Brisbane 1952 - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

James Shaw: Highwayman and Murderer of the Hampstead Road

James Shaw is a man who cannot settle. Born into a family with the means to set him on a respectable path, he drifts through one trade after another, never sticking, never satisfied; Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures him at the precise moment restlessness curdles into something far more dangerous.

He blames a negligent wife, he blames circumstance, but beneath every excuse lies a temperament that finds honest labour unbearable. It is a story that belongs to the oldest tradition of true crime: the man who convinces himself that taking from others is no crime at all.

The Hampstead Road stretches ahead of him in the dark, full of coaches and strangers and the particular kind of trouble that cannot be undone. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells what happens next; let it speak in its own voice.

James Shaw: Highwayman and Murderer of the Hampstead Road

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Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.

Unsettledness: today we might say ‘restlessness’ or ‘instability,’ but in the early eighteenth century this word carried a sharper edge. It suggested a constitutional defect, a soul that refused to be governed; not merely fidgeting, but a deep incapacity for the discipline that society demanded.

Forger of gun-locks: nothing to do with forgery in the criminal sense. A forger here is a metalworker, someone who shapes iron at a forge. Shaw learns enough of this honest trade to occasionally earn money by it, though he prefers to earn it other ways entirely.

Footpad: a highway robber who operates on foot rather than on horseback. The distinction mattered enormously in this era; the mounted highwayman could at least pretend to a certain glamour, while the footpad was seen as the lowest and most brutal kind of street predator.

Goldfinches: Shaw uses this as slang for gold coins. When he tells his victims he ‘fancied the goldfinches were not yet flown,’ he means he suspects there is far more money hidden in the coach. It is a piece of criminal wit, delivered at swordpoint.

Knights of the road: an ironic, almost affectionate term for highwaymen, borrowing the language of chivalry to describe armed robbery. The phrase was common in the period and captures the strange way popular culture romanticised men who were, by law, common felons.

Committed: in legal usage, to be committed meant to be formally sent to prison by a magistrate to await trial. It did not imply conviction; it meant the wheels of justice had begun turning, and they rarely turned in the prisoner’s favour.

Tile kilns by Pancras: the brick and tile kilns that stood near the parish of St Pancras, then a semi-rural area on London’s northern fringe. It was exactly the kind of lonely, industrial borderland where footpads thrived; close enough to the city for victims, remote enough for violence.

Pinder of Wakefield: a well-known tavern near the Gray’s Inn Road area. Named after a figure from Robin Hood legend, it served in this story as the place where a dying man was carried after being attacked; a grim irony, given its folkloric associations with outlawry.

Fact: in eighteenth century legal language, ‘fact’ often meant ‘deed’ or ‘criminal act.’ When the text says ‘for a fact of murder,’ it means for the deed of murder; the word had a harder, more accusatory weight than it does today.

About This Series

Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is one of the earliest works of true crime writing in the English language, nearly 300 years old, covering murderers, thieves, highwaymen, forgers, coiners and worse.

The book is entirely in the public domain and every word of it can be read today for free. But if you would rather listen, this podcast does exactly that: one criminal at a time, every week, read aloud.

True crime was not invented by podcasts or streaming services. Eighteenth century readers were just as fascinated by outlaws and killers as we are today. They just consumed their dark stories by candlelight.

The voice you hear is David Dark: crime researcher, theatre script writer, producer of live immersive experiences, and audiobook narrator and voice artist. This podcast uses an AI voice model trained on David’s own voice, built using the maximum available training data to faithfully represent how he actually sounds. To hear David’s real voice in human generated form, visit him on Audible, Online Stage, Voices of Today, Spoken Realms, and Internet Archive.

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James Wright: The Weeping Highwayman of the Old Bailey

by Davros Dark

A respectable wigmaker on the Old Bailey begins to spend faster than he earns, drawn into pleasures he cannot afford and will not abandon. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures his slide with quiet precision: James Wright does not turn to crime out of malice but out of want, a man whose appetites gnaw through his livelihood until nothing remains but the road.

What makes Wright linger in the annals of true crime is not his daring but his conscience. He is described as a highwayman who could hardly rob a traveller without weeping, a man forever promising himself he would stop, forever failing to keep that promise.

The tension between remorse and repetition shapes everything that follows, a loop of guilt and need tightening around a man who cannot break free. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells his story in full; listen now and step into the dimly lit world of a criminal who could never quite harden his own heart.

James Wright: The Weeping Highwayman of the Old Bailey

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Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.

Malefactor: today this word sounds almost theatrical, something pulled from a superhero film. In the eighteenth century it was deadly serious: a malefactor was simply a person who committed a crime, a wrongdoer in the eyes of the law. It carried no dramatic flair; it was the plain, official label pinned to anyone awaiting judgement.

Peruke-maker: a maker of perukes, which is to say wigs. In Georgian England the wig trade was a legitimate and often lucrative craft, serving everyone from lawyers to gentlemen of fashion. To be apprenticed to a peruke-maker was a perfectly respectable start in life; the fact that Wright had one makes his fall all the sharper.

Equipage: today this word is virtually extinct, but in the 1700s it referred to the carriage, horses, servants and general outfit a wealthy person travelled with. Wright used equipage as his guide; the finer the coach and livery, the fatter the target.

Villainies: not the cartoonish scheming the word might conjure now, but a straightforward plural for criminal acts. In this era it carried real legal weight; a list of villainies was a list of offences that could send a person to the gallows.

Impeached: in modern usage we think of presidents and parliamentary proceedings, but in eighteenth century criminal slang, to be impeached meant to be informed upon by an associate. It was betrayal dressed in legal clothes: one thief turning evidence against another to save his own skin.

