Mysteries and Histories

In 1483, 12-year-old King Edward V and his nine-year-old brother, Richard, Duke of York, were placed in the Tower of London by their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, while Edward awaited his coronation. Instead, Richard took the crown as Richard III and the boys vanished from public view that summer, never to be seen alive again.
Most historians believe the princes were murdered, with Richard III long considered the likeliest person to have ordered it because their deaths removed the strongest rivals to his throne. But there is no conclusive contemporary proof, and competing theories remain.
In 1674, workmen found two child skeletons beneath a staircase in the Tower; they were later buried in Westminster Abbey as the princes’ presumed remains. Yet they have never been conclusively identified using modern forensic testing, so one of England’s most haunting royal mysteries remains unsolved.

At 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, a rented Ryder truck packed with explosives detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The blast destroyed much of the building, killed 168 people, including 19 children in a daycare centre and injured hundreds more.
The bomber was Timothy McVeigh, a former Army soldier whose anti-government extremism had hardened into violence. He was stopped on a weapons charge less than 90 minutes after the bombing, and investigators quickly connected him to the truck and the attack. McVeigh was convicted in 1997 and executed in 2001; his co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, received life in prison.
For America, Oklahoma City was a brutal awakening. It showed that mass-casualty terrorism could come not from abroad, but from within and it left a city, hundreds of survivors, and the families of 168 victims carrying the consequences forever.

Graham Young was only 14 when he began secretly slipping poison into his family’s food and tea, treating their sickness like a private scientific experiment and recording the effects in his diary. His stepmother, Molly, died after he poisoned her with thallium; his father, sister, and a school friend were also poisoned, and Young was sent to Broadmoor rather than prison.academic.
But after just eight years, he was released and given a job at a Hertfordshire factory, where colleagues began collapsing with agonising stomach pain, paralysis, and mysterious “flu-like” symptoms. Young had returned to the teacups, poisoning workers with antimony and thallium; two men, Bob Egle and Fred Biggs, died before forensic evidence and his own obsessive notes exposed him.
Known forever as the Teacup Poisoner, Young was convicted in 1972 and sentenced to life imprisonment, a chilling case not only because of what he did, but because the system once believed he was safe enough to be set free.

On Easter Sunday in 1955, Ruth Ellis waited outside a Hampstead pub for her lover, racing driver David Blakely, then shot him dead in the street as he walked toward his car. She confessed almost immediately, but the story behind that final act was tangled with years of domestic abuse, coercion, infidelity, violence, and a legal system that gave the 28-year-old nightclub manager just one route to the gallows.
Her trial lasted only days, the jury deliberated for less than half an hour, and just three months after the shooting, Ruth was hanged at Holloway Prison, becoming the last woman executed in Britain. More than 70 years later, she received a conditional posthumous pardon, not because she was declared innocent, but because her case came to represent something far darker: how the death penalty could erase a woman’s life story as easily as it ended her life.

In 1971, an off-duty constable walking near an abandoned flint mill beside the River Trent in Burton upon Trent found what he first thought was a piece of cement, until he saw it was part of a human skull. Beneath the earth lay the skeletal remains of a young man, naked, bound hand and foot, and buried in a shallow grave in a kneeling position, with only pink socks and a wedding ring left to suggest he had once belonged somewhere.
More than five decades later, he is still known only as “Fred the Head”, a nickname born from the first body part uncovered, not a name anyone who loved him ever gave him. Fingerprints, dental work, facial reconstructions, DNA testing, and possible matches have all failed to restore his identity, making him Staffordshire’s oldest unsolved murder victim: a man who was brutally hidden away, but never reported missing by anyone police could find.