Unsolved crimes have a special fascination, none more so than unsolved
murders. The shock of the crime itself and the mystery surrounding it,
the fear generated by the awareness a killer on the loose, the insight
the cases give into outdated police methods, and the chance to speculate
about the identity of the killer after so many years have passed - all
these aspects of unsolved murder cases make them compelling reading.
In this companion volume to his best-selling Unsolved Murders of
Victorian and Edwardian London, Jonathan Oates has selected over 20
haunting, sometimes shocking cases from the period between the two world
wars. Included are the shooting of PC James Kelly in Gunnersbury,
violent deaths associated with Fenian Conspiracies, the stabbing of the
French acrobat Martial Lechevalier in Piccadilly, the strychnine
poisoning of egg-seller Kusel Behr, the killing by arsenic of three
members of a Croydon family, and, perhaps most gruesome of all, the case
of the unidentified body parts found at Waterloo Station.
Jonathan Oates describes each of these crimes in precise, forensic
detail. His case studies shed light on the lives of the victims and
summon up the ruthless, sometimes lethal character of London itself.
