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Nude inspections, thigh flashers and fights to the death: 15 things you need to know about the Spartans
In our minds, Sparta has become a near-mythical Greek city-state populated by the tough and single-minded ancient predecessors of today’s special forces troops. But as historian Andrew Bayliss outlines, its supposedly hyper-militarised society was stranger and more complex than its reputation suggests
1. The ‘Spartans’ were really called the homoioi Although we know the citizens of the ancient Greek city of Sparta as the ‘Spartans’, they usually called themselves the homoioi. This can be translated as ‘equals’ or ‘similars’. As for outsiders, they usually called the Spartans ‘the Lacedaemonians’. This was because the city-state of Sparta – what the ancient Greeks called a polis – was actually called ‘Lacedaemon’. 2. All Spartan citizens were rich Although ancient sources often describe their lifestyle as austere, Spartan citizens were all wealthy men. Every citizen was required to join a mess group, where he dined each night. To keep his place, he had to supply large monthly contributions of foodstuffs from his estates: roughly 45kg of barley, 3kg of cheese, 1.5kg of figs, a small amount of pork and 37 litres of wine. Modern scholars have calculated that each Spartiate would have needed to own at least 15 hectares of land to meet his mess contributions. Such large holdings would have made them all properly wealthy by ancient Greek standards. 3. They wore their hair long – and sported striking red cloaks To reflect their relative equality as homoioi, Spartan citizens adopted a uniform appearance, keeping their hair long and dressing in red cloaks and tunics. Ancient sources claimed the Spartans’ long hair was designed to make handsome men more attractive and ugly men more frightening. Their red cloaks helped conceal bloodstains in combat. In fact, this appearance was designed to project citizens’ gentlemanly status. This is because the ancient Greeks thought it was impossible for any man with long hair to perform manual labour, while producing the red dye for cloaks was incredibly laborious, a process that required the harvesting of more than 10,000 murex shellfish to produce just a single gram of dye. 4. This was not a ‘warrior’ society Spartans are often described as ‘warriors’, but they didn’t spend all their time preparing for conflict as professional soldiers would. In fact, not one single surviving ancient Greek source describes the Spartans training for war. Nonetheless, this was a militarised society in that all Spartan citizens were required to serve in the army until the age of 60. In addition, throughout their lives citizens were expected to share in communal activities, with citizens exercising and hunting together during the day. Training in athletics, wrestling and boxing would have kept the Spartans’ bodies strong, while hunting would have been useful in conditioning them to kill with bladed weapons. The Spartans also dined together in their mess clubs each evening. Spartan citizens aged between 20 and 30 slept together in barracks each night. Read more | The Peloponnesian War: Athens fights Sparta for dominance in ancient Greece 5. They were parasites, who profited from slave labour Citizens’ communal lifestyle was based on their ruthless exploitation of tens of thousands of enslaved people known as ‘helots’. These helots outnumbered their Spartan owners by perhaps as many as 10 to one. The primary role of these helot slaves was, as Aristotle bluntly put it, to “farm the land for the benefit of the Spartiates”. By toiling on their masters’ estates in Laconia and Messenia, the helots produced the vast quantities of foodstuffs citizens needed to maintain their status atop society. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/5-BAL487241-8eda65b-e1777535569383.jpg" width="1500" height="996" alt="Three minimally clothed workers lean forward to pull a large wooden beam across open grassland, while a figure in red with a blue head covering stands behind them holding a whip." title="A modern-day illustration depicting a Spartan man whipping his enslaved servants. Known as ‘helots’, they were expected to toil the land to provide foodstuffs for their much richer owners (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> 6. The helots were regularly hunted and subjected to violence Each year, the Spartan authorities declared war on the helots. This meant the slaves could be slaughtered without incurring the religious pollution, or miasma, ancient Greeks believed resulted from an unlawful killing. In addition, helots were forced to wear dog-skin caps and coats. They were given a stipulated number of beatings, regardless of whether they had done anything wrong, to remind them they were slaves. Sometimes, helots were forced to drink large quantities of unmixed wine to show young men what drunkenness was like. At other times, helots were forced to perform ridiculous songs and dances. But from a modern perspective, the most disturbing risk faced by helots was surely the krypteia. This was a brutal rite of passage whereby the ‘smartest’ young Spartan adults were sent into the countryside armed with a knife and ordered to eliminate the strongest of the helots. 7. They (likely) had the world’s first compulsory state-run education system Choosing the ‘smartest’ of the young adult Spartans would have been easy for the authorities. This was because every single Spartan citizen had been tried and tested by the city’s compulsory and brutal upbringing, which lasted from age seven to 30. A state official known as the paidonomos or ‘boyherder’ oversaw this brutal regime. He had full authority to assemble the boys and punish them as he saw fit. To assist him in his boyherding, the paidonomos was given a staff of young adults called the ‘whip-bearers’. If neither the paidonomos nor the whip-bearers were around, any free Spartan adult would oversee the activities of the boys. The Athenian writer Xenophon stated bluntly that: “Spartan boys are never without someone in charge of them.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/6-GettyImages-916072764-0bb1562-e1777535652242.jpg" width="1498" height="1000" alt="Several people in draped ancient garments sit, stand, or recline around a central figure seated on an elevated chair within a classical hall of tall columns and stonework, with a dog resting nearby." title="Every citizen was tried and tested in a compulsory – and brutal – coaching system. This 1880s woodcut imagines a Spartan boy being shown a helot forced to drink unmixed wine (Image by Getty Images)" /> 8. Pederasty was a key part of life Youths in training were mentored by an older male, who was not one of the officials or a relative. But this was not mentoring in the modern sense. What we are talking about here is the ancient Greek practice of ‘pederasty’, a homoerotic relationship between a pubescent boy and an adult male. The mentor was meant to choose his protégé for his character rather than his looks. However, there is considerable dispute amongst sources about whether these Spartan partnerships were sexual. Xenophon insisted these pederastic unions were chaste, and that Spartans actually considered sexual molestation of boys as unacceptable as incest. But the Athenian comic playwright Aristophanes regularly mocked the Spartans for their sexual interest in boys. For his part, Plato overtly rejected Sparta as a model for his ideal state – where pederasty was explicitly forbidden – because when it came to homoerotic affairs, the Spartans were “slaves to pleasure”. Read more | Were the Amazons just a “male fantasy”? Here’s the truth behind the ancient world’s warrior women 9. Fat-shaming was socially acceptable The food intake of Spartan boys was strictly limited. The Athenian writer Xenophon says the boys were provided with just enough food for them not to become “fat or sluggish”, but meagre enough for them to learn how to work hard without eating and make their rations last longer. It was not just Spartan boys who were required to stay slim. The young Spartan men aged 20–30 who lived in barracks were also expected to maintain a healthy physique. Spartan officials reportedly inspected these young men in the nude every 10 days to ensure they had not grown fat. A Spartan named Naucleides, who became “extremely corpulent”, was even made to stand in the middle of the assembly to shame him into changing his ways. 10. Spartan girls were known as ‘thigh-flashers’ Girls participated in sports too, including running, wrestling and jumping. The rationale was that they would grow strong enough to bear sturdy babies. But rather than competing naked like Spartan men and boys, Spartan girls protected their modesty by wearing short tunics. Nonetheless, these tunics exposed the tops of their legs, earning them the nickname ‘thigh-flashers’. Several bronze figurines have been unearthed depicting Spartan girls running or dancing, their short-sleeved tunics hitched to expose their left thigh. Other bronze figurines depicting Spartan girls bare-breasted and wearing only triangular loincloths. These are thought to depict the girls preparing to wrestle. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/13-GettyImages-463895159-e6008a6-e1777535847106.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="In a grassy landscape with hills and a distant mountain, several nude or partially clothed figures interact in the foreground while a group of clothed onlookers stands behind them." title="Young Spartans Exercising by Edgar Degas, c1860. Spartan boys would train in the nude, while girls wore loincloths or short tunics to cover up (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> 11. Spartan women developed a reputation for telling men what to do No fewer than 40 sayings by Spartan women were recorded in antiquity, most of which are judgments by Spartan mothers on how their sons fared in combat. When one Spartan mother handed her son his shield, she told him bluntly, “Your father kept this safe for you, so either keep this safe or don’t exist.” One particularly frightening Spartan mother went so far as to hitch up her dress to expose herself to her cowardly sons, before inviting them to “crawl back in” her womb. When another Spartan lad made the mistake of telling his mother that everyone in his company had been killed, she yelled, “So they sent you to announce the bad news to us?” She then bashed his brains in with a broken roof tile. 12. Aristotle deemed Sparta a gynaecocracy Sparta was almost unparalleled in the pre-modern world as a city-state where women were permitted to own land. By the fourth century BC, women owned as much as 40 per cent of all the land in Sparta. The philosopher Aristotle complained that owning so much land allowed Spartan women to dominate their husbands, sons and brothers, effectively turning Sparta into a ‘gynaecocracy’ – a state where women held power. The Spartan queen Gorgo would likely have agreed. When asked by an Athenian woman why Spartan women were the only ones who could rule men, Gorgo replied, “Because we are the only ones who give birth to men.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/12-Jean-Jacques-FrancoisLeBarbier-ASpartanWomanGivingaShieldtoHerSon-dffa38b-e1777535959262.jpg" width="619" height="413" alt="A seated woman in flowing garments gestures toward a helmeted man holding a round shield, spear, and sword, while two unclothed children stand close to him and a dog looks up at the group in a classical domestic setting." title="A Spartan woman gives a shield to her son in this 19th century painting. Women held a lot of power in Spartan society – an unfamiliar ‘gynaecocracy’ which bothered Aristotle" /> 13. They doubled down to create a dyarchy In truth, Sparta was not really ruled by women, it was ruled by kings. And in fact, Sparta was unique in having two kings from two separate royal houses – the Agiads and Eurypontids – reigning jointly. Sparta was not a monarchy, but a dyarchy. The Spartans claimed this peculiar arrangement dated back to the 11th century BC when their first king, Aristodemus, died before his wife gave birth to twin sons, Eurysthenes and Procles. Because the mother refused to reveal which one was the eldest son, the Spartans made them both kings. Read more | Think you know what an ancient Roman gladiator looked like? The reality will make you think again 14. But the real powerbrokers were officials known as ephors The power of the Spartan kings was counterbalanced by five annually elected officials known as ephors (literally ‘overseers’). The ephors began each year by ordering Spartan citizens to ‘cut’ their moustaches and obey the laws. The authority the ephors held was such that they were the only Spartan citizens not required to rise when one of the kings approached. The ephors also exchanged monthly oaths with the kings. The royals swore they would “reign according to the established laws of the state”, while the ephors responded, “While you abide by your oath, we will keep the kingship unshaken.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/15-SpartaEphorenWMH11-1861-62S48LLoeffler-d27e587-e1777536328758.jpg" width="619" height="413" alt="Five seated figures in ancient Greek‑style robes hold long staffs and face one another as if debating, set against tall architectural columns." title="An 1862 imagining of the ephors, the most powerful officials in Sparta. They managed all citizens – including the kings" /> 15. Spartans didn’t always fight to the death Famously, when King Leonidas learned that he and his men were going to be surrounded by the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, he sent the other Greeks away but ordered his 300 Spartans to remain at their posts. Leonidas and his men fought to the death. After the battle, an epigram was set up to commemorate their sacrifice: “Stranger, go tell the Spartans that here, obedient to their orders, we lie.” It would be natural, then, to think that Spartan law required Spartans to win or die trying. But there were actually numerous battles and skirmishes when the Spartans made tactical withdrawals or ran away. Sometimes, they even surrendered. When 120 Spartan citizens who were marooned on the island of Sphacteria near Pylos gave themselves up to the Athenians in 425 BC, the Athenians displayed the Spartans’ shields in the ‘Painted Stoa’, a covered walkway that housed artworks and war booty. Perhaps pointedly, the shields were situated close to a painting showing the Athenian general Miltiades defeating the Persians at the battle of Marathon in 490 BC. Today, you can see one of those captured Spartan shields in the Agora Museum in Athens. Andrew Bayliss is a classicist at the University of Birmingham. His latest book is Sparta: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower (Profile Books, 2025)
A history of the world in 7 faces: from Tutankhamun to the Virgin Mary
From a Stone Age Venus and an Egyptian death mask to an unflinchingly challenging 21st-century sculpture, Fay Bound-Alberti introduces seven depictions of the face that track humanity’s ever-evolving relationship with creativity, hierarchy and self-image
