Alfred Earnest Scholes joined the Metropolitan Police in February 1888 and was one of many constables that were posted to the dark slums of Whitechapel during the Jack the Ripper scare of the same year. In a career spanning 36 years from lowly PC Scholes to Detective Inspector, this book examines some of the most fascinating crimes and criminals that had Victorian and Edwardian England shocked and enthralled. Beginning with the infamous Mrs Pearcey in the Kentish Town Murder, who cut the throat of her lover’s wife and smothered their baby, before walking the bodies through the streets in an overloaded pram, this book goes deeper than ever before into some of the crimes you may have heard of, and some you may not. Includes for the first time in over 110 years a sensational solution to the infamous murder of Emily Dimmock in The Camden Town Murder.
Hear about depraved sexual deviant, the Mad Monk Widdows, who preyed on vulnerable young boys; the tragic Adolf Beck, whose case led to the creation of the Criminal Court of Appeal; Lily Miers, the West End’s most brazen and successful shoplifter; Milsom and Fowler, who beat to death an elderly man in the kitchen of his own home in The Muswell Hill Murder; Ann O’Delia Diss Debar who robbed, conned and raped her way through a shocked Victorian London; and the enigmatic and adventurous life of Chicago May, from gangster’s moll in America’s midwest, to confidence trickster in Chicago, New York and London, to safe cracker in Paris and ultimately to the attempted murder of Eddie Guerrin in London’s West End.
In 1922, Detective Inspector Scholes, now of the Port of London Authority Police, boarded the SS Morea and seized letters written by Edith Thompson to her lover Freddie Bywaters, which were instrumental in sending them both to the gallows in what was known as The Ilford Murder Case. But was Edith Thompson a victim of a miscarriage of justice as some have since claimed, or a scheming, murderous woman, responsible for the deaths of two men in the primes of their lives? G S Burroughs explores the letters and the trial at The Old Bailey and finishes this revealing and fascinating book with his controversial conclusion.