Crime and punishment

Prohibition protesters parade in a car emblazoned with signs and flags calling for the repeal of the 18th Amendment, which outlawed the production and consumption of alcohol in the United States. (Archive Photos/Getty Images)

“A great social experiment”: your guide to prohibition

An aerial view showing the courtroom during the Nuremberg Trials, November 1945. (Photo by Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

Second World War

Forgotten trials: the other side of Nuremberg

Helen Duncan, a 20th-century medium and spiritualist, allegedly summoned spirits draped in ‘ectoplasm’ – organic matter emitted from her body. In the 1930s she was denounced as a fraud, and in 1944 prosecuted under the 1735 Witchcra Act, which forbade conjuring spirits. (Photo courtesy of Ashmolean Museum/University of London)

Conjuring up the dead: Helen Duncan and her ectoplasm spirits

A portrait of Sir Walter Ralegh, a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, c1588. (Photo by ACTIVE MUSEUM / Alamy Stock Photo)

“The rankest traitor in all England?” Walter Ralegh on trial

An engraving from 'The Illustrated Police News', c1889, imagines Jack the Ripper

Your guide to Jack the Ripper

Five theories about Jack the Ripper's identity. (Photo by dreamstime.com)

The Ripper of our nightmares: 5 theories about Jack the Ripper’s identity

The ‘Princes in the Tower’: Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York, disappeared in mysterious circumstances following the death of their father, King Edward IV. (The Print Collector/Print Collector/Getty Images)

6 notorious unsolved crimes from history

Ruth Ellis and her friend Desmond Cussen

Ruth Ellis and the hanging that rocked a nation

An 1870s illustration of a typical London artisan terraced houses with washhouses, privies and yards leading on to an alley, all dominated by railway viaducts. (Photo by Oxford Science Archive/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Victorian London’s East End: what can a foul murder tell us about life in the city?

Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico's left-wing president who in 1940 legalised drugs. (Photo by Henry Guttmann/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The year Mexico legalised drugs

John Bellingham Who Shot the Hon. Spencer Percival Print

The assassination of prime minister Spencer Perceval: a popular murder?

Four police officers, members of the Bow Street Horse Patrol, pose for a photograph with a horse.

The rise of the Great British ‘bobby’: a brief history of Britain’s police service

"For those of noble birth who were condemned to die, execution by beheading (which was considered the least brutal method of execution) was used until the 18th century," says Seal. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

A brief history of capital punishment in Britain

Operators dealing with emergency calls at New Scotland Yard, London, c1956. (Photo by Reg Speller/Getty Images)

5 crimes that changed law enforcement in Britain