Dr Sam Shepphard had it all – a brilliant career, a beautiful wife, a young family, and a gorgeous house overlooking Lake Eerie. Then, on Independence Day 1954, his dream life came tumbling down. A bushy-haired burglar broke into the Sheppard residence and beat pregnant Marilyn Sheppard to death while she slept. At least, that was Dr Sheppard's story, and he stuck to it. But the police and the courts were dubious – and the events of that summer night in Bay View, Ohio, would echo down the...

He was suave, sophisticated, and a psycho killer through and through. Arthur Warren Waite's get-rich-quick plan involved the systematic murders of his parents-in-law, his wife, and any of her relatives who got in the way. Waite was as audacious as he was ruthless. But could his jaw-dropping legal defence save him from the high-voltage embrace of Ol' Sparky? Step back in time to New York in its heyday – and the dastardly deeds of the Deadly Dentist!

Why did Lee Harvey Oswald shoot JFK? We’ll never know. Jack Ruby saw to that. But we do know why Sirhan Bishara Sirhan assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in 1968. Sirhan was captured. And over the course of his life sentence, he’s gone on record about what motivated him. Patrick Magee, the Brighton bomber, is less talkative. Magee tried to blow up Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet in 1984 – and he almost succeeded. Magee was a terrorist, a member of the Irish Republican Army....

The Metropolitan Police is without a Commissioner following the resignation of Dame Cressida Dick as London's police chief. A recent report about racist and sexist officers was one of many controversies she faced. Among the cases covered by Psycho Killer are: - The murder of Sarah Everard by Wayne Couzens, a serving police officer (https://bit.ly/sarah-everard-wayne-couzens) - The murder of Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman by Danyal Hussein (https://bit.ly/danyal-hussein) - The investigation...

Advisory: injury detail Not much is known about William Sheward, a Victorian tailor-turned-pawnbroker. He loved the company of women – except, it seems, his wife. Did he marry her for love, or for money? Was William climbing the social ladder, or cooking up a get-rich-quick scheme? The couple had a fiery relationship that flared up when they hit hard times. Their fall from grace preceded possibly the most gruesome crime ever committed in Norfolk — the Norwich Tabernacle Street Murder....

In the fortnight before Christmas 2006, the bodies of five missing women were discovered at locations near Ipswich in Suffolk. There was a serial killer on the loose and the police had to act fast. God only knew what he'd do if he wasn't stopped – and stopped quickly. This podcast goes behind the scenes of the hunt for the psycho killer Steve Wright, with insight and analysis from our resident homicide investigator, Jacques Morrell. And we remember the women whose lives Wright cruelly cut...

It started with the unexplained deaths of four young, gay men, whose bodies were found in Barking, East London. It led to the conviction of Stephen Port, whose warped fantasies drove him to administer lethal doses of the date-rape drug, GHB. But the case of the Grindr Killer is far from over, with calls for a Public Enquiry into allegations of institutionalised homophobia at the Metropolitan Police. But why did the 'catalogue of errors' come about? How were crucial errors made? Were...

Part 3 of 3 Question: you've just killed someone; what's the quickest way to dispose of the body? If you live in northern Queensland, Australia, a simple answer presents itself. Dump the corpse in a crocodile-infested river. The "salties", as Australians call them, will do the rest. That was Matthew White's plan after he murdered Donna Steele in Cooktown. But the plan backfired spectacularly thanks to advances in forensic science and a one-in-a-million DNA match. The third and final part...

Part 2 of 3 16-year-old Colette Aram had her whole life in front of her. But on Halloween 1986 she encountered Paul Stewart Hutchinson as he cruised her home village in Nottinghamshire in a stolen car. Hutchinson abducted Colette, raped and murdered her. Then he simply disappeared. 25 years later, police reopened the investigation. In this podcast, we go behind the scenes of the Colette Aram cold case with Psycho Killer's Jacques Morrell. He was part of the team that collared Hutchinson...

Part 1 of 3 This psycho killer made Jack the Ripper look like a choirboy. Joseph James DeAngelo Jr. committed at least 13 murders, 50 rapes, and 120 burglaries across California between 1974 and 1986. Born on 8 November 1945, DeAngelo served in the US Navy during the Vietnam war. Afterwards, he joined the police but was fired for gross misconduct. Before he was unmasked, DeAngelo was known as the Night Stalker, the Original Night Stalker, the Visalia Ransacker, and the East Area Rapist....

Advisory: violence, strong language. When three young men disappeared in a small Yorkshire town, the finger of suspicion pointed to the local troublemaker. Paul Anthony Hobson was the president of the West Riding chapter of the Hell's Angels. He and his rag-tag gang of impressionable followers were behind most of the antisocial behaviour in Garforth, near Leeds. But was loud-mouthed Tony Hobson a killer? Even hardened detectives were shocked by what they found.

Pre-sentencing reports are being prepared on David Fuller, the self-confessed murderer who also admitted sexually abusing more than 100 dead bodies in a hospital mortuary. Fuller was unmasked s the 1987 Tunbridge Wells Bedsit Killer by DNA evidence. He'd lived a normal life under the noses of the police for more than three decades. Detectives stumbled upon evidence of his other, sickening crimes when they raided his home in East Sussex. Simon Ford, writer and journalist, and former major...

