped moral debates, and filled the columns of Victorian newspapers. But with the passing of the Capital Punishment Amendment Act, everything changed. For the first time, a condemned prisoner would die behind the closed gates of a prison, witnessed only by officials.
The case that carried Britain into this new era began not in London or a notorious criminal underworld, but at Dover Priory Station, where an unsettled young railway worker would commit a murder that shocked the country.
When 18-year-old carriage cleaner Thomas Wells shot his stationmaster, Edward Adolphus Walshe, the crime seemed at first merely tragic. But the circumstances were so stark, the evidence so immediate, and the public sentiment so charged that the case quickly became the test through which the new law would be judged.
This episode follows the story step by step: Wells’s growing resentment, the tense confrontation in the cramped station office, and the moments leading to a single violent act that ended a respected man’s life. We explore the swift investigation that followed, the testimony from railway workers and townspeople, the courtroom atmosphere thick with expectation, and the public’s uneasy fascination with the new manner in which justice was to be carried out.
As Wells faced the gallows inside Maidstone Gaol, the nation confronted something larger than the crime itself:
What does justice look like when removed from the public gaze?
Is a hidden execution more humane — or simply more palatable?
And what does it mean when the first man to be hanged privately is barely out of boyhood?
⭐ This episode includes:
• A railway dispute that spiralled into an unprecedented murder case
• A remarkably airtight chain of evidence from witnesses at the station
• Wells’s unsettling calmness — and how Victorians interpreted it
• How the press framed Britain’s first private execution
• What officials behind the prison walls actually saw
• And in Further Particulars: a Norfolk ferret incident so chaotic and so darkly comic that even Dickens would have raised an eyebrow
Through archival detail, atmospheric reconstruction, and careful historical context, we trace how one violent moment on a railway platform reshaped the entire future of British executions.
This is more than a true crime story — it is the moment Victorian Britain stepped into a new age of justice, reluctantly, awkwardly, and under the shadow of a single gunshot at Dover Priory.
Settle in for a vivid journey into a pivotal turning point in British legal history.

In 1845, Britain witnessed a murder investigation unlike anything seen before.
When Sarah Hart died suddenly in the quiet village of Salt Hill, suspicion fell upon a seemingly respectable Quaker gentleman, John Tawell. What followed became the first manhunt in history conducted through the electric telegraph, racing ahead of a fleeing suspect along the Great Western Railway line.
In this episode, we explore the extraordinary case that blended poison, secrecy, telegraph wires, and Victorian morality, uncovering how a single message sent from Slough changed the future of policing.
You’ll hear about:
• The hidden life behind Tawell’s quiet exterior• Prussic acid and the Victorian obsession with poisons• How the telegraph outpaced a murderer for the first time• The dramatic arrest in a London coffee house• A sensational trial that gripped the nation• Tawell’s final confession — and the truth it revealed
And in Further Particulars, we close with a chaotic vignette from the 1880s involving a German labourer, a lover’s quarrel, and an improvised breakfast melee.
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