Assizes: the travelling courts that moved through the English counties, bringing the full power of royal justice to provincial towns. The assizes at Kingston, where Wright was tried and acquitted on one occasion, were periodic sessions where serious criminal cases were heard by visiting judges.

Ignominious: bearing public shame and disgrace. Wright uses the word when speaking of the death that awaits him, and in the context of a public hanging it is precise; the punishment was designed not merely to kill but to humiliate, serving as a spectacle of disgrace for all who watched.

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Richard James: The Highwayman of the Oxford Road

by Davros Dark

Richard James comes into the world already half abandoned: the son of a nobleman’s cook, fatherless before he can remember, cast to sea at twelve years old. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals recounts his story, what emerges is a man shaped less by malice than by a relentless current of misfortune; a figure whose slide toward highway robbery feels almost inevitable, and who belongs to the long, dark tradition of true crime that stretches from Georgian England to our own restless fascination with outlaws.

Captured by Spaniards, taken by pirates, abandoned by a wife who declared him dead while he still breathed: every return to England strips away another reason to live honestly. By the time he turns to the Oxford Road with violence in his hands, there is almost nothing left of the boy who once crossed oceans just to come home.

The road ahead for Richard James narrows with every robbery, and the Georgian world he inhabits does not forgive men without friends or fortune. Hear his full story read aloud from Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals; it waits for you now.

Richard James: The Highwayman of the Oxford Road

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Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.

Disobliged: today we might use this word lightly, meaning to mildly offend or inconvenience someone. In eighteenth century usage it carried far more weight; to disoblige your friends was to sever ties, to alienate those whose goodwill was your only safety net. When Richard James ‘disobliged’ his few remaining friends, the text is telling us he burned every bridge he had.

Betake him: a construction that sounds strange to modern ears, meaning simply to take himself off to something; to resort to an occupation or course of action. James ‘betook him’ to the sea the way a man might shrug and walk toward the only door still open.

Viz.: short for the Latin ‘videlicet,’ meaning ‘namely’ or ‘that is to say.’ Writers of this period used it the way we might use ‘i.e.’ or ‘in other words.’ Here it introduces the blunt truth of James’s new career with almost clinical precision.

Waggoners: not simply drivers but the men who hauled goods along the major roads in heavy horse-drawn wagons. They were frequent targets for highwaymen because they travelled predictable routes, moved slowly, and often carried cargo worth stealing. Robbing a waggoner was less glamorous than holding up a coach, but far more reliable.

Reprieve: in Georgian criminal justice, a reprieve was a temporary suspension of a death sentence, often granted by royal mercy or through the intercession of powerful friends. It did not mean acquittal; it meant a pause, a breath of time in which fate might be renegotiated. That James claims he would refuse one even if offered tells us something chilling about the man.

Inclinable: meaning disposed toward or willing. A word that has faded from everyday speech but once served as the standard way of saying someone was leaning toward a decision. James’s companions were ‘inclinable’ to return the lady’s possessions; James himself was not.

Ignominious: a word still in use but rarely felt as sharply as it was in the eighteenth century, when public execution was designed to be a spectacle of shame as much as a punishment of death. An ignominious death was one that marked you before the crowd as something lower than human; the disgrace was considered part of the sentence.

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John Wigley: The Lone Highwayman of Finchley Common

by Davros Dark

A plasterer by trade, John Wigley abandons honest work early and slides into what Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals calls ‘felonious methods of getting money.’ His is a solitary brand of criminality; he rides out alone onto the dark roads around the commons north of London, trusting no one, convinced that gangs always betray themselves in the end.

This true crime story from the early eighteenth century carries the smell of damp hedgerows and cheap brandy. Wigley drifts between a woman who sells spirits on the common and a life spent prowling the highways, always alone, always suspicious of companionship.

The roads he haunts are patient places, but the justice of Georgian England is not, and something is closing in on the lone highwayman who refuses to trust anyone but himself. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells his story in full; listen now and walk those dark roads beside him.

John Wigley: The Lone Highwayman of Finchley Common

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Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.

Bred: today we might say someone was ‘raised’ or ‘trained,’ but in the eighteenth century to be ‘bred’ to a trade meant you had been apprenticed in it from youth. It carried weight: your breeding was your destiny, and to abandon it was a moral as well as a practical failure.

Ill courses: a phrase that sounds almost gentle to modern ears, but it meant a sustained pattern of criminal or immoral behaviour. Not a single mistake; a chosen path, walked deliberately and repeatedly.

Benighted: today this word means ignorant or unenlightened, used as a metaphor. In this text it is purely literal: to be benighted was to be overtaken by nightfall while travelling, stranded in the dark. On the roads around London, being benighted could be fatal for reasons that had nothing to do with weather.

Confederacies in villainy: a wonderfully heavy phrase for criminal gangs. A ‘confederacy’ implied an organised alliance, almost a conspiracy. The text uses it to describe the very partnerships Wigley despised, believing that sworn oaths among thieves always crumbled when their lives were at stake.

Receded from: to recede from a resolution meant to abandon or retreat from a decision you had made. It carries a sense of weakness; Wigley’s whole philosophy rests on working alone, and the moment he recedes from that principle, everything changes.

Rapine: a word that has all but vanished from everyday English. It meant the violent seizure of property; plunder by force. It is distinct from mere theft; rapine carries the connotation of aggression, of taking things at the point of a weapon.

Malefactor: a criminal or wrongdoer, drawn from Latin roots meaning ‘one who does evil.’ It was a common courtroom and literary term in the eighteenth century, carrying a solemnity that the word ‘criminal’ sometimes lacks. When you hear it in this episode, imagine it spoken by a judge.

Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

About This Series

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

About This Series

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

About This Series

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.

About This Series

Spread the word on your favourite platform!

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