Escape from Broadmoor

Escape from Broadmoor PDF Author: Gordon Lowe
Publisher: History Press
ISBN: 9780752489889
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
John Thomas Straffen - England's longest-serving prisoner - was the first patient to escape from Broadmoor Hospital. He killed within hours. Prior to this, at his home in Bath, he was dismissed as an imbecile, a loner, a 'child trapped in an adult's body'. On the afternoon of Sunday July 15, 1951, John Straffen strangled 8-year-old Brenda Goddard as she picked flowers. Three weeks later he committed a similar murder before inadvertently confessing to the police. Faced with a serial killer with a mental age of 10, Straffen was admitted to Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital. But on April 29, 1951, having spent only six months at the institute, he escaped during a meticulously planned bid for freedom that should have been impossible. During his six hours on the run, he murdered 5-year-old Linda Bowyer in an attempt to 'annoy' the police. Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister, and his beleaguered government personally intervened to make sure that Straffen would never walk free. But was Straffen insane? Benefitting from previously unpublished documents, including classified government papers, author Gordon Lowe paints a vivid picture of a man whose crimes shocked a nation.

Escape from Broadmoor

Escape from Broadmoor PDF Author: Gordon Lowe
Publisher: History Press
ISBN: 9780752489889
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
John Thomas Straffen - England's longest-serving prisoner - was the first patient to escape from Broadmoor Hospital. He killed within hours. Prior to this, at his home in Bath, he was dismissed as an imbecile, a loner, a 'child trapped in an adult's body'. On the afternoon of Sunday July 15, 1951, John Straffen strangled 8-year-old Brenda Goddard as she picked flowers. Three weeks later he committed a similar murder before inadvertently confessing to the police. Faced with a serial killer with a mental age of 10, Straffen was admitted to Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital. But on April 29, 1951, having spent only six months at the institute, he escaped during a meticulously planned bid for freedom that should have been impossible. During his six hours on the run, he murdered 5-year-old Linda Bowyer in an attempt to 'annoy' the police. Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister, and his beleaguered government personally intervened to make sure that Straffen would never walk free. But was Straffen insane? Benefitting from previously unpublished documents, including classified government papers, author Gordon Lowe paints a vivid picture of a man whose crimes shocked a nation.

The Devil You Know

The Devil You Know PDF Author: Gwen Adshead
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982134798
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"What drives someone to commit an act of terrible violence? Drawing from her thirty years' experience in working with people who have committed serious offenses, Dr. Gwen Adshead provides fresh and surprising insights into violence and the mind. Through a collaboration with coauthor Eileen Horne, Dr. Adshead brings her extraordinary career to life in a series of unflinching portraits. In eleven vivid narratives based on decades of providing therapy to people in prisons and secure hospitals, an internationally renowned forensic psychiatrist and psychotherapist demonstrates the remarkable human capacity for radical empathy, change, and redemption."--Provided by publisher.

Donald Hume

Donald Hume PDF Author: Jonathan Oates
Publisher: Pen and Sword True Crime
ISBN: 1526769670
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
From the bestselling author of John Christie of Rillington Place. “If you have an interest in post war crime and criminals this is one for you!” —Robert Bartlett, author of Blood Royal The trial of the year in 1950 was of Donald Hume, a North London petty thief accused of stabbing car dealer Stanley Setty to death, of cutting up his corpse and dropping his body parts from an airplane. The press and public were horrified and fascinated by the details. But Hume was convicted and jailed as an accessory—he later claimed his wife was guilty of the crime. He then fled to Switzerland, taking up with a Swiss woman in Zurich, but he needed money to finance his lavish lifestyle and he returned to robbery. He carried out two armed robberies, shooting a member of the bank staff, but getting clean away. Then in 1959 his attempt to rob a bank failed and he shot dead a bystander. Arrested, he stood trial and was sentenced to life, but was later deemed criminally insane and was returned to Britain and to Broadmoor. Jonathan Oates’s compelling account of Hume’s notorious life of crime is based on extensive primary research. It sheds new light on Hume and his crimes, especially the murder of Setty, and gives the reader a rare insight into the criminal underworld of the time.

