Merseyside Murders Of The 1920s

Interwar Liverpool was a hard place to live. Though the chronic living conditions were being tackled through widespread slum clearance, for some the pressures of poverty, unemployment, post-war trauma & uncertainty took their toll. Many of the cases in this collection of murders show all too well how bleak life could be.

Shocking historic murders from around Merseyside

In this compelling study of true crime, Liverpool's most popular author Tom Slemen recounts some of the most intriguing and baffling murders of Merseyside such as:• The baffling case of the Victorian canned corpse• The magistrate's beautiful granddaughter who was killed by a crazed admirer• The condemned man who was hanged twice• Frederick Deeming - the Rainhill psychopath who wiped out his own family and danced on their grave with his next victim• The bizarre link between a South Seas cult and the housewife who was stabbed fourteen times in her Knotty Ash home by a killer who struck under the cover of a fog• The unsolved case of the superintendent and his son who died of gunshot wounds under mysterious circumstances - in a police station• The enigmatic murder of Julia Wallace - and a very credible solution• The only assassination of a British prime minister - by a Liverpool businessmanPlus many more fascinating murder cases.This fascinating book is a must for all readers of true crime in general and Liverpudlians and Merseysiders in particular.

The 43 murders recounted in this fascinating book range from the downright evil to the heartbreakingly sad, and the ways in which they were dealt with by the police and courts of the time are both interesting and revealing. A great piece of social history with additional material on issues such as hanging, infanticide, drunkenness, unemployment and religion.

On October 8th, 1920 the body of a young woman named Kate Lilian Bailey, aged 22, was discovered. It transpired that her husband, George Arthur Bailey, had poisoned his pregnant wife with prussic acid, and sedated his young daughter. George was known as the 'musical milkman' because he could be heard whistling while on his daily milk rounds.

This text tells the story of the murderous activities of an infamous killing syndicate operating in the heart of the Victorian city. The money-making enterprise involved a complicated 'web' of ordinary women from a poor area of Liverpool who conspired to insure & then poison their victims for the insurance pay out.

The thirty-three cases in this excellent book give a unique and fascinating insight into life in the Victorian period, in Liverpool and beyond.