1. The art of darkness This enigmatic head is a 25,000-year-old testament to the innate urge to capture the essence of a person in art In 1894, an archaeologist called Édouard Piette walked into a cave in the village of Brassempouy in south-west France and came face-to-face with humanity’s distant past. Lying in the darkness was a fragment of mammoth-ivory carved to depict a head. That head was tiny – so small that it could nestle in the palm of Piette’s hand – and yet it had survived for 25,000 years, carved by an artist deep in the Palaeolithic period. Piette couldn’t have been aware of it at the time, but he had just discovered one of the earliest known representations of a human face in art. That representation is both awe-inspiring – and deeply enigmatic. It would soon be known as ‘The Venus of Brassempouy’ – there were other Venuses in the same cave, with those rounded hips and breasts associated with fertility symbols – and yet we can’t even be sure if it depicts a woman. Despite these uncertainties, the fact that this rare and portable object exists at all tells us that it was important for the artist to capture something of the essence of a person – and with a level of detail that is unusual for a Venus figurine. That depth of detail is most evident in the intricate, chequerboard-patterned hair – possibly a wig or hood – from which the object derives its nickname, ‘La Dame à La Capuche’ (Lady with the Hood). The face, by comparison, is a blank canvas. It has a prominent forehead, nose and brow, but it lacks a mouth. Was this artistic decision influenced by convention? Religion? Personal style? Time? We do not know. What we do know is that the Venus of Brassempouy stands as a symbol of how representations of the face have evolved over 25,000 years. Today, we take it for granted that our face represents us – a phenomenon I have termed ‘facehood’. It is marked on our passports and unlocks our mobiles; it is captured in photographs countless times over our lifetimes. It has become a shorthand for a unique, individual person in a way that simply wasn’t the case with the Venus of Brassempouy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/dreamstimel48080984-74bcdd9-e1777286681457.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The gold funerary mask of Tutankhamun with blue‑striped headdress, inlaid eyes, and royal cobra and vulture emblems." title="Tutankhamun’s golden burial mask presents an idealised, godlike face symbolising divine transformation in the afterlife (Image by Dreamstime)" /> 2. From death to deity Tutankhamun’s dazzling mask was designed to transform a mortal man into a god In ancient Egypt, memorialising people did not mean remembering what they looked like. It was wealth, power and similarity to the gods that mattered. For proof, look no further than one of the world’s most recognisable objects: Tutankhamun’s golden burial mask. Revealed in 1925 by British archaeologist Howard Carter, three years after he discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, this dazzling artefact measures 54cm high – a fit for an average adult’s head. Weighing over 10kg, the mask is made of solid gold, with intricate inlays of lapis lazuli and carnelian. Yet the most intriguing feature is its 2.5kg golden beard. That beard, which is long and plaited, extends down from the chin with a formal, geometric appearance and rectangular shape. Look at the mask in profile and you’ll see that it is not intended to look naturalistic; the beard is held in place with a band beneath the chin – as it would have been in a ceremony. Tutankhamun died c1323 BC, aged just 18 or 19 – too young to grow such a beard. This – coupled with the fact that the mask has pierced earlobes, the preserve of women and children – has led some Egyptologists to argue that it was never intended to be used by Tutankhamun at all. It was, they argue, designed for his stepmother, Nefertiti. Yet for ancient Egyptians, faces had symbolic rather than literal, gendered meanings. Eyes, for instance, had mystical connotations – as illustrated by the ‘Eye of Horus’ and the ‘Eye of Ra’ (representing wellbeing, healing and protection). Both male and female rulers wore fake beards in ancient Egyptian ceremonies and art – to display divine power and royal authority. The principle was practical, but the practice was genderless. Hence Tutankhamun’s mask resembles the gods Osiris and Ra, whose bodies were made of gold and lapis lazuli. An inscription on the mask reads: “Your forehead is Anubis, your right eye is the night boat [of Ra], your left eye is the day boat, your eyebrows are in the company of nine gods.” The mask was intended to be seen by the gods, not by humans. Such images were theological objects that transformed a corpse into a deity. Read more | Howard Carter's discovery of Tutankhamun: was the tomb really cursed? 3. Age before beauty The Romans believed that wisdom – and, therefore, fitness to rule – was etched in the lines of the face We do not know the identity of the artist, or indeed the subject, of this ‘Head of a Roman Patrician’. So what do we see when we look at it? We might conclude, from the richness of the drapery, that this was someone important. After all, plebs and slaves were not sculpted in marble. He is a serious man, with a poker-straight posture and a solemn expression, whose face and neck are wizened by age. The skin on his forehead and balding brow is deeply lined by years of thinking – and, perhaps, by responsibility. Earlier scholars suggested that the sitter was Cato the Censor, the famously austere Republican statesman. Yet we should beware making the mistake of thinking the sculptor aimed at realism, or likeness, as we understand it. This bust is an example of ‘verism’, a style of Roman portraiture that sought symbolic rather than literal truth. Roman sculptors and philosophers followed the rules of physiognomy that meant character was revealed in the lines and structure of the face. Why? Because Romans needed a visual language that demonstrated political legitimacy in a system where power was contested. In later centuries it would be important for monarchs to have individually recognisable portraits for propaganda and coinage. But their rule was assured by blood or war. In the Republic of Rome, rulers showed their fitness in the experience, wisdom and expertise etched on their faces. Women – wives and daughters of those rulers – were not depicted as aged and wise, because female value, then as now, was too often based on beauty, not intellect. Men could also be subject to gendered idealism. Since a Republican politician often needed to embody not only the wisdom and experience of age, but also the physical prowess of a warrior, some sculptural portraits had wizened faces but youthful, vigorous bodies. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-463895209-ee1b31f-e1777286825978.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A seated Virgin Mary holding the Christ Child, surrounded by haloed saints and angels against a gold architectural backdrop." title="The medieval church developed a visual code that the entire population could recognise, as exemplified by Giotto’s Madonna Enthroned (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. Why the long face? In the Middle Ages, religious portraiture relied on symbolism rather than realism to spread the word of God Patricians symbolising leadership in ancient Rome were concerned principally with their peers – the literate elite who read character in wrinkles. The medieval church faced a different problem: it needed to communicate to vast populations, most of them illiterate, many of them poor, none of them experts at what faces meant. So the church developed a visual language of symbols in portraiture. These symbols told viewers instantly who Jesus and the saints were, as well as religious martyrs, local landowners and wealthy donors who invested in the church fabric. Giotto’s Madonna Enthroned is one of the most famous examples of a symbolically laden portrait. Here, the Virgin Mary’s image lacks the emotionality and fleshiness of later artworks such as Raphael’s Madonna del Granduca (c1506–07). Painted around 1310, Giotto’s work was influenced by Byzantine tradition, which dominated Italian art, though he began introducing more naturalism. Gold leaf, bright colours, formal poses and slender, otherworldly faces were what people expected from divine images. What made Mary instantly recognisable were her symbols: the dark blue mantel, the white headscarf, the Christ child on her lap, the throne, the surrounding saints with their haloes and attributes, the gold trim and background. She might also be shown with a crown of 12 stars, roses, rosary beads and a heart pierced by a sword. In a world before consumer capitalism, bureaucracy and mass urbanisation, personal portraiture that showed an ordinary person simply wasn’t necessary. Read more | Medieval family planning: meet the strong-willed women who redefined motherhood in the Middle Ages 5. The man in the mirror By the 17th century, symbolism was being swept aside by portraits that sought to reveal the unvarnished truth In 1659, the Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn sat before a mirror to capture his reflection. Unlike the Roman patrician, Giotto’s Madonna – or indeed Hans Holbein the Younger’s portraits of Henry VIII a century earlier – there is nothing idealised about Rembrandt’s self-portrait. What he produced was unflinchingly realistic. Rembrandt wears a dark coat and a black beret, and stares out from a dark, featureless canvas. Nothing distracts from the face, the centre of emotion, humanity and the self, with a posture and expression that reveals emotion in the creases round the mouth and eyes. His skin is weathered, his features irregular, his nose is prominent, his jowls sagging. This is a man who has suffered – Rembrandt was care-worn from a recent bankruptcy. His eyes meet ours, offering an invitation to connect. Unlike earlier self-portraits – Rembrandt created almost 100 during his lifetime – there are no elaborate symbols on display here: no artist’s palette, no jewels signalling status, no books to indicate learning or hourglass to warn of time’s passing. Self-portraits of his era reflect the fact that the status of the artist was becoming more important, as well as the idea of interiority and psychological individualism. Rembrandt’s portrait is an archetype of modern portraiture – it betrays a feeling face. We can see what he looked like as a specific, unique person, and the same face ageing across different self-portraits. In medieval portraits, faces had been more stylised and generic, and painters often re-used faces, because they were not the focal point of the painting. With its radical approach to symbols, identity and the face, the Renaissance changed all that. From now on, artists would seek to portray their subjects as distinctly individual and recognisable. Portraiture, then, did not only reflect a growing interest in the face, but also encouraged and perpetuated it – much as photographic portraits did in the 19th century. 6. What lies beneath Photography forced artists to look beyond the skin to the sitter’s core, with often unsettling results This Head of a Woman was crafted in 1909 by the great Spanish artist Pablo Picasso. It is modelled on Fernande Olivier, an artist in her own right. Olivier is usually credited as Picasso’s muse, yet flattery was clearly not a consideration in this particular portrayal of her. Picasso’s ‘Head’ is roughly constructed, with no attempt at realism. But why? To answer that question, we need to consider the dramatic technological changes that had convulsed the art world between the ages of Rembrandt and Picasso. When Rembrandt plied his trade, artists could make a good living. Their success came from their ability to capture some essential truth about appearance – to reproduce the world as it really was. But between the 1840s and the 1870s, with the invention and popularisation of photography, everything changed. Once a camera could capture likeness with mechanical precision, the project of realistic portraiture became obsolete. If a camera could do in a few minutes what took a painter months, what was the job of the artist? For artists such as Picasso, the answer lay in achieving in their paintings what a photograph could not: penetrating the core of a person to capture what the mind feels. Picasso’s Cubist work embodies this approach. For all the head’s lack of realism, skill is not an issue here. Picasso was accomplished at realism in painting and sculpture. Rather, the focus was different. The face was now a problem to be solved and understood – a structural puzzle, rather than an object to be copied. For artists that followed, such as Francis Bacon and the surrealists, the artist’s job was to ferret out what could only be discovered through their special insight. In such hands, and increasingly after the crisis of confidence caused by the First World War, the portrait was a tool for psychological investigation rather than social documentation. Read more | Did he photograph the ghost of a president? Meet the scheming Victorian who exploited a grieving America <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-489164501-21e92a2-e1777287214373.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large white sphinx-like sculpture with human features inside a vast industrial hall, with people standing nearby for scale." title="Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby features a towering sugar sphinx that confronts racism, exploitation and the politics of visibility (Image by Getty Images)" /> 7. Sweet scents and rotting flesh This installation serves as a reminder that, over the history of portraiture, not all faces have been equal Today, the question is less how faces are portrayed, but rather, whose faces. For centuries, the canon of western portraiture has, for the most part, not included black people. And where they were included, it was as servants, slaves, exoticised presences in paintings made by, and for, white subjects. There are exceptions: Juan de Pareja, enslaved and painted by Velázquez; Frederick Douglass, photographed repeatedly after achieving freedom. But these instances are rare. For most of history, black people have appeared as exhibits, in the margins, in the background, or not at all. However, in the 21st century artists such as Kara Walker have begun to subvert Victorian artistic styles, such as the silhouette – a medium historically associated with genteel portraiture – to critique the racist depictions of black faces found in art and culture, from slavery advertisements to blackface. In 2014, Walker created A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, a monumental installation in the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. At the centre of that artwork stands a sphinx coated with 8 tonnes of sugar – the commodity that built American wealth on the backs of slaves. The face of the statue invokes that mammy archetype, Aunt Jemima, while the gaze stares straight ahead, as impassively as the Great Sphinx of Giza, on which it is modelled. But the body is exposed and sexualised, as black women’s bodies have been in history. Around the sphinx are smaller figures: molasses-covered children, whose bodies are deteriorating, some with missing limbs and empty eye sockets. The sweet smell of sugar gives way to the acrid stench of rotting flesh. What is beneath the surface here is not some secret interiority – as was the case for Bacon or Picasso – but the question of who is being looked at, and who is doing the looking. It is the nature of artistic production and consumption itself that takes centre stage. Fay Bound-Alberti is professor of modern history, and director of Interface at King’s College London. Her new book, The Face: A Cultural History, was published by Allen Lane in February This article was first published in the April 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Retracing Eleanor of Castile's final journey
Alice Loxton retraces Eleanor of Castile’s 200-mile funerary journey, uncovering the life, legacy, and love story of the medieval queen
At the end of the 13th century, England was gripped by grief as news of the queen's death shook the nation. Eleanor of Castile's funeral procession from Lincoln to London would become one of the most remarkable journeys in medieval English history – and would also be immortalised in stone through the famous Eleanor Crosses. More than seven centuries later, Alice Loxton has retraced that historic route on foot – and, in her latest book, Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England's Lost Queen, she explores the landscapes that connect us to this past. Emily Briffett caught up with Alice to find out more about how 12 stone crosses act as enduring testaments to royal love – and the history that we can uncover for ourselves by simply stepping outside.
