Block I — The 19th Century
Nine real crimes that defined an era. Each case, a window into the society that produced it.
Manuel Blanco Romasanta
Spain's first documented serial killer claimed to be a werewolf. The court had to decide between popular superstition and the nascent science of forensic psychiatry.
Read the case → Case II · Madrid, 1888The Fuencarral Street Crime
A murdered widow, a convicted maid and an acquitted son. Spain's first great media trial, with all of Madrid divided between competing camps.
Read the case → Case III · London, 1888Jack the Ripper
Five women murdered in Whitechapel. A killer with no name and no face. And the Victorian press inventing the most famous criminal myth in modern history.
Read the case → Case IV · Wiltshire, 1860Constance Kent
A child murdered inside his own home. A half-sister who confessed five years later. And the detective who ruined his reputation for looking where he was not supposed to.
Read the case → Case V · Barcelona, 1912Enriqueta Martí, the Vampire of Raval
A kidnapped child. A poor neighbourhood. A press hungry for monsters. The Barcelona that needed someone to blame for its own misery.
Read the case → Case VI · Glasgow, 1857Madeleine Smith
Two hundred and fifty love letters, a bottle of arsenic and a dead lover. The trial that scandalised Scotland ended with the famous verdict of "not proven."
Read the case → Case VII · Suffolk, 1827Maria Marten and the Red Barn
A dream that led to the body. A killer who advertised for a wife. And two hundred thousand people visiting the crime scene within a year.
Read the case → Case VIII · Edinburgh, 1828Burke and Hare
Sixteen people murdered to sell their bodies to science. The case that revealed the link between medical progress, poverty and the trade in human remains.
Read the case → Case IX · London, 1864Franz Müller
Britain's first documented railway murder. The victim, a banker. The killer, pursued to New York. The outcome, a reform of train design across the country.
Read the case →About Criminal Epochs
Criminal Epochs was born from a simple conviction: the great historical crimes are, above all, social documents. They speak not only of the killers. They speak of the cities that produced them, the judicial systems that processed them, the presses that turned them into spectacle, and the victims who were too often reduced to narrative functions.
Every case we publish starts from documentary verification, passes through journalistic rigour, and reaches the reader with the conviction that criminal history, properly told, is one of the most honest ways of understanding the past. And sometimes the present.
No sensationalism here. Only real cases, verified sources and the commitment to telling what happened without unnecessary ornament or gratuitous morbidity.
Carlos S. Montero · Editor · El Archivo Privado