Criminal Women

Women have sometimes been seen as less criminally inclined than men. But, as John Eddleston shows in this revealing anthology of female crimes in London, this image is hard to mesh with reality, for the city's history is crowded with cases of women who broke the law. In vivid detail he reconstructs a series of dramatic, often harrowing cases in which women were involved and puts their acts in the context of their times. Taking episodes from the eighteenth century to near the present day, he looks at criminal women of all types, from all walks of life. The work of the London police, the courts and the prisons is an essential element in his study, and each chapter reveals much about how attitudes to crime and punishment have changed over the centuries.Fascinating portraits of these criminal women as individuals emerge from their stories - their cases come to life - as does the London in which they lived. They include Catherine Hayes who was burnt alive for murdering her...

Among the shocking cases of violent death Jonathan Oates reconstructs in this, the third volume in his series on unsolved murders in the capital, are the killing of 5-year-old Eileen Lockhart, the strangulation of a young woman whose body was found in a bombed house in 1941, the mysterious Cranford Park murder, the assassination of Countess Teresa Lubienska, and the strangulation of Elizabeth Figgs who was possibly the first victim of the Nudes Murderer.Also featured is a re-examination of the notorious case of Timothy Evans, the Welshman who was hung in 1950 for the murder of his infant daughter. Jonathan Oates describes each of these terrible crimes in precise, forensic and gripping detail. The criminal stories he tells shed light on the lives of the victims and summon up the ruthless, sometimes lethal character of London itself.