What are history's biggest misconceptions? 9 experts reveal what we get wrong about the past
Our team of historians, broadcasters and authors take aim at the most egregious fallacies about the past
Ancient Athenian democracy was democratic There’s plenty to criticise about that ancient approach We wouldn’t recognise the system practised in ancient Athens as democracy in the sense we understand it today. Women did not have the vote, and the entire society depended on a massive slave population to be able to function. Yet in other ways it was also more democratic than our democracies today. Every (male) citizen took an active role in governing the city, and every major decision was taken by a vote involving every citizen who attended. An even more egregious misconception is the idea there is an unbroken link between ancient and modern democracy. Athenian democracy lasted for only around 200 years; since then, through most of the rest of antiquity, the Middle Ages and more modern historical periods, democracy has not been practised. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1155876683wbebready-ecda02a-e1775040845111.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An illustration of an ancient Greek orator standing on a raised platform, wearing a robe and laurel wreath, gesturing toward a crowd of citizens and soldiers gathered below. Classical buildings and hills appear in the background" title="Demosthenes, a defender of Athenian democracy in the fourth century BC, pictured in a c1880s illustration (Image by Getty Images)" /> In more recent times, Athenian democracy has been held up as a system to avoid rather than imitate. During debates between the founding fathers about the Constitution of the United States in the 1780s, many argued that “even if every Athenian had been a Socrates [ie very intelligent], Athenian democracy would have been little more than mob rule”. It is only very recently that we have come (again) to admire Athenian democracy, and want to link our own system of government to that ancient ideal. Michael Scott, professor in classics and ancient history at the University of Warwick Most people in the past had much shorter lifespans Many people died very young – but many others lived long lives On paper, this seems to be true: today, the average global life expectancy is around 72, whereas for much of the medieval and early modern periods the figure hovered around 30–35. You might think, then, that modern medicine, public health initiatives and better nutrition have all combined to help us live longer than our ancestors. In fact, though there has been a significant improvement in living conditions, the idea that there has been a corresponding increase in lifespan over the centuries is incorrect. The overall life expectancy has risen simply because more of us are living to older ages. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1691539942wbebready-f6db793-e1775040973181.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A seated adult in dark clothing cradles a young child dressed in pale yellow, who leans against them as if unwell. A bowl and spoon sit on a nearby table, with a chair draped in green fabric to the right." title="A 17th-century Dutch painting depicts a mother with her sick child. Though infant mortality was high in pre-modern eras, many people who survived childhood lived long lives (Image by Getty Images)" /> It’s important to understand the difference between life expectancy and lifespan. The former is an average – so, for example, if two people are born on the same day and one lives to the age of 80 but the other gets ill and dies before their first birthday, their average life expectancy is 40. Although that is statistically correct, we should be wary of drawing conclusions about typical lifespans. Using such figures doesn’t tell us that all (or even most) people in the past lived shorter lives. For most of the medieval and early modern periods, infant mortality was high due to the prevalence of disease, the lack of vaccines and medical knowledge, poor hygiene and sanitation, and complications from childbirth. But if you made it through childhood, you had a fair chance of living for almost as long as the average person today. There are plenty of historical examples of people living well into their seventies, eighties and beyond. Elizabeth I was in her 70th year when she died, and the Roman author and scientist Pliny the Elder recorded one musician who enjoyed good health until his death at the age of 105. Tracy Borman, author, historian and broadcaster Every war ends at a single moment The consequences of conflict can drag on for years The greatest historical misconception is that wars come to an end neatly, on a specific date, with the signing of an armistice or surrender agreement. No war in history has ever ended happily-ever-after with a sudden return to normality. The consequences of war – famine, displacement, lawlessness and political violence – often last longer than the conflict itself. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-514079642wbebready-6a2479b-e1775041054396.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="“A group of people gather with copies of The Washington Times, holding up front pages with bold headlines such as ‘GERMANY SURRENDERS’ and ‘WAR IS OVER,’ reacting to news of the First World War’s end" title="Jubilant Americans celebrate German defeat in 1918. As Keith Lowe points out, though, the end of a world war has never resulted in a world fully at peace (Image by Getty Images)" /> The First World War is a perfect example. In our popular imagination, especially in the west, it came to an abrupt end on 11 November 1918. But the guns did not fall silent for long. Popular revolutions soon broke out in Germany, Austria, Hungary and many other places. Turkey was consumed by ethnic and religious violence, and vast battles took place between Poland, Ukraine and the new Soviet Union. Such events created an atmosphere of chaos that lasted well into the 1920s. The same thing happened after the Second World War. Ceasefires in 1945 did not bring immediate peace. Instead, armed groups rushed to fill the power vacuum left by the defeat of Germany and Japan. Political violence became the norm, and full-blown civil wars erupted in Greece, Poland, China and Indonesia, among other places. That period of chaos lasted at least until the end of the 1940s. War is sometimes unavoidable. But if we had a better historical understanding of the long-term consequences, perhaps we would prepare a little better for the period of instability that always comes afterwards. And maybe we would be less eager to embark on war in the first place. Keith Lowe, author of The Fear and the Freedom: How the Second World War Changed Us (Viking, 2017) Read more | Is the Eastern Front the forgotten theatre of World War One? History is written by the victors Voices of the defeated often resonate the loudest “History will be kind to me,” said Winston Churchill, “for I intend to write it.” Or such, at least, is the popular paraphrase of a line that Churchill trotted out on numerous occasions, always in jest. In reality, as he must have appreciated, no one gets to dictate how they are viewed by posterity. Nevertheless, the notion that ‘history is written by the victors’ is a persistent one. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1175727472wbebready-4a19229-e1775041240806.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white engraving showing a hooded, monk‑like figure offering a bowl and cross to an injured man supported by another. A fourth man in a helmet and holding a spear watches beside a forest stream and small waterfall" title="Welsh leader Llywelyn ap Gruffudd dies, 1282 (Image by Getty Images)" /> Consider a few counter-examples from the broad sweep of British history. Our only narrative source for Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions is Gildas, a British monk lamenting the arrival of the invaders. Similarly, when the Vikings were ravaging Europe in the ninth century, the tale of their bloody progress was recorded by their monastic victims. Even the Normans, who produced an abundance of propaganda to justify their conquest of England in 1066, did not get to control the narrative. One of the most insightful portraits of William the Conqueror is the obituary of him penned by an English monk. The king, we are told, “was stern beyond measure to those who opposed his will… In his time people suffered grievous oppression and manifold injuries.” When Edward I conquered Wales in the late 13th century, no one (insofar as we know) celebrated his victory in verse, but Welsh poets did lament the passing of his vanquished opponent, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd. The voices of the defeated are often the ones that resonate the loudest across the centuries. Marc Morris, medieval historian, writer and broadcaster Vikings drank from their enemies’ skulls Those horned helmets are hooey, too Lurid myths swirl around the Vikings: that they wore horned helmets, drank from the skulls of vanquished foes, and tortured and dispatched enemies by splaying their ribs in the gruesome ‘blood eagle’. It’s all nonsense. We can blame the 19th century for the horned helmets. When translations of the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas were published, that headwear started to sneak into the illustrations. Wagner didn’t help. In 1876, for the first performances of his Ring cycle, costume designer Carl Doepler decided that horned helmets would be just the thing. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-542363271wbebready-344c1a7-e1775041336198.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph of three people dressed in Viking‑style outfits, wearing horned helmets and fur garments, each holding a spear and a decorated round shield" title="Warriors don horned helmets in a Wagner opera (Image by Getty Images)" /> The idea of drinking from the skulls of enemies comes from a misreading of an Old Norse verse. That’s easily done, because the Norse wrote fiendishly complicated poetry that was deliberately difficult to unpick. One ode, Krákumál (‘The Lay of Kraka’), features a line about heroes drinking from the “curved branches of skulls”. It’s actually a poetic reference to animal horns, but 17th-century antiquarian Ole Worm translated it as heroes quaffing “from the skulls of those they had killed”. The ‘blood eagle’ is trickier to unpick, but again Old Norse poetry might be the source. The sons of Ragnar Lodbrok (‘Hairy-Breeches’), it was written, murdered the king of Northumbria by cutting his ribs from his spine and drawing out his lungs so that they looked like gory wings. It has been argued that this is a misunderstanding rooted in knottily obscure Old Norse verse, and that no such form of torture was ever perpetrated. The moral of the story? If in doubt, blame poets and costume designers. Eleanor Barraclough, historian, broadcaster and author of Embers of the Hands (Profile, 2024) Pompeii was ‘frozen in time’ Most citizens of the Roman town escaped a violent volcanic demise The eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 didn’t happen in an instant. Nor was Pompeii buried in one swift sweep by lava. In fact, there was no lava at all. On the morning of the eruption, a thin curl of smoke rose from Vesuvius. By midday, the volcano had erupted, sending a vast column of smoke, ash and pumice 16 miles into the sky. Pumice rained onto the surrounding towns, and over the next few hours many of their inhabitants started to flee. Sometime after 7pm, the column – now too heavy to support itself – collapsed. This sent a scorching gush of pumice, gas and ash known as a pyroclastic flow hurtling towards Herculaneum. The city was buried beneath 20 metres of volcanic material. There were no survivors. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-918985082wbebready-dc62e0f-e1775041410267.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two plaster casts of human bodies lie on a bed of light gravel, one smaller figure close beside a larger one, set against a stone wall" title="Casts of a mother and child lie in the ruins of Pompeii – two of an estimated 2,000 victims there (Image by Getty Images)" /> It wasn’t until 6.30am the following day that the first pyroclastic surge reached Pompeii’s northern walls, sweeping about 200 metres into the city before losing momentum. Then, between 7.30 and 8am, the column above Vesuvius collapsed again – and Pompeii was engulfed. Any people remaining in the city were killed instantly, their bodies locked in a rigid ‘boxer pose’ as their muscles contracted rapidly in the fierce heat. Though many died beneath collapsing structures or from suffocation during the first parts of the eruption, most residents escaped before the final lethal surges; the death rate in Pompeii may have been as low as 10 per cent. The eruption didn’t happen in an instant – and the destruction it wreaked took place over the course of some 24 hours. Jess Venner, ancient historian, presenter and author of The Lost Voices of Pompeii Read more | Your ultimate guide to Pompeii, plus 8 fascinating facts about the ancient Roman city The North won the American Civil War White racial democracy was not displaced even after Confederate defeat Southern planters lost much when the American Civil War ended in 1865. The North’s victory in that conflict ensured that the Confederacy would never establish a global empire of cotton, and paved the way for emancipation, citizenship for freed people, and the franchise for black American men. Yet white racial democracy was not displaced, even if the slaveocracy was somewhat diminished. For the remainder of the 19th century, white people mounted deadly battles against black voters, business owners and politicians. They raged against the short-lived experiment in full democracy known as Reconstruction until they struck a deal with the federal government to end it. By 1877, the rest of the country had left black southerners and their few allies to defend democracy alone. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-1329737646wbebready-3d4918b-e1775041532812.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A rectangular metal sign with white lettering on a dark background that reads ‘WAITING ROOM FOR WHITES ONLY BY ORDER OF POLICE DEPT" title="A Jim Crow-era sign enforcing racial segregation at a railway station in the US South (Image by Getty Images)" /> Even more strikingly, white southern elites won a narrative war that changed Americans’ sense of what happened. Historians call it the myth of the ‘Lost Cause’: an understanding shaped in schoolbooks, monuments and popular media that the antebellum South was a place of romance, not horror, and that there was something noble in the region’s last stand. Secessionists were understood as rebels, not traitors, and freed people as, in the words of future president Woodrow Wilson, “dusky children untimely put out of school”. “Whoever tells the best story wins,” it’s been said. The white South told such a compelling story that they secured Jim Crow segregation by 1900, bringing themselves back into the union on their own terms – and at the expense of black Americans. Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University The Victorians were po-faced prudes The queen herself loved to laugh "We are not amused.” These words, supposedly uttered by Queen Victoria, have burdened the 19th century with an unfair reputation for prudishness and humourlessness. Many still characterise the Victorian era as a stiff and solemn time when fun and pleasure were suffocated under a cloud of self-discipline and respectability. This, quite frankly, is nonsense. Fun was a vital part of Victorian culture. Celebrity comedians packed music halls every night, the country’s most popular newspapers brimmed with jokes, and the saying “laugh and grow fat” – the belief that cheerfulness promoted health – was a familiar household phrase. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-3321199wbebready-60feebc-e1775041641325.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person poses in a theatrical costume: a plaid jacket with large buttons and a wide collar, checkered trousers, a tall tilted hat, and exaggerated facial makeup, set against a plain background." title="Music-hall star Dan Leno poses in a ludicrously mismatched outfit c1890s, illustrating Bob Nicholson’s point that “fun was a vital part of Victorian culture” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Victoria herself was no exception. Her diaries are packed with things that made her laugh. At one dinner party, she found herself talking to an elderly admiral who bored her with a story about a damaged ship. Hoping to change the subject, she asked after his sister’s health. Mishearing her, the admiral replied: “She’ll be fine, ma’am, when we turn her over and scrape the barnacles off her bottom.” Victoria shook with uncontrollable laughter until tears ran down her face. It’s true that Victorian humour was less coarse than that of earlier generations. Jokes about sex, farts and other bodily functions fell out of favour – in respectable circles, at least – but puns became a national obsession, and the era’s comedians produced plenty of books, cartoons and one-liners that still have the power to amuse. It’s high time we stopped treating the Victorians as solemn bores, and started laughing with them instead of at them. Bob Nicholson, writer, broadcaster and historian at Edge Hill University Read more | Think the Victorians were prudes? Their filthiest jokes will shock you The Middle Ages were dismal The Renaissance starts here I am continually astonished by how often I hear the medieval period in Europe called the ‘dark ages’. One thousand years of history cannot be dismissed so quickly. This was a period of seminal political developments – of genuine statecraft. It was a period of architectural and visual glories. It was a period of outstandingly rich intellectual achievement. It encompassed the Carolingian Renaissance in the eighth and ninth centuries; the so-called 12th-century Renaissance, another period of great cultural revival and vibrancy; and the late 14th and 15th-century Renaissance. (Indeed, we can blame those latter Renaissance thinkers for the denigration of the earlier Middle Ages: they had a vested interest in making out their immediate predecessors to have been benighted and stupidly dogmatic.) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/GettyImages-526750990webready-9c11477-e1775041787316.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large circular stained‑glass rose window composed of vivid blue, red, and yellow panels depicting religious figures, framed by Gothic stone tracery and pointed arches." title="he c1220 Dean’s Eye rose window of Lincoln Cathedral, a wonder of the Middle Ages (Image by Getty Images)" /> Modern intellectual approaches were developed in the 12th century, pioneered by the scholar Peter Abelard in his dialectical text Sic et non (‘Yes and no’). Abelard also wrote a text called the Ethics, which set the tone for many centuries of ethical thinking; he foregrounded the idea of intention, too, and promoted the dictum ‘Know thyself’. On a more everyday note, the Middle Ages were also not as filthy as often assumed. By the later part of the period, urban authorities in particular were deeply concerned about hygiene, and regulated extensively. The metaphor “standing on the shoulders of giants” is often attributed to Newton, but he was merely quoting a 12th-century philosopher, Bernard of Chartres: “We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.” We should, like Bernard, acknowledge our intellectual debts to our medieval predecessors. Hannah Skoda, associate professor of medieval history at the University of Oxford This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
Famous last words: what did Winston Churchill, Walt Disney and Marie Antoinette say on their deathbeds?
