Crime and punishment - Getty Images

Crime and punishment

A woman dressed in a grey top and a green and orange bandana holds a black and white photograph of a young man against her chin. She stands in front of a plain, yellow wall

The Srebrenica massacre: the worst atrocity committed on European soil since the Second World War

Illustration of a demon breathing fire with springs on his shoes jumping and scaring two women

Spring-Heeled Jack: the fire-breathing phantom that terrorised Victorian England

A fairy in a green dress balances on the palm of a hand with a yellow background

Don’t fear the fairies – but do allow a little enchantment into your life

Scotland's season of the witch

Illustration of soldiers in medieval armour killing peasant women

Why it was more dangerous to steal a loaf of bread than commit murder in medieval England

The "outwardly respectable" man who had a body in his basement: how the Dr Crippen case shocked Britain

Tudor angels of death: the 16th-century obsession with female killers

Gilles de Rais, accused of murdering at least 140 children in 15th-century France

Was Gilles de Rais really history’s first recorded serial killer?

Ruth Ellis and her friend Desmond Cussen

The true story of Ruth Ellis and the hanging that rocked a nation

The Forty Elephants gang with an inset of Diamond Annie

Who were the real Forty Elephants? The true story of Mary Carr and the all-woman crime gang

An illustration of the future King Edward VI of England with his whipping boy (Photo by Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo)

“Literally whipped”: the boys who took the beatings meant for royal bottoms

John F Kennedy in 1960 (left) and would-be assassin Richard Pavlick

The JFK assassination attempt you’ve never heard of

Lilian Lenton, collage by Rachel Dickens

Lilian Lenton, the 'Elusive Pimpernel': the courageous and daring suffragette who took direct action

How to build a radical: what the Gunpowder Plot can teach us about extremism today

Supplies train for the Russian transported during deportation to Siberia.

Nazino was Stalin’s worst labour gulag. Its inmates knew it by another name: Cannibal Island

A portrait of William 'Buffalo Bill' Cody standing in front of his saddle, holding a rifle behind his back.

13 famous cowboys and gunslingers from the history of the American Wild West

Portrait of Coch Bach y Bala

Who was ‘The Welsh Houdini’?Coch Bach y Bala, the legendary prison escape artist

How convict labour forged empires

Lord Lucan and his wife Veronica, shortly after becoming engaged in 1963. It is thought that Lady Lucan was the intended target of the attack in 1974 (Photo by Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Murder and vanishing without a trace: the mysterious case of Lord Lucan

The princes in the Tower

Have we finally unmasked the killer of the Princes in the Tower?

The murders at Rillington Place: postwar London's grisliest crimes

A Victorian cult: inside the strange world of the Agapemone

An 1872 illustration from the weekly newspaper Days’ Doings shows a shoplifter being apprehended (Photo by Look and Learn/Rosenberg Collection/Bridgeman Images)

Lady swindlers: 6 women who turned to lives of crime and became queens of the underworld

The school for girls imprisoned at Tothill Fields in the late 1850s. A dedicated schoolmistress was employed to teach that institution’s large female population; in other prisons, the matron took lessons. (Engraving from Chronicle, via Alamy)

Reading, writing and retribution: inside Victorian prison schools

Lord Lucan: the vanishing earl

“Impaled on a stake and left to die”: crime, punishment and law enforcement in ancient Egypt

Police chase demonstrators during the 1936 battle of Cable Street

When Mosley's fascists took on East End London and lost: the Battle of Cable Street explained

Victorian women detectives

English prime minister Spencer Perceval being assassinated by bankrupt businessman John Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons

Why was Spencer Perceval assassinated? Inside the killing of a Georgian prime minister

Video podcastThe Iranian embassy siege: an SAS hostage drama in London