1975: The Yorkshire Ripper Claims His First Victim

Wilma McCann, a mother of four, left a Leeds nightclub to walk home on the night of 30 October 1975 and never made it back. She was found the next morning on a playing field, stabbed and beaten, the first of thirteen women Peter Sutcliffe would kill over the next five years as the Yorkshire Ripper evaded capture despite one of the largest manhunts in British police history.

The damage did not end with her death. In 2007, more than three decades later, her eldest daughter Sonia took her own life, never having recovered from losing her mother as a child. It meant the Ripper's toll outlived his capture and his sentencing, reaching into a generation he never touched directly.

Leeds Town Hall, Leeds.
Leeds Town Hall, Leeds.

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1988: Harold Shipman Killed His 55th Patient, a Decade Before Anyone Stopped Him

Alice Prestwich was just another house call for a family doctor trusted by an entire community. Harold Shipman gave the 69-year-old widow a lethal injection of morphine at her home in Hyde, Greater Manchester, on 20 October 1988, the same quiet routine he had already used on dozens of elderly patients before her. She became his 55th confirmed victim, and not one soul suspected a thing.

Shipman kept practising, and killing, for another ten years, forging wills and helping himself to his victims' assets along the way, before a suspicious bequest finally exposed him in 1998. An official inquiry later concluded he had killed at least 215 patients, making him the most prolific serial killer in British history.

Dr Death - Harold Shipman
Dr Death - Harold Shipman

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1216: The Poison Toad Theory Behind the Death of King John of England

Legend has it that King John of England was not felled by illness but by a monk's revenge. Staying at Swineshead Abbey in Lincolnshire that October, John allegedly threatened to starve his own kingdom with crushing bread prices; a monk is said to have milked a toad for its venom, mixed it into a cup of ale, and drunk from it himself before serving the king, to prove the drink was safe. The monk reportedly died first in the abbey infirmary, and John followed him within hours.

The king, already infamous for the Magna Carta he was forced to sign and then tried to annul, died at Newark Castle on 19 October 1216 as a rebel army closed in on his crumbling kingdom. The poisoning story only surfaces in a chronicle written decades later for John's old enemies, the barons; most contemporary accounts agree he died of dysentery, the far less dramatic verdict most historians still accept today.

Tomb of King John of England in Worcester Cathedral
Tomb of King John of England in Worcester Cathedral

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1989: The Confession That Was Buried for 12 Years: the Guildford Four Finally Freed

The Guildford Four were four young people wrongly convicted over a pub bombing campaign carried out by the IRA in Guildford, England, in 1974, and sentenced to life in prison after detectives extracted confessions during lengthy, uncharged interrogations. Three of the convicted were in their early twenties; the youngest was still a teenager.

Within a few years an IRA unit known as the Balcombe Street Gang admitted in custody that they, not the four, had carried out the attack, but the confession was dismissed and the convictions stood. It took more than a decade, and the discovery that police had secretly rewritten interview notes to match the statements used at trial, before the case collapsed. On 19 October 1989, after 15 years behind bars, the Guildford Four walked free.

Gerry Conlon, One of the Guildford Four, wrongly jailed for the Guildford pub bombings in Surrey, England, at a book launch in London on June 11, 1990. | ID 11134005 © David Fowler | Dreamstime.com
ID 11134005 © David Fowler | Dreamstime.com

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