The parting comments of some of history's most famous figures have been recorded for posterity. Here, Jonny Wilkes reveals a selection of the most noteworthy examples – from dying presidents to condemned prisoners
<img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Oscar-WildeGettyImages-2207162542-7ce61a2-e1775118534122.jpg" width="1500" height="1003" alt="A colourised print of Oscar Wilde, 1882. His unique sense of humour lasted until his death (Image by Getty Images)" title="A colourised print of Oscar Wilde, 1882. His unique sense of humour lasted until his death (Image by Getty Images)" /> 1. “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go” Oscar Wilde The Irish author and playwright – best known for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) – is an enduring source of witty, pithy adages, such as “I can resist everything except temptation” and “always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much”. Oscar Wilde kept that unique brand of humour until the end: on his deathbed, in a Paris hotel room, he reportedly quipped about the dingy wallpaper. Evidently, the wallpaper won the duel, since 46-year-old Wilde passed away of meningitis shortly afterwards, on 30 November 1900. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/ChurchillGettyImages-106756722-ecd2b88-e1775118778678.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="An elderly person lies on a stretcher and raises two fingers in a V‑sign while uniformed officers and suited men stand around them" title="Winston Churchill giving the ‘V’ sign as he’s transported to hospital, 1962. Three years later, he would succumb to complications from his eighth stroke (Image by Getty Images)" /> 2. “I’m bored with it all” Winston Churchill Winston Churchill suffered his eighth stroke on 15 January 1965, after a decade and a half of failing health. All the cigars, booze and rich meals had caught up with him. He had been the prime minister who led Britain through the Second World War with impassioned oratory and declarations of “We shall never surrender”, but, if his last words are anything to go by, his battle was fought. With his son-in-law Christopher Soames by his side, Churchill muttered, “I’m bored with it all,” before slipping into a coma. Nine days later, on 24 January, he died at the age of 90. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Jean-Philippe-Rameau-GettyImages-113442113-ebfa171-e1775118867229.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="“A seated figure in 18th‑century dress holds a violin, looking toward the viewer against a dark background." title="A c1728 painting of Jean-Philippe Rameau, who described music as “the language of the heart” (Image by Getty Images)" /> 3. “What the devil do you mean to sing to me, priest? You are out of tune!” Jean-Philippe Rameau Having described music as “the language of the heart”, the French composer and music theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau was a major force of the Baroque period of the 18th century, and remained active until his dying day, 12 September 1764. Indeed, the last contribution he made to music was a critique of the quality of religious singing being performed in his room. Perhaps he was already hearing the choirs of angels, and so earthly melodies no longer enthralled him the way that they had during his long career. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/William-Henry-SewardGettyImages-3229805-a8b20b7-e1775118995911.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A man in 19th‑century formal dress sits at a desk covered with books and papers, with more sheets scattered on the floor" title="William Henry Seward, c1870. As Lincoln’s secretary of state, he narrowly escaped death in 1865 thanks to a jaw splint (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. “Nothing, only ‘love one another’” William Henry Seward The death of Abraham Lincoln’s secretary of state was also intended on that fateful night in 1865. At the same time that the US president was shot, one of John Wilkes Booth’s fellow conspirators stabbed Seward in the neck and face multiple times. In a bizarre twist of fortune, it was a splint on his jaw, the result of a stagecoach accident several days earlier, that saved his life. His death actually came on 10 October 1872. Sensing the end, his family gathered around and asked if he had any last things to say. His response was simply to “love one another”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Marie-AntoinetteGettyImages-533483497-62f200a-e1775119058184.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A woman in a white gown stands with her hands bound as soldiers in uniform surround her, while a crowd reacts nearby in a tense outdoor scene." title="A 1794 painting depicts Marie Antoinette being taken to her execution the previous year. She is better-known for the phrase “let them eat cake” – which she never said (Image by Getty Images)" /> 5. “Pardon me, sir. I did not do it on purpose” Marie Antoinette King Louis XVI lost his head in the French Revolution and his queen, Marie Antoinette, would follow him to the guillotine. She had become so hated among her people as the epitome of extravagance (that said, she never uttered “let them eat cake”) that all efforts were made to make her execution as humiliating as possible. On 16 October 1793, she was forced to dress in front of her guards, had her hair chopped off and hands bound behind her back, and was taken through the streets on the back of a cart, jeered all the way. Yet Antoinette maintained her composure, even apologising politely when she accidentally stepped on the executioner’s foot. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/HitchcockGettyImages-108962593-0c6f17d-e1775119404822.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person’s face is lit from below in a black‑and‑white portrait, framed by two upright hands on either side" title="Alfred Hitchcock frames a shot, 1964. The ‘master of suspense’ was a meticulous director, but even he didn’t know what would happen after death (Image by Getty Images)" /> 6. “One never knows the ending. One has to die to know exactly what happens after death, although Catholics have their hopes” Alfred Hitchcock Alfred Hitchcock is rightly celebrated as one of the most important filmmakers in the history of cinema, directing dozens of iconic movies like Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho. Dubbed the ‘master of suspense’, he meticulously crafted every scene and knew exactly where the plot was going. His Hitchcockian style and immense talent for storytelling could not be called upon, however, when it came to the grand denouement of his life, as his last words illustrate. He died from kidney failure, aged 80, on 29 April 1980, relying not on plot but his Catholic hopes. Read more | Ninety years of horror: nine films that reflect society’s changing anxieties <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/John-SedgwickGettyImages-50801826-1c34bd4-e1775119480133.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Union soldiers engage in battle as a mounted figure lifts a hat, surrounded by riflemen, flags, artillery, and fallen men" title="Union General John Sedgwick tempted fate when he claimed that Confederate sharpshooters “couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance”; he was fatally shot shortly after (Image by Getty Images)" /> 7. “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance” John Sedgwick On the morning of 9 May 1864, John Sedgwick set about inspecting the line at the battle of Spotsylvania Court House. A general in the Union Army during the American Civil War, he had been wounded at Antietam in 1862 but did not share his men’s concerns about Confederate sharpshooters that began to make their presence known. He scolded his staff, stating that the enemy “couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance” – right before being felled by a bullet under his left eye. 8. “How’s this for your headline: French Fries!” James Donald French How did murderer James Donald French react as he was taken to the electric chair on 10 August 1966? He made a pun for the press. Far from fearing death, the 30-year-old American had been longing for it for years. Following his first murder in 1958, he requested execution and was disappointed to receive a life sentence. So, in 1961, he strangled his cellmate and again demanded the death penalty. It took three separate trials, and French’s constant pleas not to accept any appeals, before he finally got his wish and went out with a gag. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Che-Guevara2WK4HM7-9dfede5-e1775119748933.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white portrait shows a person wearing a beret with a star emblem and a military‑style jacket, gazing slightly upward." title="Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, pictured in 1960. Shot dead by a CIA-backed soldier, Guevara became an icon of revolution (Image by Alamy)" /> 9. “I know you are here to kill me. Shoot, coward, you are only going to kill a man” Che Guevara The man from all those posters and T-shirts, Che Guevara became a globally recognised name for his role in putting Fidel Castro in power in Cuba. But it was in a doomed insurgency in Bolivia that the Marxist revolutionary had his final fight. Captured by CIA-backed soldiers, he was held in a mud schoolhouse deep in the jungle when the decision was made to have him executed. When, on 9 October 1967, a soldier entered his rudimentary cell, Guevara barked out his final words before being shot. He may have been only a man, but his face became a ubiquitous and enduring icon of revolution. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Emily-DickinsonM989TW-5731e61-e1775119856837.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="American poet Emily Dickinson, c1846. Before her own passing in 1886, she had endured the deaths of many close friends and family members (Image by Alamy)" title="American poet Emily Dickinson, c1846. Before her own passing in 1886, she had endured the deaths of many close friends and family members (Image by Alamy)" /> 10. “I must go in, for the fog is rising” Emily Dickinson By the time that Emily Dickinson – little known in her lifetime but now regarded as the influential and ever-popular American poet of the 19th century – died, it is fair to say that her spirit had been broken. In the preceding years, she endured numerous deaths of family and friends, most traumatically her young, favourite nephew, and her health collapsed. “The Crisis of the sorrow of so many years is all that tires me,” she wrote in a letter. Dickinson passed away at 55 on 15 May 1886, shortly after penning one last verse that ended, “I must go in, for the fog is rising”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Lawrence-of-RomeGettyImages-2188110193-2f9fd45-e1775120079143.jpg" width="1498" height="1000" alt="A medieval manuscript painting shows a haloed figure lying on a patterned bed while several people stand around, and angels descend from above" title="The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence by Pacino di Bonaguida depicts the brutal execution of Lawrence of Rome, during which he allegedly uttered his comical last words (Image by Getty Images)" /> 11. “Turn me over. I’m done on this side” Lawrence of Rome Lawrence served as one of the seven deacons of Rome in the third century; this was not a good time to be a Christian as, in AD 258, Emperor Valerian ordered that the pope and clergy be put to death. According to the legend, Lawrence’s method of execution was being burned alive on a gridiron, similar to cooking meat on a barbecue. Lawrence saw the funny side of this image, it seems, since during his martyrdom he supposedly joked that his tormentors should turn him over to ensure he cooked fully. These last words may be apocryphal, but Lawrence is still honoured as patron saint of comedians. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Walt-DisneyGettyImages-2192286936-450aa4b-e1775120152808.jpg" width="1495" height="1000" alt="A man in a dark suit stands beside a large Mickey Mouse figure behind a wooden desk with a globe and a rotary telephone" title="Walt Disney poses for a portrait with Mickey Mouse, c1955. Working right up until the end, it seems Disney wanted to plan teen star Kurt Russell’s next acting project before his death (Image by Getty Images)" /> 12. “Kurt Russell” Walt Disney After Walt Disney’s death from lung cancer on 15 December 1966, his body was not cryogenically frozen, as the urban myth goes. Yet the death of Mickey Mouse’s creator comes with another oddity: the mystery of his final written note. While the meanings of “Ron Miller”, “Way Down Cellar” and “CIA – Mobley” remain unknown, Disney also wrote the name Kurt Russell (misspelled as “Kirt”). The teen actor had signed a 10-year contract with Disney, and it seems that the ailing businessman wanted to plot out the young star’s next project before the end. Even without it, though, Kurt Russell became one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. Read more | Cartoon century: a history of 100 years of Disney <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/John-AdamsGettyImages-513681337-ac501d0-e1775120307259.jpg" width="1495" height="1000" alt="Three men in 18th‑century clothing gather around a table covered with papers and books, reading and discussing documents in a sunlit room." title="A c1921 depiction of the writing of the Declaration of Independence, 1776. On his deathbed, John Adams wrongly believed Thomas Jefferson was still alive (Image by Getty Images)" /> 13. “Thomas Jefferson survives” John Adams On 4 July 1826, exactly 50 years after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, a 90-year-old John Adams lay dying. Three decades earlier, he had been elected as the second president of the United States, and his final thoughts were with the man who succeeded him. Adams’ last reported words were “Thomas Jefferson survives”. While the two men had fallen out over how their new country should be governed, they renewed their friendship in their later years, so maybe Adams was hopeful at the end that one of the Founding Fathers remained. Unfortunately, he was wrong: Jefferson, aged 83, had actually died just a few hours before Adams. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Joe-DiMaggioGettyImages-517367946-1a23a02-e1775120392952.jpg" width="1498" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photo shows two people sitting together, smiling and talking, with a bookshelf full of volumes behind them." title="Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio had a tumultuous and short marriage – but DiMaggio remained devoted to the movie star until his dying day (Image by Getty Images)" /> 14. “I’ll finally get to see Marilyn” Joe DiMaggio The retired baseball great Joe DiMaggio may have been married to the glamourous movie star Marilyn Monroe for less than a year, but he remained devoted to her for the rest of his life. He took the lead in arranging the funeral after Monroe was found dead in 1962, and for the next 20 years he sent roses to her grave every week. DiMaggio never remarried and as he lay dying on 8 March 1999, aged 84, he clung on to one hope: that he and Monroe would finally be reunited. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Jane-AustenGettyImages-3248276-0b6a9ca-e1775120465354.jpg" width="1497" height="1000" alt="An engraving of a young woman in a light blue dress with a ruffled collar and a ruffled bonnet" title="An engraving of Jane Austen, c1790. Plagued by illness for a long time, Austen allegedly welcomed death when it came (Image by Getty Images)" /> 15. “Nothing but death” Jane Austen The beloved author of Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion and Emma died at the age of 41 on 18 July 1817. The cause remains a matter of debate, although it is known that she suffered with pains and illnesses for at least a year, which may explain her last sentiments, expressed by her sister Cassandra in a letter to Austen’s niece, Fanny. “When I asked her if there was anything she wanted, her answer was she wanted nothing but death,” it read. These were probably not her final words, however, as Cassandra also refers to Austen saying, “God grant me patience, pray for me, oh, pray for me.” 16. “I did not get my SpaghettiOs, I got spaghetti. I want the press to know this” Thomas J Grasso With his execution by lethal injection scheduled for 20 March 1995, convicted murderer Thomas J Grasso put in a rather elaborate request for his final meal. It included two dozen steamed mussels, two dozen steamed clams, six barbecued spareribs, a Burger King double cheeseburger, a can of SpaghettiOs with meatballs, half a pumpkin pie with whipped cream, and strawberries. He clearly was not fully satisfied, since he wanted his last statement to be a complaint to the chef that he received spaghetti instead of the canned version he asked for. 17. “More weight” Giles Corey During the Salem Witch Trials, hundreds were accused of witchcraft in the small Massachusetts village, resulting in 19 hangings, at least five deaths in prison, and one man – a farmer in his 80s named Giles Corey – being pressed to death. Having refused to enter a plea, he was stripped and laid on the floor with a wooden board across his body, on which heavy stones were gradually put on top. The torture lasted days and was expected to end in confession; instead, Corey kept crying out for “more weight”. He finally succumbed on 19 September 1692. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Horatio-NelsonGettyImages-629450219-92f15ba-e1775120767821.jpg" width="1498" height="1000" alt="A wounded officer lies on the floor of a ship’s cabin as several men in naval uniforms gather around him in lantern light" title="The fatal wounding of Admiral Nelson, depicted by Arthur William Devis, c1807. Nelson’s body was preserved in brandy for the journey back to England (Image by Getty Images)" /> 18. “Thanks be to God. I have but lived this day and now I die content” Horatio Nelson It is a well-worn story that when Lord Nelson was shot at the battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805, he asked of his friend, and flag captain of HMS Victory, “Kiss me, Hardy”. They were not the great admiral’s last words, though. Taken belowdecks, Nelson continued to issue orders and lived long enough to receive word that several French ships had surrendered. Only then did he say, “Thanks be to God. I have but lived this day and now I die content.” After the battle, his body was placed in a cask of brandy to keep it preserved for its voyage back to England. Read more | “A monster of egotism”: Dominic Sandbrook reveals the secret to Admiral Nelson’s unstoppable success <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Hannie-SchaftPDFJCA-672d548-e1775120840316.jpg" width="1500" height="1003" alt="A black‑and‑white portrait shows a person with medium‑length wavy hair wearing a dark top, posed against a plain dark background" title="Defiant until the end, Dutch resistance member Hannie Schaft claimed she shot better than her executioner (Image by Alamy)" /> 19. “I shoot better” Hannie Schaft During the Second World War, a young woman named Jannetje Johanna Schaft signed up to fight for the Dutch resistance. To them, she became ‘Hannie’, but to the Nazis, who came to fear her marksmanship, she was ‘the girl with red hair’. After carrying out numerous assassinations, Schaft was finally captured in 1945 and executed just three weeks before the end of the war. Although, according to her legend, she did not go down easily: the first shot only grazed her, leading Schaft to yell out, “I shoot better!” The executioner did not make the same mistake again. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Lawrence-OatesGettyImages-964820416-bc1e26a-e1775120989211.jpg" width="1498" height="1000" alt="Four explorers in heavy cold‑weather gear stand around a small tent on a snow‑covered landscape, with a flagpole rising from the tent" title="The Terra Nova expedition team find Roald Amundsen’s tent, signifying their failure to reach the South Pole first. All five explorers would die on the trek back (Image by Getty Images)" /> 20. “I am just going outside and may be some time” Lawrence Oates Captain Robert Falcon Scott and four other men – Dr Edward Wilson, Captain Lawrence Oates, Lieutenant Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers and Petty Officer Edgar Evans – had set out to be the very first to reach the South Pole, but on reaching it in January 1912 they discovered that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had just beaten them. Defeated and demoralised, they began the 800-mile trek back to base camp. None of them survived. Oates, suffering from frostbite and gangrene, made the ultimate sacrifice by leaving the tent in a blizzard with the now-immortalised words, “I am just going outside and may be some time.” His body was never found. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/04/Henry-Ward-BeecherGettyImages-929102448-704c81c-e1775121078941.jpg" width="1495" height="1000" alt="A sepia‑toned studio portrait shows one person seated holding a hat and umbrella, with another standing beside them in a dress and bonnet" title="Henry Ward Beecher and his sister Harriet, 1885. The most famous preacher in the United States philosophically considered what awaited him after death (Image by Getty Images)" /> 21. “Now comes the mystery” Henry Ward Beecher In life, Henry Ward Beecher was the most famous preacher in the United States: a passionate minister in Congregational Protestantism, a gifted orator, and a social reformer calling for women’s suffrage and the abolition of slavery. His works had a profound influence on American Christianity in the 19th century and beyond. As he faced the end of his mortal life, having suffered a stroke in early March 1887, his last words were filled with the philosophical curiosity and hopefulness that permeated much of his preaching, as he pondered what awaited him: “Now comes the mystery.”