David Fuller, an electrician from Kent, will go into the history books as Britain's most prolific necrophile. He confessed to nearly 80 offences at the hospital where he worked for three decades. Fuller, 67, was on trial for the murders of two women in the 1980s. He'd been living an outwardly normal life until DNA evidence put him in the crosshairs of a police investigation. Jacques Morrell was a major crime detective for 30 years. He worked on homicides and complex investigations into...

Visit our website https://psycho-killer.co for exclusive videos, photos, articles, and transcripts. Psycho killers Danyal Hussein and Wayne Couzens should be executed for their crimes, according to DCS (Ret.) Bob Taylor, the former head of West Yorkshire CID. This week, teenager Hussein was jailed for 35 years for stabbing to death two sisters at a park in Wembley, north-west London. He murdered Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in a supposed "sacrifice" he believed would give him a lottery...

Visit our website https://psycho-killer.co for exclusive videos, photos, articles, and transcripts. Firearms regulation in Great Britain is among the strictest in the world. So it's hard for us to comprehend the accidental shooting of a crew member by the film star Alec Baldwin using a 'prop gun'. What is the difference between a supposedly harmless prop and a real, deadly firearm? What are the laws governing gun ownership in the UK? How are British TV shows and movies regulated? Why don't...

Visit our website https://psycho-killer.co for exclusive videos, photos, articles, and transcripts. Last week a new name was added to the roll-call of British parliamentarians who've died violent deaths in the course of their duties. Sir David Amess MP, who was 69, was fatally stabbed while meeting people in the constituency he represented. A man has been detained and is being questioned in connection with Sir David's murder, which police are treating as a terrorist incident. Jacques...

Visit our website https://psycho-killer.co for exclusive videos, photos, articles, and transcripts. This episode contains graphic content of a sexual nature that you might find upsetting. We know because we were. But we decided the story needed to be told straight, for the record. The dictionary is full of adjectives to describe child rape and murder. None comes close to the experience of the children and families Robert Black tormented. If you have kids (as we do) please give them a hug...

Visit our website https://psycho-killer.co for exclusive videos, photos, articles, and transcripts. Kenneth Noye has a way of dealing with people who p*** him off. He stabs them to death. The first time it was an undercover surveillance officer hiding in the grounds of his mansion. Noye's guard dogs brought down PC John Fordham. Then Noye shanked him 10 times and left the officer to bleed to death. Noye pleaded self-defence — and got off! The next time was during a road rage fistfight....

Wayne Couzens was a disgrace to the police uniform he wore. Somehow, this sexual deviant managed to secure employment with the Met's elite diplomatic protection squad. He was licenced to kill – and kill he did. Posing as a plainclothes officer, Couzens raped and murdered Sarah Everard after kidnapping her under the guise of an arrest. Couzens erstwhile colleagues were soon onto him. He confessed and on 30 September 2021, a judge told him he'd spend the rest of his life in prison.

Britain’s most prolific female killer. That’s one description of Bev Allitt. But to the families whose babies and children she murdered, she is a monster – the embodiment of evil. And to those who seek to analyse her, an enigma. Allitt was a pathological liar who was allowed, by a series of grievous errors, to join the nursing profession. She claimed her first victim – a seven-week-old baby – within days of starting work at Grantham Hospital in Lincolnshire. Assigned to the children’s...

Detective Chief Superintendent Bob Taylor was instrumental in bringing some of the UK's most notorious killers, rapists and kidnappers to justice. In the second part of our exclusive interview, he tells Simon Ford about the part he played in the 2002 Soham murder investigation. Plus, he expands on what makes a psychopath; developments in forensic science; and the impact of terrorism on police procedure. Simon starts by asking DCS Taylor about the questioning of John Humble, the 'I'm...

See our exclusive picture gallery https://bit.ly/parker-murder-images Thomas Parker’s mother doted on her little boy. This spoilt brat grew up to be a workshy, wife-beating drunk. And he repaid his parents by turning a shotgun on them. Parker’s father survived with slight injuries. But his mother lingered for weeks with a festering head wound. The year was 1864. Elizabeth Parker fell into a coma and died in April. Four months later, her son also met his maker — at the end of a rope in...

Bob Taylor retired as Detective Chief Superintendent of West Yorkshire Police with an unprecedented 100% clear-up record. In a career spanning 31 years, Taylor and his team were responsible for putting some of Britain's most evil criminals behind bars. That's why his officers called their guv'nor 'Crimebuster'. Taylor cut his teeth on the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. Then he tracked down some of the country's most notorious psychopaths and murderers, before becoming head of operations...

Michael Benneman Sams was one of life’s losers, a little man with big, bad ideas. He snatched his victims and held them to ransom locked in a wheelie bin. Birmingham estate agent Stephanie Slater walked free when her employers paid £175,000. Julie Dart, a teenager from Leeds, wasn’t so lucky. She escaped from the wheelie bin, triggering Sams’s silent alarm. He murdered her before she could break out of his workshop in Newark, Nottinghamshire, and dumped her body in a field in Lincolnshire....

In straight-laced Victorian Britain, the railway line between London and the seaside town of Brighton was a bordello on wheels. Inevitably, the secret trysts and dodgy deals conducted in its curtained carriages led to some unsavoury crimes. A series of murders on the Brighton Line shocked polite society and some remain unsolved to this day. Others saw their perpetrators sent to the gallows. Brighton’s reputation as a Bohemian playground was matched only by the town’s notoriety for violence....