Blocks I and II — 19th and 20th Centuries
Eighteen 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 → Case X · Chicago, 1896H. H. Holmes
Convicted of one murder. The legend gave him two hundred victims and an infernal castle. The real story is darker and more interesting than the myth.
Read the case → Case XI · Spain, 1924The Andalucía Express Crime
Two postal workers murdered in the mail car of the Madrid-Seville express. The case that shocked Spain and ended in public executions under Primo de Rivera's dictatorship.
Read the case → Case XII · Spain, 1910–1926The Crime of Cuenca
José María Grimaldos disappeared in 1910. Two men were tortured and convicted of his murder. In 1926 he turned up alive. Spain's greatest contemporary judicial error.
Read the case → Case XIII · France, 1921Landru, the Bluebeard of Gambais
Matrimonial ads, ninety aliases, an accountant's notebook and eleven absences. The man who turned wartime loneliness into a criminal method.
Read the case → Case XIV · United Kingdom, 1910The Crippen Case
A doctor, a cellar, a lover and a telegram. The first criminal pursuit in history aided by wireless telegraphy. The domestic crime caught by modernity.
Read the case → Case XIV · United Kingdom, 1910The Crippen Case
Hanged in 1910 for murdering his wife. Proclaimed his innocence to the end. A century later, DNA showed the cellar remains were not Cora Crippen's. They were not even female.
Read the case → Case XV · France, 1933Violette Nozière
Sentenced to death in 1934 for poisoning her parents. She accused her father of incest. The press made her a monster. The Surrealists made her a symbol. Justice, twenty-nine years later, rehabilitated her.
Read the case → Case XVI · USA, 1920–1927Sacco and Vanzetti
Two Italian immigrant anarchists convicted of double murder in Massachusetts. Executed in 1927. Half a century later, Massachusetts acknowledged the trial had not been fair.
Read the case → Case XVII · Russia, 1916Rasputin
Monarchist nobles murdered the Siberian mystic believing they were saving Tsarism. Two months later the Empire collapsed. The political murder that proved killing a symbol does not cure the disease.
Read the case → Case XVIII · USA, 1932The Lindbergh Case
The kidnapping of America's most famous aviator's son changed federal law, strengthened the FBI and showed how fame turns private grief into national spectacle.
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