It was medieval England's worst antisemitic massacre. Here's what happened next
Kavita Puri explores York's long and complex Jewish history
On a cold, grey January day in York, I climbed the steps to Clifford’s Tower, continuing all the way to the top to enjoy panoramic views across the city. This structure was for many years a notorious prison, and housed a royalist garrison before being taken by the parliamentarians during the Civil War. Long before then, though, it was the site of one of the worst antisemitic massacres of the Middle Ages. Towards the end of the 12th century, peaking around the time of the Third Crusade, anti-Jewish hostility swelled in England. Antisemitic rioting broke out in London and across the east of the country. In spring 1190, as Jewish properties in York were looted or burned, concerned royal officers sheltered some 150 Jewish people inside a timber structure in York Castle that almost certainly stood on the current site of Clifford’s Tower, built perhaps 60 years later. Read more | “Some say that the first Jews sailed here on King Solomon’s ships”: Kavita Puri on India's long Jewish history A mob surrounded the tower and prepared to attack. On the night of 16 March, many of the Jews inside – seeing no safe way out of the situation – took their own lives, having set their possessions on fire, which ignited the tower itself. One of the aggressors reputedly offered an amnesty to any Jew willing to convert to Christianity – but all who left the tower to do so were murdered. However, that terrible incident did not mark the end of Jewish life in York. Within a few years, a new community was established, which endured in the city throughout the 13th century. Research from the University of York published in 2023 shows that a synagogue stood on Coney Street from 1205 to 1290 – the year when all Jews were expelled from England by order of Edward I. A commemorative plaque was unveiled at the site in 2024. Read more | The history of York: a northern powerhouse of many names Today, Coney Street is a busy commercial thoroughfare – as it was in the Middle Ages, when it was home to a clothier, a leatherworker, a vintner, a goldsmith, a baker and an apothecary, along with important members of the medieval Jewish community. The 2023 research found that a branch of Boots stands on the site occupied by one Leo Episcopus; his son-in-law, Aaron, lived nearby at the spot where Next is today. Both inhabited homes built by Christian landlords and leased to Jews, who lived alongside prominent Christian citizens. Leo and Aaron served as chief representatives of the entire Jewish community in England. In the 1230s and 1240s, Aaron was considered to be the richest man in the country. Charters from the Durham Cathedral archive show how Aaron co-operated with senior clergy of York Minster in purchasing the large stone building that became the city’s Guildhall. It also seems likely that Aaron worked with Minster authorities on the ‘Five Sisters’ window – previously known as the Jewish window – in return for land on which to extend the Jewish cemetery. For so long, the Jewish history of York has been overshadowed by the horrors of what took place at Clifford’s Tower in 1190. Remembrance of this tragedy continues to evolve today: there are plans to redevelop the area around the tower, and proposals include a more formal memorial to the massacre. Each spring, daffodils bloom on the mound – flowers of a six-pointed narcissus variety whose shape echoes the Star of David, creating an annual reminder of the massacre. Read more | The assassins' reign of terror: how these 12th-century killers spread fear in the Middle East It’s right that we mark such a horrifying event – but also that we remember the Jewish community which, in the decades that followed, lived largely harmoniously alongside Christian neighbours in one of the most high-status streets in York. York’s Jewish history is complex – but the university’s research suggests strongly that, during the 13th century, Jews and Christians worked together for the common good, developing civic and religious sites that remain important in the city today. Serendipitously, the university’s findings were revealed just as York appointed its first resident rabbi since the expulsion of 1290 – the latest positive milestone in the city’s long Jewish history. This article was first published in the March 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
I wrote a letter to the world's most famous terrorist – and nothing could have prepared me for his reply
In December 1975, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez – better known as Carlos the Jackal – attacked the headquarters of a global oil organisation in Vienna. Jason Burke recounts the story of the incident, and reveals how his efforts to interview the terrorist helped solve a 50-year-old mystery
About half an hour after opening the letter sent to me by one of the most notorious terrorists of all time, I realised that not only did it contain a note offering “revolutionary greetings”, but that it would lead to the solution of a decades-old mystery. It was the summer of 2023, and for months I had been trying to contact Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal. While researching my book, a narrative history of 1970s terrorism entitled The Revolutionists, I had already spoken to several of those who had bombed, hijacked and shot their way through the decade, but Ramírez Sánchez was the most iconic figure of these years. Arguably the world’s first real ‘celebrity terrorist’, Ramírez Sánchez was responsible for around a dozen major attacks in western Europe between 1973 and 1983. But despite the many articles, books and films about him, there was still much about his career of deadly violence that was unknown. As such, the letter on my doormat marked a significant breakthrough. From Caracas to Paris It had been easy to locate Ramírez Sánchez, who by that point had been incarcerated for nearly 30 years. Captured by the French intelligence service while undergoing minor surgery in Sudan in 1994, he had been convicted of multiple terrorist offences and held in several different prisons across France. Now locked away in a high-security facility in Fresnes, about 20 miles south of Paris, he was allowed a small number of visitors. To be among them, however, I needed an invitation. As a first step, I got a message to him via an intermediary to establish my bona fides. I then wrote directly, explaining my interest in hearing his own version of events. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/9-GettyImages-115106383-1d24d91-e1774617817390.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A multi‑storey brick complex with red‑tiled roofs and uniform tall windows fills the foreground. The older industrial‑style buildings sit within a townscape of smaller houses, trees, and a few commercial structures, including one with a visible shop sign." title="An aerial view of Fresnes Prison in Val-de-Marne – one of several French facilities in which Ramírez Sánchez has been held over the past three decades (Image by Getty Images)" /> Thanks to a large body of existing literature – declassified diplomatic cables, leaked documents and interviews with spies, officials and others – I had already learned a lot about the man from my research. For example, I found that he had not been a precociously young leftwing activist in Venezuela in the 1950s, as often claimed, but a timid and chubby teenager who steered clear of the street politics of his hometown, Caracas. In London in the 1960s, living with his mother and younger brother after his parents’ divorce, his tastes tended more towards Napoleon brandy, tailored suits and sleazy West End clubs than protests and sit-ins. In fact, his journey into violence appeared to have been motivated more by megalomania than Marxism. When sent to Moscow to study for an undergraduate degree by his leftwing lawyer father, Ramírez Sánchez was noticed not for his commitment to ideology, but to what the Soviet capital offered by way of nightlife. If, in 1970, he had made a trip to Jordan to find Palestinian factions dedicated to what they called the “armed struggle” against Israel, his claims to have fought against government forces in the virtual civil war there were exaggerated to say the least. It became apparent, too, that the idea he had been recruited by the KGB was probably just Cold War propaganda. One fact I dug out was the origin of his famous soubriquet: Carlos the Jackal. This was invented by British journalists in the summer of 1975, shortly after he had killed two French policemen, seriously injured a third, and then executed his superior in the breakaway Palestinian faction he had joined, known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – External Operations (PFLP-XO). All three murders had taken place within the space of a minute inside a small apartment on Paris’s Left Bank. First, French investigators had found a false passport in the name of ‘Carlos Martinez’ at the apartment of a girlfriend. Then, reporters spotted a copy of Frederick Forsyth’s novel The Day of the Jackal in the London home of another lover, a Basque waitress. The false ID and the book were swiftly combined, and a thousand headlines followed. Read more | The JFK assassination attempt you’ve never heard of Terror in Vienna In the letter that dropped through my door that summer morning, Ramírez Sánchez expressed his delight at my intended visit. Sadly, this delight was not shared by French authorities, who blocked my request for an in-person meeting but did allow me to send a series of letters. Though he avoided answering my pointed enquiries about his misdeeds, he posted me dozens of printed and photocopied documents. These described his youth and the treble murder in Paris, before going into considerable detail about the attack that earned him global infamy. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/IMG2705-62cdd3a-e1774619170787.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A collection of printed and handwritten documents lies spread out on a surface, many showing the name Ilich Ramírez Sánchez along with numbers and institutional headings. Some pages are typed, others handwritten in French." title="Although the French authorities denied his request for an in-person interview, author Jason Burke received numerous documents from Ramírez Sánchez via post (Image by Jason Burke)" /> The plan had been put together in the early autumn of 1975. Ramírez Sánchez was to lead a team from the PFLP-XO and a West German extremist group called the Revolutionary Cells in an attack on a meeting of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) at its headquarters in Vienna. They would seize the high-ranking ministers due to attend, demand a plane from the Austrian authorities, and then fly around the Middle East, releasing the hostages one by one at the airports of their respective capital cities. Two would not be freed: instead, the ministers from Saudi Arabia and Iran would be shot dead. The date of the attack, 21 December 1975, was a Sunday. The streets of Vienna were quiet, the air was chilly under a clear blue sky, and carols piped over the speakers of the Christmas Market opposite OPEC’s modern, seven-storey headquarters on Ringstrasse. The attackers arrived at their target at around 11am, rushed through the unguarded entrance of the building, and made their way up to the main meeting room on the first floor. Ramírez Sánchez then fired five shots, shouting: “Don’t move… I am the famous Carlos. You may have heard of me.” There was little resistance. Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, the only female member of the team, shot dead a bodyguard of the Iraqi oil minister, before killing a plain-clothes policeman as he tried to surrender. Ramírez Sánchez then killed a Libyan economist, and explosives were wired around the building. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/7-GettyImages-541472303-0c984ab-e1774618111712.jpg" width="1500" height="1500" alt="A black‑and‑white portrait shows a person with curly dark hair wearing large, thick‑rimmed glasses and a collared shirt, photographed straight on against a plain background." title="One of Ramírez Sánchez’s accomplices, Gabriele Kröcher-Tiedemann, killed two men during the OPEC siege. Two years later, she was arrested after shooting two border guards in Switzerland and was sentenced to 15 years in prison (Image by Getty Images)" /> Once he was done, Ramírez Sánchez relaxed. He distributed cigarettes, chatted with his 60-plus hostages (conversing in English, Spanish and French), and ordered food from the local Hilton. Ham sandwiches – which any Muslim captives would not eat – were angrily sent back. When one of the Palestinian gunmen struggled to adjust the explosives, Ramírez Sánchez quipped, “Oh dear, I’ve told him a thousand times how to do it, and he still can’t get it right”. Similarly, when an OPEC driver tried to persuade him to free the female hostages, claiming they “might get hysterical”, Ramirez demurred, pointing to Kröcher-Tiedemann. Three unanswered questions Early the next morning, a bus arrived to take the hostages and their captors to Vienna airport, where a fully fuelled aircraft had been readied as Ramírez Sánchez had requested. He ordered the plane to fly first to Algiers, where a handful of the captives were released. The next destination was Tripoli, where Ramírez Sánchez hoped to obtain a bigger aircraft with enough range to fly around the Middle East. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/6-GettyImages-515113970-52211b8-e1774618468264.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black‑and‑white photograph shows a snowy airfield where several people stand between a bus and the tail section of an aircraft marked “OE‑LDB.” One person appears to be walking toward or boarding the plane, with snow‑covered ground and distant trees in the background." title="The OPEC attackers, including Ramírez Sánchez (thought to be the figure on the left, next to the bus), board the aircraft they had requested at Vienna airport. They planned to fly first to Algiers, before transferring to a larger plane in Tripoli (Image by Getty Images)" /> But he was to be disappointed. In the Libyan capital, there was a frosty reception for the angry, despondent and exhausted terrorists. No one expected them, and not a single person – even in this supposedly ‘revolutionary’ state – wanted to help. It was clear there would be no new plane. The only option was to return to Algiers, where Ramírez Sánchez was presented with an ultimatum by local authorities: he could carry out the plan to shoot the Saudi and Iranian ministers (and take his chances with Algerian security forces afterwards), or accept the $20m being offered by the Saudi and Iranian governments as ransom for the two men. Read more | How Britain stirred the cauldron of conflict in Palestine Amid stormy scenes, tears and obscenities, Ramírez Sánchez told his team that the time had come to end their escapade. A few hours later he was on his way to a five-star hotel in Algiers, thence to a luxurious government guesthouse for a few weeks’ rest and eventually back to the PFLP-XO’s base in Aden. Over the next two decades, Ramirez Sanchez would operate from bases in Baghdad, Prague, Budapest and Damascus. While some attacks were simply motivated by personal vendettas, many were commissioned by powerful patrons, including Gaddafi. Eventually, ‘Carlos the Jackal’ would become a fugitive himself, ending up in Khartoum, where the French found him. Though I had spent months investigating this whole episode, three mysteries remained unsolved. Firstly, who commissioned the attack on OPEC? Secondly, what happened to the $20m ransom payment? Finally, how had Ramírez Sánchez escaped punishment by the PFLP-XO for his failures? My correspondence with the then 74-year-old prisoner resolved the first of these questions. Ramírez Sánchez’s account unequivocally named Libya’s president, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, as the man responsible for the OPEC attack. This made sense. The mercurial Libyan leader had the means – and the motive – to embarrass pro-western Arab countries and hike the price of oil, which would boost his income. Furthermore, I had already seen testimony that a Libyan diplomat had provided weapons to the assault team in Vienna, evidence of previous Libyan support for such violence, and multiple reports of Ramírez Sánchez cursing Gaddafi as “impossible to work with” when he realised that, rather than delivering the vital new plane as presumably agreed, the Libyan leader had simply disappeared into the desert. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/8-GettyImages-591708114-8a4a827-e1774618771964.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A person wearing glasses and a collared shirt stands at a podium, speaking into two microphones and gesturing with both hands. The background is plain and dark, drawing focus to the speaker." title="According to Ramírez Sánchez, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi – seen here in 1973 – was the instigator of the OPEC attack (Image by Getty Images)" /> Fame as a weapon The whereabouts of the $20m cash remained unresolved, however. It is possible that Ramírez Sánchez kept it, as some veterans of the PFLP-XO suggested to me when I tracked them down. But I found no proof, and the alleged thief himself did not respond to my questions on the matter. There is some reliable documentary evidence, too, that only Saudi Arabia actually paid up and that these funds were kept by the Algerians – the designated intermediary – as ‘compensation’ for their trouble. And why wasn’t Ramírez Sánchez shot by his comrades? Either after killing a respected member of the PFLP-XO, or after the debacle of the OPEC raid itself? Here, the correspondence offered an important and unsolicited insight. Much of what this most famous of terrorists sent to me consisted of press cuttings. These said nothing new, but confirmed something I had long suspected: that Ramírez Sánchez’s greatest talent was not as a terrorist, but as a self-publicist. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/3-GettyImages-652492568-6c4d73d-e1774618878699.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Several uniformed officers wearing dark clothing, bulletproof vests, and gold‑trimmed hats hold firearms while standing near a stone archway. A dark van with a yellow licence plate is parked behind them on the paved street." title="French police officers guard a van carrying Ramírez Sánchez ahead of a hearing in Paris, 1995. The terrorist only avoided being murdered by his former comrades because of his celebrity, says Jason Burke (Image by Getty Images)" /> If most of his attacks failed to attain their objectives, this did not matter. They all helped construct his legend, and this fame made it impossible for his outraged ‘comrades’ to consign this hero of their cause to a shallow grave in a Middle Eastern desert. It also convinced Gaddafi and other sponsors to pay Ramírez Sánchez tens of millions of dollars to carry out violent new operations in western Europe, and eventually persuaded several eastern European regimes to offer him a base in their own countries as well. The greatest weapon Ramírez Sánchez possessed, I realised, was not his Tokarev pistol or total unconcern for the suffering of others – and nor was it his undoubted ability to manipulate and charm. Rather, it was his celebrity, in which western governments and media were to some extent complicit. It was this, above all, that had allowed him to continue his career of violence at great cost to many hundreds of innocent people. Memories of his violence may have faded, but the morbid fascination with Carlos the Jackal – and sometimes other terrorists too – remains. Jason Burke is the international security correspondent for The Guardian. His latest book, The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists who Hijacked the 1970s (Vintage, 2025), was shortlisted for the 2025 Baillie-Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
