Yorkshires Murderous Women


Book Description

Presents stories of murder by women in all parts of Yorkshire - tales of marital tension and tragedy and sad accounts of infanticide while under mental duress. This work also explores the uneasy relationship between social change and the criminal law, so the courtrooms as well as the murder scenes have their absorbing and dramatic stories.




Revisiting the Yorkshire Ripper Murders


Book Description

Between 1975 and 1980, Peter Sutcliffe, who became known as the Yorkshire Ripper, murdered 13 women in the North of England. The murders provoked widespread fear amongst women and impacted the public consciousness at both the local and national level. This book revisits the case, applying a feminist and cultural criminological lens to explore a range of criminological concerns relating to gender, violence and victimhood. Combining research findings from oral history interviews, analysis of popular criminological texts and academic commentary, this volume explores what the case can tell us about feminism, fear of crime, gender and serial murder and the representation of victims and sex workers. The volume contributes to a creative cultural criminology, highlighting how excavating recent criminal history and reading across texts presents new ways for understanding violence, gender and representation in the contemporary context.




Murder at St Anne's


Book Description

Winter, snow, murder--and a centuries-dead suspect. In the chilly depths of a Yorkshire winter, a well-liked rector is found bludgeoned to death in her own church. With no sign of a murder weapon, local superstition quickly pins the blame on the ghost of a medieval monk believed to haunt the building... Well accustomed to unusual murder investigations, DCI Jim Oldroyd takes on the case, along with his assistant, Sergeant Andy Carter, but they are hampered at every turn by the deepening snow and the threat of the supernatural. Even as possible motives and opportunities begin to reveal themselves, Oldroyd struggles to find a better suspect than the hooded phantom. Has Oldroyd really found himself in the midst of a Gothic ghost story or is there a very real killer at large? Spectre or otherwise, it soon becomes apparent that the murderer is not yet finished. And, for Oldroyd, it's about to become personal...




Misogynies


Book Description

Misogynies is one of the most celebrated feminist texts by a British author. First published in 1989, it created shock waves with its analyses of history, literature and popular culture. Joan Smith drew on her own experience as one of the few women reporting the Yorkshire Ripper murders and looked at novels, slasher movies, Page Three and Princess Diana, teasing out the attitudes that brought them together.




Somebody's Mother, Somebody's Daughter


Book Description

In Somebody's Mother, Somebody's Daughter, Carol Ann Lee tells, for the first time, the stories of those women who came into Sutcliffe's murderous orbit, restoring their individuality to them and giving a voice to their families, including the twenty-three children whom he left motherless.




Infanticide


Book Description

Infanticide examines medical expert evidence in infanticide cases, focusing specifically on the shifting notion of "certainty" in medical testimony. Beginning in the Early Modern period and concluding in the mid-twentieth century, it considers how courts determined whether an infant died from natural causes or other reasons, including violence. The book explores expert evidence in cases of infanticide and examines the extent of certainty created by medical specialists who founded their testimony on anatomical exploration and science. As the book progresses, it becomes clear that medical specialists were unable to scientifically establish cause of death and in doing so conveyed uncertainty in court proceedings. Rather than being regarded as a professional failing, Dixon argues that the uncertainty created by medical specialists redirected the outcomes of infanticide cases. The combination of uncertainty and the changing perceptions of infanticidal women by the court lead juries to find infanticidal women not guilty of a capital offence in many cases. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Criminology, Law and History.




Wicked Beyond Belief: The Hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper (Text Only)


Book Description

Now a major TV series ‘A masterpiece that reads like a thriller’ Time Out A gripping and probing account of the biggest criminal manhunt in British history.




Yorkshire Ripper - The Secret Murders


Book Description

In 1981, Peter Sutcliffe, the 'Yorkshire Ripper', was convicted of thirteen murders and seven attempted murders. All his proven victims were women: most were prostitutes.Astonishingly, however, this is not the whole truth. There is a still-secret story of how Sutcliffe's terrible reign of terror claimed at least twenty-two more lives and left five other victims with terrible injuries. These crimes - attacks on men as well as women - took place all over England, not just in his known killing fields of Yorkshire and Lancashire.Police and prosecution authorities have long known that Sutcliffe's reign of terror was far longer and far more widespread than the public has been led to believe. But the evidence has been locked away in the files and archives, ensuring that these murders and attempted murders remain unsolved today.As a result, the families of at least twenty-two murdered women have been cheated of their right to know how and why their loved ones died: the pain of living with that may diminish over time, but it never fades away completely. Five other victims survived his attacks: their plight, too, has never been officially acknowledged.Worse still, police blunders and subsequent suppression of evidence ensured that three entirely innocent men were imprisoned for murders committed by the Yorkshire Ripper. They each lost the best parts of their adult lives, locked up and forgotten in stinking cells for more than two decades.This book, by a former police Intelligence Officer, is the story not just of those long-cold killings, of the forgotten families and of three terrible miscarriages of justice. It also uncovers Peter Sutcliffe's real motive for murder - and reveals how he manipulated police, prosecutors and psychiatrists to ensure that he serves his sentence in the comfort of a psychiatric hospital rather than a prison cell.




The Yorkshire Witch


Book Description

On the morning of 20 March 1809, the woman who had earned herself the title of ‘The Yorkshire Witch’ was hanged upon York’s ‘New Drop’ gallows before an estimated crowd of 20,000 people. Some of those who came to see Mary Bateman die had traveled all the way from Leeds, many of them on foot, and many of them were doubtless the victims of her hoaxes and extortion. A consummate con-artist, Mary was extremely adept at identifying the psychological weaknesses of the desperate and poor who populated the growing industrial metropolis of Leeds at the turn of the nineteenth century. Exploiting their fears and terror of witchcraft, Mary Bateman was well placed to rob them of all their worldly goods, yet she did much more than cause misery and penury; though tried and convicted on a single murder charge, the contemporary branding of Bateman as a serial killer is doubtless accurate. Meticulously researched, this accessible, and at times shocking retelling of Mary Bateman’s life, and indeed her death, is the first since the publication chronicling her criminal career appeared in print in 1811, two years after her execution. Not only focusing on the details of her felonies and the consequences to her victims, it also examines the macabre legacy of her mortal remains, a bone of contention (literally you might say!) with the continuous public display of her skeleton in the Thackray Medical Museum until the recent removal of this controversial exhibit.




The Five


Book Description

Miscast in the media for nearly 130 years, the victims of Jack the Ripper finally get their full stories told in this eye-opening and chilling reminder that life for middle-class women in Victorian London could be full of social pitfalls and peril.