Broadmoor Revealed

Broadmoor Revealed PDF Author: Mark Stevens
Publisher: Casemate Publishers
ISBN: 1783462361
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
“A fascinating insight into the country’s most famous asylum for criminals” which reveals Victorian England’s care and management of the mentally ill (Your Family Tree). On 27 May 1863, three coaches pulled up at the gates of a new asylum, built amongst the tall, dense pines of Windsor Forest. Broadmoor’s first patients had arrived. In Broadmoor Revealed, Mark Stevens writes about what life was like for the criminally insane, over one hundred years ago. From fresh research into the Broadmoor archives, Mark has uncovered the lost lives of patients whose mental illnesses led them to become involved in crime. Discover the five women who went on to become mothers in Broadmoor, giving birth to new life when three of them had previously taken it. Find out how several Victorian immigrants ended their hopeful journeys to England in madness and disaster. And follow the numerous escapes, actual and attempted, as the first doctors tried to assert control over the residents. As well as bringing the lives of forgotten patients to light, this thrilling book reveals new perspectives on some of the hospital’s most famous Victorian residents: Edward Oxford, the bar boy who shot at Queen Victoria. Richard Dadd, the brilliant artist and murderer of his own father. William Chester Minor, veteran of the American Civil War who went on to play a key part in the first Oxford English Dictionary. Christiana Edmunds, The Chocolate Cream Poisoner and frustrated lover from Brighton. “Detailed and thoughtful.” —Times Literary Supplement “It challenges preconceptions about mental illness and public reaction to shocking crimes.” —Bracknell Forest Standard

Inside Broadmoor

Inside Broadmoor PDF Author: Jonathan Levi
Publisher: Blink Publishing
ISBN: 9781788700948
Category : Mentally ill offenders
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Broadmoor. Few place names in the world have such chilling resonance. For over 150 years, it has contained the UK's most violent, dangerous and psychopathic. Since opening as an asylum for the criminally insane in 1863 it has housed the perpetrators of many of the most shocking and appalling crimes in history; including Jack the Ripper suspect James Kelly, serial killers Peter Sutcliffe, John Straffen and Kenneth Erskine, murderer and rapist Robert Napper, the teacup poisoner Graham Young, armed robber Charles Bronson, East End gangster Ronnie Kray, child killer Ian Brady, London nail bomber David Copeland and cannibal Peter Bryan. The truth about what goes on behind the Victorian walls of the high-security hospital has largely remained a mystery, but now with unprecedented access investigative journalist Jonathan Levi and cultural historian Emma French reveal all, after spending 12 months observing and speaking to those on the inside. Based on research from Broadmoor's closely guarded archives, interviews with the staff that work there - including nurses, psychiatrists, therapists, security guards - and above all the patients themselves, Inside Broadmoor is the most comprehensive study of the institution to-date. Published on the dawn of a new era as a £242m, state-of-the-art new building opens, this is the full story of Broadmoor's past, present and future and a dark but enlightening journey into the minds of Britain's most evil and how they are treated.

Murder by the Book

Murder by the Book PDF Author: Claire Harman
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525520392
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
"From the prize-winning biographer--the fascinating, little-known story of a Victorian-era murder that rocked literary London, leading Charles Dickens, William Thackeray, and Queen Victoria herself to wonder: can a novel kill? In May 1840, Lord William Russell, well known in London's highest social circles, was found with his throat cut. The brutal murder had the whole city talking. The police suspected Russell's valet, Courvoisier, but the evidence was weak. And the missing clue lay in the unlikeliest place: what Courvoisier had been reading. In the years just before the murder, new printing methods had made books cheap and abundant, the novel form was on the rise, and suddenly everyone was reading. The best-selling titles were the most sensational true-crime stories. Even Dickens and Thackeray, both at the beginning of their careers, fell under the spell of these tales--Dickens publicly admiring them, Thackeray rejecting them. One such phenomenon was William Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard, the story of an unrepentant criminal who escaped the gallows time and again. When Courvoisier finally confessed his guilt, he would cite this novel in his defense. Murder By the Book combines the thrilling true-crime story with a illuminating account of the rise of the novel form and the battle for its early soul between the most famous writers of the time. It is a superbly researched, vividly written, fascinating read from first to last"--