History's most notorious crime scenes: from Lizzie Borden's lair to HH Holmes's 'murder castle'
What is it about places marked by murder and violence that continue to pique our interest, long after the crimes have been committed? Caitlin Blackwell Baines uncovers the history behind some of the world's most morbid locations – from a crumbling Slovakian castle to Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel
1. Canterbury Cathedral, Kent, United Kingdom Founded in AD 597, Canterbury Cathedral is Britain’s oldest and most important religious complex: the ‘mother church’ of the Anglican faith and seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury. With its soaring 250-foot central tower and 13,000 square feet of stained-glass windows, the cathedral draws more than a million visitors each year – some who come to worship, others simply to marvel at its serene majesty. Such a setting would seem an unlikely place for a murder, but, ironically, that murder has been a big part of the pull for the past 850 or so years. The victim was Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who, on the night of 29 December 1170, was hacked to death in the cathedral’s northwest transept. Once a royal favourite – Henry II’s chancellor and closest confidant – Becket ran afoul of the monarch soon after being ordained in 1162. By refusing to uphold the king’s authority over that of the church in the following years, the archbishop effectively sealed his fate. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/1-GettyImages-2188130261-ad7bb3e-e1773932992660.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A medieval illuminated manuscript shows three armored knights striking a kneeling, haloed cleric at an altar. The cleric prays as blood streams from his head. A chalice and open book sit on the altar, and the background is filled with ornate red and gold patterns" title="A medieval manuscript illumination depicts Thomas Becket’s gruesome demise. The archbishop was brutally killed in Canterbury Cathedral, turning a place of worship into a crime scene" /> “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?” Henry is reported to have ranted to his courtiers. Interpreting this as a kind of kingly hit order, four of his knights stole away under the cover of night, travelling in secret from Normandy to Canterbury, where they accosted Becket as he entered the cathedral. At first, the knights attempted to arrest the cleric, but when he refused to accompany them, a violent scuffle broke out. As Becket desperately clung to a column, the knights slashed at him with their swords, eventually striking a fatal blow to the top of his head, spraying blood and gore across the cathedral floor. The gruesome crime shocked the whole of Christendom, quickly transforming victim into martyr, and crime scene into pilgrimage site. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/2-GettyImages-999672134-08df4e0-e1773934721665.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A ruined stone castle stands on a rocky hilltop above a dense green forest, lit by warm sunrise or sunset light. Rolling hills fade into the distance under a soft pastel sky" title="A panoramic shot of Čachtice Castle, western Slovakia. Now a crumbling ruin, the castle was supposedly the site of dozens of murders perpetrated by Countess Elizabeth Báthory (Image by Getty Images)" /> 2. Čachtice Castle, Slovakia You’ve probably heard of Castle Dracula, the seat of the titular character in Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel. But have you heard of Čachtice Castle? It is the setting for a real-life horror story far more frightening than anything dreamed up in Gothic fiction. Now a crumbling ruin, teetering on a rocky outcrop in the Trenchin region of western Slovakia, the castle was once home to Countess Elizabeth Báthory – purportedly the most prolific female serial killer in history. Čachtice Castle began its existence as a 13th-century fortress built to defend the western border of the Kingdom of Hungary. Over the centuries, it was expanded and transformed into a stately home. Passing through several hands, it eventually came into the possession of nobleman Francis Nádasdy II, who, in 1575, gifted it to his 14-year-old bride, Elizabeth Báthory, as a wedding present. By all accounts, the marriage of Francis and Elizabeth was a happy one. Home life at Čachtice Castle, on the other hand, was not exactly the picture of domestic bliss. With Francis frequently away on military campaigns against the Ottoman Turks, Elizabeth was left behind to manage the family’s household and vast estates, and in her husband’s absence, the countess seems to have taken up an unusual hobby: the torture and murder of her servants. Her many victims – a revolving door of peasant girls recruited from nearby villages – were variously cut, burnt, bitten, beaten, starved and even frozen to death. Posthumous rumours that Báthory bathed in the blood of her prey to preserve her youth have never been proven, but the available evidence suggests that her actions went far beyond that of a harsh mistress. Read more | Elizabeth Báthory: a 17th-century 'serial killer' She was a sadistic killer whose position of power and relative isolation at Čachtice Castle allowed her to operate unchecked for over two decades. During this time, she is estimated to have killed as many as 600 young women and girls. Had the cruel countess stuck to her original victim pool of poor servants, she may have escaped capture. Indeed, it was only when several young noblewomen invited to the castle to attend a gynaeceum (finishing school) went missing that the authorities finally took notice. In December 1610, Čachtice Castle was raided on the orders of King Matthias II. Báthory was seized during a post-Christmas feast – and not, as it was later claimed, in the middle of a murder. Owing to her high station, however, she managed to avoid trial (and inevitable execution) and was instead placed on house arrest in her castle. She died there four years later. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/3-GettyImages-167652325-3e2d3aa-e1773934794798.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Historic three‑storey corner building with wrought‑iron balconies and arched windows in a busy street scene" title="The present-day LaLaurie Mansion in New Orleans. The original building burned down in 1834, revealing evidence of Delphine LaLaurie’s horrific torture of enslaved people (Image by Getty Images)" /> 3. LaLaurie Mansion, New Orleans, United States Sadistic slave-owning socialite Delphine LaLaurie might just be New Orleans’ answer to Countess Báthory. If ever you travel to the city, you will inevitably hear of the notorious madame and her house of horrors. It is a stately three-storey French empire-style townhouse located on Royal Street in the heart of the historic French Quarter, the city’s main tourist district. On 10 April 1834, the mansion caught fire, attracting a large crowd of curious onlookers. At the time, the LaLaurie Mansion was renowned for its lavish interiors and decadent soirees – as well as for something more sinister. Rumour had it that the mistress of the manor treated her slaves exceptionally cruelly – which spoke volumes, given that most slave-owners thought nothing of whipping their workers at the time. These rumours would soon prove to be true. When concerned members of the community entered the house to help extinguish the flames, they made a horrific discovery. According to reports, behind the padlocked door of the attic, they found “seven slaves more or less horribly mutilated… suspended by the neck, with their limbs apparently stretched and torn from one extremity to another”. So shocking was the scene that the once-respected society hostess was run out of town by an angry mob. Nearly 200 years later, the legend of Madame LaLaurie lives on as one of the darkest chapters in the city’s pre-Civil War history. Though privately owned and publicly inaccessible, the present-day LaLaurie Mansion (rebuilt three years after the fire) still manages to draw hordes of tourists, who come to gawk at its paradoxically elegant exterior. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/4-GettyImages-117081718-8c2be8c-e1773938765180.jpg" width="1500" height="1002" alt="Black‑and‑white photo of a worn brick building with an arched passageway and a sign reading ‘Millers Court." title="The exterior of 13 Miller’s Court, Whitechapel, c1900. In 1888, the body of Mary Jane Kelly – the last of Jack the Ripper’s ‘canonical five’ victims – was discovered inside (Image by Getty Images)" /> 4. 13 Miller's Court, London, United Kingdom No list of historical true crime would be complete without an entry on Jack the Ripper, the pseudonymous serial killer responsible for the brutal slayings of at least five women in London's Whitechapel district between August and November 1888. Easily the most infamous unsolved murders in global history, there’s no shortage of Ripper-related content out there: books, films, TV shows, websites – and even historical walking tours offering the opportunity to follow in the mysterious murderer’s footsteps. Of course, there’s not much for the modern Ripper tourist to see. The gritty East End streets that comprised the killer’s hunting grounds were long ago transformed as part of a series of early 20th-century improvement projects designed to eradicate the scourge that was the Whitechapel slums. But before this modern uplift, at least a few intrepid explorers were able to visit the crime scenes and view them much as the killer would have done. Read more | He's the Victorian serial killer you've never heard of – and we may now know who he was On 20 December 1890, The Birmingham Mail published the account of one journalist’s journey through Jack the Ripper’s East London. The highlight of his adventures in so-called ‘Murderland’ was a trip to 13 Miller’s Court – the site of the last (and most ghastly) of the canonical Ripper murders. It was inside this squalid one room tenement that, just two years earlier, Mary Jane Kelly – a sex worker in her mid-20s – was found mutilated beyond all recognition. According to the journalist, “for a long time after the murder [the room] was vacant. Nobody would take it, owing to the rumour that it was haunted by Jack’s victim”. But, by the time of the journalist’s visit, it was occupied by “an old crone” and her “bedridden husband” who, for the “drop of half-a-crown” would show visitors the “ghastly relics of the crimes”. These included “a huge crimson stain” on the floor, “the fading imprints of a bloody hand on the wall”, and some pencil scratched graffiti purportedly left behind by the killer. Such “ghastly relics” were ultimately destroyed when, in 1928, the property was demolished to make way for the rebuilding of Spitalfields Market. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/5-GettyImages-145262286-5b9ade9-e1773938831936.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white sketch depicting a tall, three-storey building with several windows. Telegraph poles and lines stand outside the building, and the street out front has lots of people walking around" title="HH Holmes’ infamous ‘Murder Castle’ in Chicago. The three-storey structure, long since demolished, was rumoured to contain a network of secret passageways (Image by Getty Images)" /> 5. 'Murder Castle', Chicago, United States At around the same time that Jack the Ripper was roving the streets of Victorian London, another pseudonymous serial killer was wreaking havoc across the pond in Chicago. Operating under the alias ‘HH Holmes’, Herman Webster Mudgett was a conman posing as a pharmacist, who, between the years of 1891 and 1894, lured as many as 200 men and women to their deaths. But where the Ripper seemingly killed for the sheer thrill of it, Holmes had ulterior motives – namely money. Most of his victims were the unwitting targets of insurance schemes and romance scams. And unlike his British counterpart, who committed all but one of his crimes outdoors, the nefarious ‘Dr Holmes’ preferred the privacy of his own home: 601–603 West 63rd Street, a sprawling three-storey structure, aptly dubbed the ‘Murder Castle’ by the Windy City press. Having been gutted by fire shortly after his arrest in the autumn of 1894, Holmes’s ‘Murder Castle’ is a bit of an enigma. According to contemporary reports, it possessed a labyrinthine layout, replete with secret passageways, soundproof rooms and a network of chutes and trapdoors purportedly designed for the fast disposal of dead bodies. But was it purpose-built for murder? The oft-repeated story that Holmes hired new building crews each week to ensure that no single person knew the property’s layout is likely apocryphal. Instead, he was probably attempting to cheat his contractors out of fair pay. Holmes’s astonishingly high body count may too have been exaggerated – he confessed to 27 murders, of which only nine have been confirmed. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/6-BordenHouse92SecondStFallRiverMassachusetts1892-24f9fc3-e1773938890143.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="Black‑and‑white photo of a two‑storey wooden house with a gabled roof and a leafless tree in front" title="230 Second Street, Fall River – where 32-year-old Lizzie Borden allegedly murdered her father and stepmother – is one of America’s most notorious addresses" /> 6. The Lizzie Borden House, Fall River, Massachusetts, United States 230 Second Street, Fall River, Massachusetts. At first glance, this modest clapboard cottage hardly stands out in a city where the streets are lined with Victorian buildings – many of them far grander than this home. But this is actually Fall River’s most famous landmark: the Lizzie Borden House. Almost all Americans know of the alleged crimes of the accused axe-murderer Lizzie Borden. Outside of America, however, Lizzie is perhaps less well-known. And yet, most will be familiar with this little ditty: Lizzie Borden took an axe Gave her mother forty whacks. She gave her father forty-one. Andrew Borden now is dead, Lizzie hit him on the head. Up in heaven he will sing, On the gallows she will swing. But if all you know of Lizzie is the morbid nursery rhyme, you don’t know much. On the morning of 4 August 1892, Lizzie Borden, the 32-year-old daughter of Andrew Borden, a wealthy yet miserly property developer, allegedly killed her stepmother, Abby, using a hatchet. Lizzie struck 18 (not 40) blows to Abby’s head in an upstairs bedroom. When her father returned home from work for a mid-morning nap on the parlour sofa, Lizzie killed him with a more conservative 11 whacks as he slept. Read more | These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators? The second verse gets it wrong too. Lizzie was acquitted of the murder charges in 1893, thus escaping the gallows. She then lived out the rest of her days in a larger, more luxurious home purchased with her father’s fortune – worth about $9.5 million (£7.5 million) in today’s money. And if we are to believe the reports of thrill-seeking tourists, Andrew is hardly singing up in heaven. He’s moaning right here on earth, forever stuck in his former home, now known as the Lizzie Borden House, a murder-themed bed and breakfast since 1996. Ghost-hunting guests claim to have encountered Andrew, Abby, their family maid Bridget – and even Lizzie herself – in the house. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/7-GettyImages-51096199-6211f5a-e1773938947804.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black‑and‑white photo of a patterned wallpapered wall with dark stains and a closed double door." title="The basement room at the Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg, where the Romanovs met their end. The wall has been torn apart by investigators looking for bullets and other evidence of the crimes committed there (Image by Getty Images)" /> 7. The Ipatiev House, Yekaterinburg, Russia The fall of the House of Romanov, the imperial family that ruled Russia from 1613 to 1917, irrevocably shaped the history of their country – and indeed, the world. As anyone with even the faintest recollection of their secondary school history lessons will recall, the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and subsequent execution of his entire family laid the foundations for the first socialist state in history. What most of us will be less familiar with is the house that hosted that fall: the Ipatiev House, a fairly unassuming former merchant’s home in the city of Yekaterinburg. Built in the 1880s for mining industrialist Ivan Redikortsev, the two-storey neoclassical manor would have been perfectly in keeping for a man of Redikortsev’s station, just as it was for subsequent owners: gold-dealer IG Sharaviev and military engineer Nikolai Nikolayevich Ipatiev. But for a family who had once resided in some of the most resplendent residences in Russia – including the 2.5-million-square-foot Winter Palace in St Petersburg – it was something of a downgrade. In the spring of 1918, Tsar Nicholas, his wife Tsarina Alexandra, their five children and household staff were moved into the house, where they would spend 78 days confined to just four upper-storey rooms. Under the watchful eye of Bolshevik guards, the prisoners were occasionally permitted time outdoors – though the house’s modest grounds with their oppressively high fences would have paled in comparison to the Tsarina’s private garden at the Winter Palace. Finally, on 17 July, the family was ordered to the Ipatiev’s basement where they were executed by firing squad. Meanwhile, the house itself wouldn’t fall until 1977 when it was demolished under the orders of the Soviet government. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Church on the Blood was erected on its site, with a cross marking the exact location of the Romanov murders. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/03/8-JohnSowdenHouseLosAngeles-e1773939013743.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A geometric, reddish‑brown building partially hidden behind dense tropical plants, including palms and large-leafed greenery" title="Despite its impressive architecture, Sowden House is best known for being the former home of George Hodel – the prime suspect in the infamous ‘Black Dahlia’ murder" /> 8. Sowden House, Los Angeles, United States Like many old Hollywood mansions, Sowden House is steeped in a long and colourful history. Constructed in 1926 for its namesake, artist John Sowden, for nearly a century the property has played host to lavish parties, film crews and fashion shoots. It’s featured in Oscar-winning films like LA Confidential and The Aviator, and reality TV programmes like America’s Next Top Model. But did it also bear witness to one of the most notorious unsolved murders in American history? On the night of 14 January 1947, did the enigmatic ‘Black Dahlia’ take her final breath in the bowels of this 5,600-square-foot fortress of luxury? Maybe… Located in Los Feliz, a hillside community east of Hollywood, Sowden House is one of countless mansions in this upscale district. Yet, even in a sea of swanky properties, it sticks out – partly owing to its unusual appearance. Composed of giant concrete blocks configurated and carved in designs meant to mimic an ancient Maya step pyramid, the house is perhaps the most iconic example of the Mayan Revival Movement of the early 20th century. It is widely regarded as the pinnacle of achievement for architect Lloyd Wright (not to be confused with his more famous father, Frank Lloyd Wright). Surprisingly, however, none of these things are what Sowden is best known for. Its main claim to fame is for being the former home of one Dr George Hodel, a prominent LA physician and prime suspect in the 1947 slaying of Elizabeth Short – a 22-year-old budding starlet (christened the ‘Black Dahlia’ in the press on account of her raven hair), whose mutilated and dismembered body was found in a vacant lot, six and a half miles south of Sowden House. Aside from his surgical skill and supposed sadomasochistic interests, there’s actually very little to connect Hodel to the crime. Still, legions of armchair detectives are convinced of his guilt. His own son, Steve Hoddel – a 30-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department – is adamant that the Dahlia’s dismemberment took place in the basement of his childhood home. Caitlin Blackwell Baines is an art historian and author who specialises in Georgian art and architecture. She is the author of How to Build a Haunted House: The History of a Cultural Obsession (Profile Books, 2025)
