Here is a case I have been researching for a great many years. The appalling although not uncommon activity of women who would ‘look after’ children for a fee (and we are not talking about nannies here). Now a lot of archive (including news reports) relating to the case of […]
Snippets
7 posts
A farmer from Shrewsbury found his wife dead in bed after hearing a gunshot. The relationship between the wife, Betsy Kynaston, and the husband, Charles Kynaston, had not been good for sometime. It was alleged that Mr. Kynaston had fathered a child following a brief relationship with one of his […]
Ann Gray was the proprietor of a public-house at the market town of Waltham Abbey in Essex. Late one evening in May 1797 after serving two men in her bar she was trying to close up. She had already been a little nervous of these two and asked for one […]
The deaths of two children in Edgware London caused suspicion during proceedings in 1863. The parents were separated – the father sometime before had ran off following an offence of which he was wanted, the mother had sold most of her possessions and had left the neighbourhood. When an expert […]
During the early hours, at about 4.00 AM, on July 8, 1895, 13 year old Robert Allen Coombes entered his mother’s bedroom and stabbed Emily Harriet Coombes to death. It happened at their house at 35 Cave Road, Plaistow in East London. The weapon he had used had been a […]
Annie Robinson, the woman who poisoned her husband in 1895 by administering him with mercury (if you are slightly squeamish you are advised that some of this report contains material that you might find distressing). Annie Robinson (38), it turns out, had constantly lied in court, claiming her father was […]
In January 1868 William Fleckney, a 14 year old boy from Luton got involved in a quarrel with another lad of the same age called George Barrett. They started to quarrel and shortly afterwards Barrett demanded to fight it out, but his opponent refused. Barrett then followed up the challenge […]