Chronicle of 20th century murder

The escalation of crime and its detection in this century has been punctuated by what crime writers call classics and criminologists refer to as landmarks. These are the cases which have endured in the minds of writers and social scientists but which have also entered popular mythology: Dr Crippen, Bonnie and Clyde, the Yorkshire Ripper and Mad Charlie Manson. The last nine decades has seen the rise of the motiveless murder and the serial killer, the development of forensic science and the use of DNA and psychological profiling as tools in the hunt against the killers. This book examines every major murder case this century in the light of its investigative, forensic, social or legal significance. Here are the cases of Timothy Evans, a man with a mental age of ten hanged for a crime of which he was patently innocent; Dennis Nilsen, the man who "killed for company"; John Thaw, the sadomasochist whose defence for murder was the "American right to defend womanhood"; and Ruth Ellis, whose execution hastened the abolition of the barbarous death penalty.