The Wicked Boy

The Wicked Boy PDF Author: Kate Summerscale
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1408851148
Category : Juvenile homicide
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction 2017Early in the morning of Monday 8 July 1895, thirteen-year-old Robert Coombes and his twelve-year-old brother Nattie set out from their small, yellow-brick terraced house in East London to watch a cricket match at Lord's. Their father had gone to sea the previous Friday, the boys told their neighbours, and their mother was visiting her family in Liverpool. Over the next ten days Robert and Nattie spent extravagantly, pawning their parents' valuables to fund trips to the theatre and the seaside. But as the sun beat down on the Coombes house, a strange smell began to emanate from the building.When the police were finally called to investigate, the discovery they made sent the press into a frenzy of horror and alarm, and Robert and Nattie were swept up in a criminal trial that echoed the outrageous plots of the 'penny dreadful' novels that Robert loved to read. In The Wicked Boy, Kate Summerscale has uncovered a fascinating true story of murder and morality - it is not just a meticulous examination of a shocking Victorian case, but also a compelling account of its aftermath, and of man's capacity to overcome the past.

Prisoner 1167: the Madman who was Jack the Ripper

Prisoner 1167: the Madman who was Jack the Ripper PDF Author: James Tully
Publisher: Constable
ISBN: 9783170110588
Category : Serial murderers
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
This collection on crime and criminals includes subjects as varied as alibis, arson, blackmail, con men, headless corpses, hired killers, killer couples, ladykillers, mass murderers, perverts, protection scams, sabotage, stranglers, sleep-walking slayers, victims and vital clues.

The Secret Serial Killer

The Secret Serial Killer PDF Author: Robert Mulhern
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1526722771
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 205

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Book Description
This true crime investigation into the notorious case of Kieran Kelly reveals “new twists that add further intrigue to the mystery” (Irish Post). On the evening of August 21,1983, Metropolitan Police detectives raced to London’s Clapham Police Station to find a prisoner dead. His cellmate sat quietly in the corner. Kieran Kelly, a laborer from Ireland, calmly confessed to strangling the prisoner—and then stunned officers by confessing to dozens of unreported and unsolved murders over the previous 30 years. Kelly may have been Britain’s most prolific serial killer, yet he was convicted on just two of his admissions. In 2015, a former police officer who worked on the case made a bombshell accusation: that Kelly' crimes were covered up by the British Government. Strangulations, murders on the London Underground, an internal Metropolitan Police review—as the story’s elements whipped the international news media into a frenzy, journalist Robert Mulhern set off from London to rural Ireland on a methodical search for the truth. Could Kieran Kelly really have murdered 31 times?

Broadmoor Women

Broadmoor Women PDF Author: Kim E. Thomas
Publisher: Pen and Sword History
ISBN: 1526794276
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Broadmoor, Britain’s first asylum for criminal lunatics, was founded in 1863. In the first years of its existence, one in five patients was female. Most had been tried for terrible crimes and sent to Broadmoor after being found not guilty by virtue of insanity. Many had murdered their own children, while others had killed husbands or other family members. Drawing on Broadmoor’s rich archive, this book tells the story of seven of those women, ranging from a farmer’s daughter in her 20s who shot dead her own mother to a middle-class housewife who drowned her baby daughter. Their moving stories give a glimpse into what nineteenth-century life was like for ordinary women, often struggling with poverty, domestic abuse and repeated childbearing. For some, Broadmoor, with its regime of plain food, fresh air and garden walks, was a respite from the hardships of their previous life. Others were desperate to return to their families. All but one of the women whose stories are recounted in this book recovered and were released. Their bout of insanity was temporary. Yet the causes of their condition were poorly understood and the treatment rudimentary. As well as providing an in-depth look at the lives of women in Victorian England, the book offers a fascinating insight into the medical profession’s emerging understanding of the causes and treatment of mental illness.