News of the Times - Unlocking the vaults of historical crime

Tonight we travel to Brighton in the summer of 1866, where the sudden illness of a newly married woman set in motion one of the most troubling Victorian inquests of the decade.
Ellen Warder’s decline was abrupt, her symptoms baffling, and every doctor who attended her agreed on one unsettling point: nothing about her illness could be explained by natural causes.

But it was only when investigators began looking more closely at her husband’s past that the real unease began. For Ellen was not his first wife to die suddenly. Nor his second.

As the evidence gathered pace — and as the era’s leading toxicologist was called to examine her organs — the case widened into a far darker question:
How many tragic “misfortunes” can surround a single man before coincidence becomes impossible?

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Settle in, and let’s step back to Brighton, 1866.

A quiet Surrey hotel. A routine morning remedy. And within minutes, a respected publican is dead on the floor in violent convulsions. When the doctor arrives, nothing makes sense: the salts taste bitter, the bottle has been mysteriously rinsed clean, and strange white crystals are scattered across the bar parlour.

This is the Byfleet Poisoning of 1924 — a case that led detectives from a village inn to a French chemist’s shop, a Biarritz hotel, and finally to one of the most dramatic murder trials of the decade. Was Alfred Jones the victim of accident, jealousy, desperation… or a calculated plan carried out under his own roof?

Tonight we follow the forensic trail, the conflicting testimonies, and the sudden appearance of a charming stranger whose arrival in England would change everything.

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A quiet summer evening in 1919.
A country lane in Leicestershire.
A young woman found beside her bicycle… and a mystery that would grip Britain for the next year.
In this episode, we unravel the Green Bicycle Mystery — a case that began as a presumed cycling accident but quickly deepened into one of the most perplexing investigations of the early 20th century. A bullet overlooked for nearly a day, a vanished cyclist on a distinctive green B.S.A., and a courtroom battle led by the formidable Sir Edward Marshall Hall all combine to create one of the era’s most enduring puzzles.
Join us as we follow the investigation step by step: the forensic misjudgements, the conflicting witness accounts, the disappearance and dramatic recovery of the bicycle, and the question that still divides historians more than a century later — what truly happened on that quiet Leicestershire lane?
If you enjoy immersive historical true crime, you’ll find a great deal more waiting in our archive.
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Settle in.
The lane is quiet, the evidence is troubling, and the mystery remains unsolved.
A young woman found beside her bicycle in 1919, a missing cyclist on a green B.S.A., and a bullet no one noticed for nearly a day — we unravel one of Britain’s most perplexing early forensic mysteries.

Today, we travel to Paris in the spring of 1887, where an elegant apartment off the Rue Montaigne became the centre of one of the most sensational investigations of the Belle Époque.
A courtesan of considerable means, her trusted housekeeper, and a twelve-year-old girl were found murdered behind locked doors — no struggle, no intruder seen, and only the faintest collection of clues left behind.
What followed was a case that gripped Europe: a chase across France, a courtroom overflowing with spectators, and a man whose shifting identity and charm made him both captivating and deeply suspect.
This is the story of Henri Pranzini, and the triple murder that shocked Paris to its foundations.
And in our Further Particulars, we lighten the mood just a little with a gastronomic scandal from the Boulevard Haussmann, involving a pâté, an unexpected pigeon, and a delicatessen owner whose confidence exceeded his culinary accuracy.
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Settle in — Paris awaits.

Today we travel back to Boston in 1849, to one of the most unsettling disappearances of the Victorian age.
Dr George Parkman — a man known for his precision, his routine, and his unshakeable punctuality — leaves home one afternoon and never returns. The last place he was seen? The quiet, red-brick halls of Harvard Medical College.

What follows is a mystery that gripped Boston, unsettled Harvard, and pushed the courts into the earliest days of forensic science. Locked rooms, burning furnaces, shifting statements, and a breakthrough that would change criminal investigation forever.

Settle in as we explore the disappearance — and the murder — that became known as the Harvard Mystery.

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Now — let’s step into 1849.