Real Crime Annual

Reported crime rates grew dramatically during the 20th century, peaking in the early 90s, and steadily falling since then. Of course, these trends aren’t necessarily indicative of the numbers of crimes committed. The last 100 years have seen numerous new types of crime coming into law, as well as major shifts in the public’s relationship with law enforcement. Whether actual criminality has risen or fallen during the last century, one thing is for sure: our awareness of crime has risen dramatically. Crime has always been important fodder for news media, but the rise of television and the advent of the internet have brought crime reporting into our homes, and even into the palms of our hands, like never before. Crime stories are now very much part of our everyday lives,…

Social media photographs show a fun-loving young woman who likes nothing more than a girls’ night out, dancing and drinking cocktails, while images of her bedroom, taken by the investigating police officers, suggest a slightly immature girl who still keeps cuddly toys on her bed. But looks can be deceiving: the woman smiling coyly in her graduation photo is the same one who was recently convicted of murdering seven babies and attempting to kill six more, making her the worst child killer in British history. Letby’s friends and family are still reeling at the verdict, convinced that the jury of eight women and four men have got it wrong. Her parents, John and Susan, have stood by their daughter despite the overwhelming evidence given by more than 200 witnesses, which…

Investigators from the Cheshire County Constabulary discovered the letters, scraps of paper, Post-it Notes and diaries when they searched her home and the bizarre scribbles became a key element of the prosecution’s case. The diaries were of particular interest since detectives quickly realised that they contained details of each attack, but the information was hidden within a coded system comprising of coloured asterisks. Various comments such as “I am evil” and “I killed them on purpose because I am not good enough” initially looked like strangely worded confessions and an outpouring of guilt, but criminal psychologist Dr David Holmes doubts that this is likely, stating on Good Morning Britain that she was most likely “doodling her thoughts” and merely pondering how this situation affects her rather than feeling any guilt…

Q: NOBODY SEEMS TO HAVE OFFERED UP A REASON FOR HER BEHAVIOUR. DO YOU BELIEVE SHE HAS MUNCHAUSEN BY PROXY OR IS SHE SIMPLY A SADIST? A: It is difficult to know Letby’s incentives, as she has not opened up her psyche to the world. However, we can look at some of the most high-profile healthcare professionals UK killers and compare and contrast. Beverley Allitt was convicted of murdering four infants, attempting to murder three others, and causing grievous bodily harm to a further six in 1991. She had Munchausen by proxy. This contentious disorder leads the individual to intentionally fake or even artificially create illness. The perpetrator gets some sort of perverse pleasure from feeding off the sympathy and attention that is afforded to the victim. With Harold Shipman,…

Tenacity seems to be key to prison governor Veronica Bird’s success in rising to the top of a traditionally male-orientated career, and it’s also a trait that helped her escape the poverty line and the increasingly abusive members of her family. She was brought up in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, in the 1950s as part of a coal-mining family of 11 that was fairly typical of the area and time. Her father, George Bird, had been involved in a mining accident 20 years previously that he shouldn’t have survived. Yet miraculously, surgeons managed to patch the gaping hole that a fallen coal face had opened up in his head. He fully recovered – his physical health, at least. Veronica suspects that compassion and empathy might have died in George that day,…

The gulags, the notorious labour camps of the Soviet era, weren’t much worse than the women’s and men’s prison Veronica visited in 2002. Up to 400 people were crammed into small dormitories in the most unsanitary of conditions. Ventilation was far from adequate, so the stench would have been foul but for the fact that there weren’t any smoking regulation – and everybody smoked. Rats and cockroaches were rife, disease spread easily from one unwashed body to the next in the close quarters, and the very communal mealtimes were a particularly disorganised (first come, first served) and unsanitary affair. When Veronica and her team talked with their Russian counterparts about how they ran their respective prisons, there was much exclamation on both sides. Russian officers gasped at the no-smoking rule…