"It was the greatest act of violence for 66 million years": why the modern world was born of bloodshed
In the 18th century, developments in finance, weapons and industry converged to create a modern economy born of bloodshed. Clifton Crais explores how killing powered the industrial age
Imagine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C heat of summer you’re accompanying Captain Meriwether Lewis and Second Lieutenant William Clark as they head west towards the Pacific Ocean, exploring the commercial possibilities of this vast new country. Stretching away in front of you is a sea of chocolate-brown: thousands of animals, each standing as high as a man and weighing upwards of 900kg. Now picture putrefying carcasses and heaps of bleached bones extending as far as the eye can see. “The bones were everywhere,” homesteaders complained, “as thick as cones under a big fir tree”, and so numerous that it was impossible to plough the land. That was mere decades after Lewis and Clark’s fabled expedition. By the end of the 19th century, America’s population of bison had been reduced from tens of millions to around 350. Much of this killing unfolded over the course of just a few years – one of the most concentrated acts of ecological destruction in history. The usual explanation for the slaughter of the American bison ties it to the government’s decision to solve its ‘Indian problem’ – kill the bison and you destroy the Indigenous peoples’ food supply. “Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone,” wrote Colonel Richard Irving Dodge, who had fought in the Civil War before heading west to subdue the Native American population. But politics didn’t kill the bison. Economics did. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-515301392webready-0494d00-e1771951017974.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing large piles of bison hides piled up after many animals have been killed for their skins" title="Thousands of bison hides lie in huge piles in Dodge City, Kansas, 1878. Advances in chemistry enabled hides to be processed and used in belts in industrial machinery (Image by Getty Images)" /> General Philip Sheridan, another Civil War veteran who led the Indian Campaign across the Great Plains, knew as much. These hunters “have done more in the last two years… to settle the vexed Indian question than the entire regular army has done in the last 30 years”, he said. “Send them powder and lead, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated.” A combination of guns, finance and industry made the near extinction of the bison possible. New advances in firearms made the act of slaughtering bison faster and achievable from a far greater distance. Banks rushed across the Mississippi, lending money to hunters and turning them into “businessmen with rifles”. Advances in chemistry transformed the animals’ body parts into saleable commodities, especially their notoriously difficult-to-process hides. Many of these hides ended up in factories – somewhere between 2 and 6 million in England in the 1870s and 1880s alone. Skins became drive belts that were integral to the machinery of mass production in the industrial revolution. Until the advent of rubber, industrial belting was made from hides, including those of the American bison. Meanwhile, American settlers gathered millions of tonnes of bison bones. Railway companies laid down branch lines for the sole purpose of collecting the bones and shipping them east, where they were processed in places such as the Michigan Carbon Works in Detroit – that state’s largest factory before the automobile revolution. Bones were turned into fertiliser, carbon filters and inks. For a time, bison bone could be found in ‘fine bone’ china and even in mascara. Back on the Great Plains, wealth accrued by killing and bone harvesting supported the rise of farming and ranching. Read more | These three unsuspecting inventions won the American Wild West – but did they destroy it too? What unfolded on the killing fields of the US was part of a global phenomenon. Industrial capitalism’s ‘big bang’ and our current age of global warming emerged out of the greatest act of violence the planet had seen since the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago, when a meteor crashed into the Yucatán, killing off the dinosaurs and enabling the rise of mammals. The development of modern finance and the mass production of guns, bullets and gunpowder made killing for capitalism possible. This also helps explain the rapid rise to global economic dominance of the UK and the US: two countries that were adept at extracting wealth from destruction. By the first decade of the 19th century, the US’s GDP per capita was on a par with the UK’s. The economic historians Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson have written that the US became “one of the first, if not the first, [countries] to join the modern economic growth club” pioneered by the UK. The two would soon account for a large percentage of global wealth and until 1900 were responsible for most global industrial CO₂ emissions. Firearms have a long history – almost 1,000 years – but in the 18th century the flintlock musket became the ubiquitous weapon of choice. A dramatic improvement on earlier guns that used matchlocks, it was versatile and cheap to produce – the Ford Fiesta of firearms. An experienced marksman could get off three shots in a minute. Workshops and factories across the western world scrambled to meet the insatiable global demand for the new weapon. England became the world leader in musket manufacture and distribution, beginning in London’s East End before spreading to Birmingham and Liverpool. Muskets were useless without gunpowder and lead, and England had plentiful supplies of the latter. Mines in Northumberland and Derbyshire yielded thousands of tonnes of the metal each year. When it came to gunpowder, the British East India Company’s exploitation of the subcontinent’s resources proved vital, especially the principal chemical, saltpetre. The monopolistic East India Company considered its control over the saltpetre trade to be “combined and interwoven with the welfare and even with the existence of the empire in India”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL44583webready-ef1bf1a-e1771951145854.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Workers inside a brick‑walled workshop tend large heated pans built into furnaces while others handle tall conical molds set over containers, with steam rising from the equipment. Metal vessels filled with processed gunpowder materials are scattered across the floor, showing multiple stages of early gunpowder production." title="Gunpowder is made at the Woolwich Arsenal, c1750. Controlling large reserves of Indian saltpetre, an ingredient of gunpowder, Britain became a major player in arms manufacture (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> Thanks to the research of Dr Nicholas Radburn at Lancaster University, we have quite precise figures for the millions of pounds of saltpetre imported into the UK, and the overall production of British gunpowder, across the entire 18th century. Between 1698 and 1808, Britain produced more than 522 million pounds of gunpowder. Much went to its military, especially the navy, where a single shot from a 16-pound cannon used 8 pounds of powder. But more than 78 million pounds were exported to Africa, the Caribbean and what would become the United States and Canada. These are just the official numbers, though; the real totals are probably higher. In any case, that was enough powder for more than 1.25 billion musket shots – a number greater than the entire global population in 1750. Other nations got in on the action, too, especially the French and the Dutch. Americans weren’t far behind, and by the 1820s US-made weapons were being sold far and wide, especially across the Pacific Ocean and into China, where American Colt pistols were used in the 1850–64 Taiping Rebellion – one of the most catastrophic wars in human history. Plying the world with weapons was a volatile business – literally. Stores of gunpowder and saltpetre frequently exploded. The 1794 Ratcliffe Fire in London, sparked when a barge loaded with saltpetre caught fire, was the worst conflagration in the capital since 1666. It was described by The Times as “a striking and awful spectacle” – devastation on a scale not matched in London until the Blitz of 1940–41. On the other side of the Atlantic, throughout the 19th century there were almost yearly accidents at the huge DuPont explosives factory in Delaware, where a local cemetery was filled with the victims. Murder and pillage are nothing new. In fact, both are as old as our species. However, with the widespread proliferation of weapons in the 18th century, killing became infinitely easier. Read more | Did Aztec civilisation really ‘collapse’? The reality isn’t as simple as you might think This is where modern finance enters the picture. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Spanish were outstanding at pillaging, producing men such as Hernán Cortés who rampaged across Mexico. The Conquistadors ransacked from the Americas the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money, much of it in precious metals. But Spain struggled to convert wealth produced by violence into capital for investment and production – and capital is what capitalism is all about. Instead, it spent its fortunes on religious and dynastic wars, churches, art, buildings and other forms of conspicuous consumption. England’s financial transformation was a game changer, building on innovations pioneered by the Dutch in the 17th century. In the 18th century, there was a revolution in English banking, along with a tranche of developments including insurance, bonds, stock markets, patent law and an increasingly standardised currency. In the first quarter of the 19th century, the number of banks outside London increased 30-fold, and doubled in that city. London became the “capital of capital”, as the economic historian Youssef Cassis termed it, led by the Bank of England, which was established in the closing years of the 17th century. “The multiplication of banking companies,” Adam Smith wrote in The Wealth of Nations (1776), was a great example of the virtues of competition and increased public confidence in the economy. Wealth – including that generated by violence – was free to become capital. By 1820, the US had just over 300 banks. Forty years later, that number had grown to more than 1,500 – a five-fold increase, and many more than in the UK. With banking came an array of financial innovations, from insurance to stocks and bonds. Like that of its former imperial master, the US legal system protected wealth – whether it was land, money or, across the South, human beings – which meant that it was easy to transform wealth into investable capital. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL87937webready-7efb6df-e1771951291786.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A busy 19th‑century city street where a crowd of men in top hats gathers in animated discussion, while two barefoot newsboys hold up papers in the foreground. Behind them, tall commercial buildings with large signs and a horse‑drawn streetcar marked “Broadway” frame the bustling urban setting." title="Crowds throng Wall Street, New York City’s banking hub, during a financial panic in 1857. The United States’ rise as an economic heavyweight was boosted by its ability to convert the wealth it accrued from the killing of bison, beaver and whales into capital for investment (Image by Bridgeman Images)" /> This is how bison hides ended up in factories, and their bones in your ancestor’s teacup, connecting Manchester with Wyoming, halfway around the world. The connections to killing don’t stop there, though. Those factories required lighting. Sunlight alone was unacceptable to factory owners, who wanted their workers to be labouring as long as humanly (or inhumanly) possible, sometimes from five in the morning until well into the night. Until the advent of hydrocarbons such as paraffin and natural gas, it was whale oil that kept these places lit. England was soon consuming at least 50,000 barrels of the stuff each year, generating more than 3 billion lumen-hours of illumination. By the 1830s, most of the whale oil entering England ended up in its factories for lighting and lubrication. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, anywhere between a quarter and a third of sperm-whale oil (which produced the best light) harvested by American whalers made its way into factories. Whale oil was also used for lighting in Caribbean mills, where enslaved people were forced to work continuously to process the sugar-cane juice that helped provide cheap energy for the industrial working classes. Demand for lubrication and lighting in both factories and cities resulted in the mass slaughter of whales, from Greenland to the Indian Ocean. Though it is impossible to determine the exact scale of the killing, we do know that about 2 million whales were slaughtered between 1750 and 1900. Whaling produced huge profits until the number of those marine mammals dwindled, and whalers were forced to spend more time at sea, often returning home with empty casks. In the case of New England’s whale industry, profits were reinvested in a variety of businesses, from cotton mills to railways and the transition to fossil fuels in the US. One of the world’s largest textile factories – the Wamsutta Mills in New Bedford, Massachusetts – was funded by the harvesting of whales. And some of the early investors in what became John D Rockefeller’s powerful and notorious Standard Oil Company amassed their capital from hunting whales. People found many ways of turning into capital the natural resources in their surroundings. England’s land-enclosure movement was one of them, and has commonly been offered as an explanation for the development of capitalism, going back to the works of the classical political economists in the 18th and 19th centuries. But using violence to generate capital was a global process, and an ongoing one. It proved possible to turn just about anything into profit, from whales and bison to deer, beaver and African elephants – plus another mammal: Homo sapiens. The spread of guns led to a global increase in enslavement, most infamously across Africa. Beginning in the early 16th century and continuing for over 350 years, more than 12.5 million enslaved people were trafficked from Africa’s shores – by far the largest forced migration in human history. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-517213402webready-820476d-e1771951455442.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A painting depicting a slave auction. A man in a blue suit and grey top hat stands on top of a large box, talking to a crowd of gentleman, pointing towards a group of people of colour sitting on the floor, looking sad" title="Enslaved African people are sold at auction in the US, c1852. Vast numbers perished as a result of the transatlantic slave trade (Image by Getty Images)" /> However, nearly 7.9 million people – 63 per cent of the total Atlantic trade in human beings – were moved in just 60 years from the mid-18th century, during the industrial revolution and just as weapons began flooding the continent. This rapid expansion of the slave trade precisely tracks the import of gunpowder into Africa, as Nicholas Radburn has demonstrated definitively. The UK alone exported more than 26 million kg of explosives to Africa in the 18th century, most of it after 1750. Weapons yielded the greatest gains. One result, as the tyrannical King Adandozan of Dahomey (reigned 1797–1818) bragged, was a kingdom where his people “cultivated not with hoes, but with guns”. People hunting people is part of the nasty and brutish reality of enslavement. But how many people lost their lives to produce the 7.9 million people shipped across the Atlantic, where nearly 10 per cent died along the way to the Americas? I have estimated upwards of 2–3 people died to yield a single enslaved person. In other words, perhaps as many as 24 million humans perished in the flood of weapons and enslavement. Similar ratios unfolded elsewhere in the world, where guns were used to hunt people. In the south-east US – where Indigenous people were employed to hunt and enslave other Native Americans – the hunters killed three Native Americans for every one they captured. We know that profits from the transatlantic trade increased dramatically in this period, as work by Nobel-Prize-winning economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson has demonstrated. The Caribbean sugar and American cotton that made its way into workers’ cups of tea and into the English textile mills – which were releasing CO₂ and beginning to warm the Earth’s atmosphere – were tied to Africa’s killing fields. The industrial revolution and our own age of global warming are inextricably tied not just to the institution of slavery – a continuing subject of debate across the world – but also to the mass destruction of people, animals and the environment that guns and finance made possible. Read more | The profits of slavery: the dire impact of empire on Britain's countryside This is the dark reality of capitalism’s creation myth – one that historians and climate scientists are now beginning to understand. The industrial revolution and the global warming that now threatens our very existence emerged from the globalisation of killing for profit. The deaths of millions of Africans that underpinned the entire Atlantic slavery complex is only the most obvious connection. While there were other factors at play here, the wealth generated by the system of slavery “contributed causally to Britain’s industrial revolution”, according to a 2022 study. This recognition underpins many ongoing and fraught discussions, especially in the UK – most recently the February 2025 parliamentary debates on reparations, and the July 2025 University of Edinburgh report on donor links to slavery. These conversations, however, miss something very basic. History’s horrors go deeper into the totality of destruction that made our world economy – one that entangles the deaths of Africans with the slaughter of bison and whales in addition to a vast number of other species. This is one reason why the popular term ‘Anthropocene’ may not suffice, and why I have suggested a different word to describe the epoch that created our contemporary planetary peril: the ‘Mortecene’ – the Age of Killing and Death. Clifton Crais is a professor of history at Emory University. His new book is The Killing Age: How Violence Made the Modern World (Picador, 2026) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine
He's the Victorian serial killer you've never heard of – and we may now know who he was
By 1889, Jack the Ripper’s grisly murders had sparked terror across London. So when a woman’s headless, mutilated body was found near the Thames, a coded alert was dispatched to police: “Another Whitechapel.” But her killer wasn’t Jack. Lucy Worsley investigates the horrifying crimes of the ‘Thames Torso Murderer’
In the final years of the 1880s, it truly wasn’t safe for women to venture out alone onto the streets of London. Extraordinary though it seems, there was not one but two serial killers on the loose in the same corner of the capital. We’ve all heard of Jack the Ripper, the notoriously brutal criminal who cut the throats of at least five women in and around Whitechapel – and, in doing so, triggered a firestorm of speculation over his identity that continues to rage to this day. But another murderer was plying his grisly trade along the banks of the Thames. He is the scariest Victorian serial killer you’ve probably never heard of – a man who became known as the ‘Thames Torso Murderer’. Because the Ripper slayings attract so much attention, that contemporary killer has been almost completely forgotten. There may be several reasons for this. The Ripper victims were all identified, the killings took place in a shorter time within a close community, and there were various ‘clues’ and ‘sightings’. In addition, the Ripper was clearly motivated by a hot rage against women. The Torso killer, much colder and better at planning, seems less knowable. Yet though he had a very different character and method, his crimes against women were every bit as shocking. In both cases, studying the evidence for their crimes and the lives of their victims reveals a wealth of information about life on the fringes of society in 1880s London, the most populous city in the world at the time. And now, nearly 140 years since the first of the Thames Torso Murders was committed, the culprit in this very cold case has – to my satisfaction, at least – at last been identified. The evidence I’ll lay out here, which I share in my new BBC Two series, would not stand up in a court of law. But researchers using modern techniques and, in particular, analysing large sets of data, have come up with a compelling theory. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/1362213-2webready-0141b36-e1771417616576.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Black-and-white Victorian newspaper illustration about the Whitechapel murders. At the center is a circular portrait of a curly-haired woman labeled “The Berner St. Victim.” Surrounding panels show scenes from the investigation: on the left, two men stand over a covered body on a table; below, a man discovers a woman’s body lying on a dark street. In the middle foreground, a uniformed police constable raises his arm to signal for assistance while two men crouch beside another woman’s body on the ground. On the right, small panels depict a police inspector in profile, a meeting of officials seated around a table, and a nighttime street scene marked as the “fatal spot” in Mitre Square, Aldgate. A bold headline across the center reads, “Two More Whitechapel Horrors. When Will the Murderer Be Captured?”" title="Jack the Ripper’s killing spree makes the front page of The Illustrated Police News, September 1888 (Image by Topfoto)" /> Gruesome discovery On 10 September 1889, a woman’s body was found by a police constable in Whitechapel, beneath railway arches bordering Pinchin Street, placed there in the early hours of the morning. Those arches are still there; in fact, you can still walk along many of the streets, riverbanks and water-stairs that form the backdrop for this story, which unfolded mainly in central London, along the Thames between Tower Bridge and Battersea Bridge. Distressingly, only the torso was discovered beneath the arches; the legs and head had been removed. Read more | Nell Darby's historical cold cases: murder in the year of the Ripper She was the fourth such mutilated victim to turn up. Three more, also women, had already been found in and around the Thames. Each had been dismembered, their severed limbs and other body parts being discovered piecemeal by horrified members of the public. There was a torso in the river at Rainham, Essex in 1887, followed by more remains left in the city. Then, in 1888, parts were dumped at spots around Whitehall. The torso of that victim was carefully placed for discovery in the unfinished new headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, which looks very much like jeering at authority: ‘catch me if you can.’ And in June 1889, various remains from another victim were found, mostly in and around Battersea. None of the women’s heads were located. Why did police conclude at the time that all were victims of one killer? As well as the strange disposal of body parts along the Thames, there was a common method to the way the bodies were cut up. The Irish pathologist Dr Marie Cassidy, one of our experts in the series, points out that such dismemberment was slow, skilled work that must have been done in a place of privacy, perhaps a house or workshop. But a new factor in the fourth case was the placing of the torso away from the river and – perhaps not coincidentally – on territory by then deemed to ‘belong’ to the Ripper. Perhaps the Thames Torso Murderer was jealous of the media attention that ‘Jack’ had attracted. Perhaps he even wanted to taunt the Ripper by working on ‘his’ patch. A recent Dockers’ Strike, which saw 75,000 workers walk off the job, had prompted the deployment of 2,000 extra policemen into the East End. So the torso in Pinchin Street must have been placed in the railway arches very quickly and precisely between half-hourly police patrols. Carrying a torso through the streets was risky: the killer must have had nerves of steel. But this was his pattern: he’d managed to place the torso of his second victim in the middle of a busy building site without being detected. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-1645164483webready-c056b98-e1771418656980.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of a large brown brick wall curving from the right to the left, with several arch imprints on it. There is a white road sign that reads PINCHIN STREET on the right hand side. Behind this large wall, there is a tall grey and brown tower block" title="The mutilated body of a woman was found near Pinchin Street. To do this, the killer must have carried the torso through busy streets patrolled by police (Image by Getty Images)" /> The fourth murder was a little different, though, maybe because the third hadn’t gone to plan. Clearly contrary to the killer’s intentions, that victim was identified. One of the body parts had been wrapped in fabric from a distinctively checked coat. The friends of a woman who’d gone missing came forward to say they’d recognised descriptions of the garment as one belonging to Elizabeth Jackson. Elizabeth’s life story demonstrates something that was probably true of the other victims, too: that women living precariously on the fringes of society were very vulnerable. Poor Elizabeth was pregnant without being married. She had left her job in domestic service and became estranged from her Catholic family, turning to the workhouse rather than asking them for support. In the last days of her life she had been sleeping rough by the river. She had a friend called ‘Ginger Nell,’ who was described at the time as “an unfortunate”, which means she probably sold sex. Ginger Nell warned Elizabeth to look out for bad men down by the river. It was wise advice that proved sadly prescient. Read more | These are four of the most brutal Victorian murders. Were women really the perpetrators? The identity of the person who’d killed Elizabeth and her unborn child, along with the three other unnamed victims, remained a mystery. The case stumped those investigating at the time. Modern analysis of the police surgeons’ reports shows that they didn’t do a bad job of seeking clues from the human remains, but they lacked two advantages we have today: the science of psychological profiling, and the ability to search large sets of data. A history of violence The person who I believe has identified the Thames Torso Murderer is researcher and author Sarah Bax Horton. She decided that the killer must have had a close connection to the Thames, where so many body parts were found. She also thought that he likely had a history of violent crimes against women. Her real act of genius, though, was to search the online database of British newspapers within the timeframe of the four murders, looking for crime stories containing mentions of the river Thames and violence against women. Among the names emerging from her search, one stood out: James Crick (1862–1907). Crick, Bax Horton’s research reveals, was a waterman, ferrying passengers across the Thames in his skiff. His boat could have provided the private place that the murderer required in which to kill and dismember his victims. Crick operated from Horselydown Old Stairs leading to the water near Butler’s Wharf. These water-stairs are now a hotspot for tourists and Instagrammers because they offer a wonderful view of Tower Bridge. At the time of the murders in the 1880s, the bridge was still under construction. Enabling rapid river crossings, it would eventually steal watermen’s livelihoods. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/BAL2801843webready-8207f7d-e1771417994352.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration depicting a man in a long black coat and a tall black hat, rowing a boat in a river. To the left are two other men in sitting in the boat. Behind them all are some sketches of tall buildings with lots of rectangular windows" title="An 1857 illustration of a London waterman ferrying passengers on the Thames. Might the killer have been such a man, using his boat to carry off, kill and dismember women? (Image by Bridgman Images)" /> Crick was first mentioned in the papers for an alleged assault against his wife, Rosina. He’d kicked her, causing her to scream loudly enough to bring the police to their house. Rosina said that her husband was often mysteriously missing at night. But he was not convicted of any crime. Basically, Rosina wasn’t believed. Next came a report that Crick had been accused of raping 31-year-old Jessie Miller. She had a low-skilled job folding paper for the book trade, she was separated from her husband, and she was short of money. On 1 July 1889, the Shah of Persia arrived in London aboard his yacht to visit Britain’s royal family, his progress up the Thames being observed by huge crowds. On this festive day, Crick tempted Jessie into his boat with the offer of a free ride. He then “did ravish and carnally know” Jessie in his boat, but she jumped into the water and escaped. Again she was not believed in court – and, again, Crick got off. Three of the Thames torsos had been discovered before Jessie’s ordeal. The fourth was discovered that September in Pinchin Street, across the river from Horselydown Old Stairs. That October, a 39-year-old named Sarah Warburton, whose poorly paid job was to sew fur trimmings onto clothes, had the misfortune to accept a lift in Crick’s boat. An illiterate mother of three, Sarah was, like Jessie before her, separated. On this occasion, though, Crick’s luck failed. To assault Sarah, he took his skiff to an out-of-the-way spot alongside a steamer moored underneath the half-finished Tower Bridge. But she hit him on the head with an iron bolt and fled, screaming, onto the ship’s deck. There she was heard by a passing police boat, and Crick was apprehended by Inspector Charles Ford as he tried to row away. At last, James Crick was convicted. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/dreamstimexxl150941857webready-75f4182-e1771418129790.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A photograph of Tower Bridge in London, lit up at night. Taken from below, there is a set of stone steps and a railing in the foreground, with the two towers of the bridge standing in the middle of the images. The bridge is lit up with yellow lights and the sky is a dark blue behind it." title="The remains of Horselydown Old Stairs leading to the river at Tower Bridge, which was being built at the time of the murders. It was from here that waterman James Crick worked – and perhaps picked up women to kill (Image by Dreamstime)" /> I suspect that was only because Sarah’s witness statement was backed up by that of a Metropolitan Police inspector. With his support, her testimony, so bravely given and so cleverly recovered by Sarah Bax Horton, was enough to put Crick behind bars. And once he was in prison, the bodies stopped appearing along the Thames. Chillingly, Sarah also reported something Crick had said to her during the attack: “I intend to settle you, as I have done other women that have been found in the Thames.” Was that a confession? I believe so. Read more | Hallie Rubenhold: “To most people, the women killed by the Ripper are just corpses. I want to tell a different story” Unmarked graves What became of the victims? Elizabeth Jackson was given a pauper’s burial in Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey, the largest graveyard in the world at the time. The torso found in Whitehall was also buried at Brookwood; neither grave is marked. The woman found in Pinchin Street was buried in the East London Cemetery, where she didn’t even get a funeral. Records do roughly indicate where their bodies lie, and these burial grounds are moving places to visit. In death, we can give these women the remembrance and respect they deserve. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-90748470webready-76d630c-e1771418795616.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white illustration showing an arched entrance to a train station, with ornate gates across the arch. Over the arch, the words CEMETERY STATION are written. At the top of the building, the word NECROPOLIS is written. To the left of the station entrance, there is a three storey building with four windows visible" title="The London terminus for the Necropolis Railway serving Brookwood Cemetery, where third victim Elizabeth Jackson was given a pauper’s burial (Image by Getty Images)" /> I believe that the Thames Torso Murderer claimed more victims than the four we know. If he truly was James Crick, then his abused wife, Rosina, and his rape targets Jessie and Sarah were also his victims. Rosina and Sarah managed to get on with their lives. The unfortunate Jessie did not. After a spell in the workhouse, she died at the age of 43 as “a drunkard and an unfortunate under the wheels of an omnibus”. She was a casualty not only of a terrible man but also of a society offering no safety net for women who fell on hard times. Three in the frame Which of these men might have committed the Thames Torso Murders? Jack Fairclough was a one-time partner of Elizabeth Jackson, and possibly the father of her child. They lived an itinerant life together, building up debts, and witnesses report that Jack had “unnaturally used” her. The police were obviously interested in this itinerant stonemason and army deserter, but Jack could prove that, at the time of Elizabeth’s death, he’d been away from London looking for work. James Hardiman was a cats’ meat man, a door-to-door pet-food salesman who worked with a barrow that would have been ideal for transporting a torso through London’s streets. The body of Ripper victim Annie Chapman was found in his mother’s backyard in Hanbury Street, Whitechapel, leading some to speculate that Hardiman was both Jack and the Thames Torso Murderer. However, their methods of killing seem too different. James Crick was a waterman who rowed passengers on the Thames in his boat Ally Sloper. Crick had the physical strength to commit the crimes. He also had the perfect means of distributing the body parts by water, and his boat could have provided a place where he could have dismembered the bodies out of sight. He had a history of violence against women, too. After Sarah Warburton, the target of his final identifiable rape attempt, gave testimony at trial, he was convicted and imprisoned – and the killings on the river ceased. (He was released in 1902, and died in 1907.) Crick, then, must be considered the prime suspect. This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine