Nineteen-year-old Yolanda Washington was last seen getting into a car near a Los Angeles intersection one October evening in 1977. The next morning her body was found on a hillside near the Ventura Freeway, the first known victim of the killers soon dubbed the Hillside Stranglers.
Her killers were cousins Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, who had lured her with the promise of a ride before attacking and strangling her. Washington, who worked as a waitress and sometimes turned to sex work, was the opening victim in a killing spree that would terrorise the city for months before the cousins were finally caught.
Hillside Strangler: Aerial view of rush hour traffic on the 101 Ventura Freeway
John Thomson grows up in London among dishonest company, learning the taste of easy money before he ever learns a trade. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals records how this weaver’s apprentice abandons his loom for the sea, where years of plunder and bloodshed remake him into something harder than the boy who left the shore.
When Thomson finally returns to land, the violence he has absorbed does not stay at sea. His story is the kind of true crime account that reveals how a man’s character can curdle slowly, shaped by poverty, restlessness, and the grim education of wartime waters.
The streets of Georgian London wait for men like Thomson; and the law waits too. Hear the full account now, drawn directly from the pages of Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, and listen as the past speaks for itself.
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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.
Listed himself: today we might say ‘enlisted,’ but in the early eighteenth century the word was simply ‘listed.’ It meant signing up for military or naval service, often on impulse, and it carried a weight of finality; once listed, you belonged to the Crown.
Man-of-war: not a warrior but a warship. A man-of-war was a vessel built and armed for combat, crewed by pressed or volunteered sailors who lived in conditions brutal enough to make a London slum look comfortable. Thomson served aboard one and came home changed.
Prizes: in naval usage, a prize was an enemy ship captured during wartime along with its cargo. Seizing prizes was legal plunder; crews received shares of the spoils, and a good cruise could make a common sailor rich. The word carried none of the innocent connotation it holds today; it smelled of gunpowder and salt water.
Persons of no substance: this did not mean they lacked personality. Substance here means material wealth and social standing. Thomson’s parents were poor, without property or reputation, and the phrase carried a quiet judgment: people of no substance were people who could not be trusted to raise a child properly.
Creditable method of life: a way of living that earned you credit in the eyes of society; respectable, honest, worthy of trust. Thomson’s shipmates managed it. Thomson did not.
Debauched: the word still exists, but in the eighteenth century it carried heavier moral freight. To live a debauched life meant not merely to drink too much but to have been thoroughly corrupted; turned away from all discipline, all order, all decency. Thomson’s chronicler uses it to describe a boy who had never so much as opened a Bible.
Fact: today a fact is a piece of verified truth. In Georgian legal language, a fact was a deed; specifically, a criminal deed. When the text says Thomson was ‘apprehended soon after this fact,’ it means he was caught shortly after committing the crime itself.
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.
O.J. Simpson, the former football star, stood accused of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman outside her Los Angeles home in June 1994. The trial became a media spectacle, dominating television and public debate across the United States and beyond. The defense seized on a single moment: prosecutors had Simpson try on the bloody glove found at the scene, and it appeared too tight to fit. Defense attorney Johnnie Cochran turned the moment into a rallying cry, “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” and on October 3, 1995, the jury returned a not guilty verdict after less than four hours of deliberation.
William Burridge grows up strong, handsome, and restless in Northamptonshire, a young man built for the wrestling ring and the cudgel match but never for the carpenter’s bench his father sets him to. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures him at the pivot point: a boy indulged too long, slipping easily from stolen poultry at country fairs to something far darker on the open road.
His is the kind of story that feeds the oldest appetite in true crime: a man whose physical gifts and inflated sense of his own worth carry him past every warning and every second chance. The praise he wins only sharpens his hunger for a life unburdened by honest labour.
Ahead of him lies a world of highways, prisons, and the slow tightening of a justice system that never forgets a name. Hear the full account read aloud from Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals; let this nearly three hundred year old voice pull you into the Georgian darkness.
Click the RSS feed link below to subscribe and get new episodes the moment they drop.
Subscribe via RSS
Dark Lexicon: Old words. Dark meaning.
The past speaks its own dialect; here is what to listen for in this episode.
The vulgar: today this word means crude or obscene, but in the eighteenth century it simply meant the common people; the ordinary masses. When the text says the vulgar have false notions of courage, it is not insulting anyone’s manners; it is saying that everyday folk misunderstand what bravery really is, and that misunderstanding can ruin a man.
Cudgel-playing: a rough sport in which two opponents battered each other with short, heavy sticks, trying to draw blood from the head. It was a fixture of country fairs and wakes, and winning earned a man the kind of local fame that could go straight to his skull; in more ways than one.
Junketting: not a spelling error but an older form of junketing, meaning feasting, carousing, and generally having a wild time. Burridge’s particular flavour of junketting involved servant girls in the neighbourhood, which tells you everything about where his priorities lay.
Man-of-war: a warship; specifically a vessel in the Royal Navy armed and crewed for battle. Burridge’s family hoped the discipline of naval service would straighten him out. The sea had other plans.
Becoming evidence: this phrase meant turning informer; offering testimony against your fellow criminals in exchange for your own life. It was a desperate bargain, and the courts knew exactly how to exploit it. A man who became evidence bought time, but rarely bought trust.
Wakes: in this context, not funeral vigils but annual parish festivals; loud, drunken, communal celebrations that often featured wrestling, cudgel bouts, and other rough entertainments. They were the proving grounds where young men like Burridge built dangerous reputations.
Bay gelding: a castrated male horse with a reddish brown coat. Stealing one was no petty matter; horses were enormously valuable property, and horse theft was treated as a serious felony that could carry the heaviest of consequences.
Old Bailey: London’s central criminal court, standing next to Newgate Prison. For centuries it was the last courtroom many defendants would ever see. Its name alone carried weight enough to make a hardened man go pale.
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