Introduction & Acknowledgements
1. ‘I am afraid I have shot my wife’
Cheam, Surrey, 1828
2. ‘You shall find a complete devil in me’
Middlesex, 1847
3. ‘I did it and I did it right’
Old Meldrum, Aberdeenshire, 1857
Rochester, Kent, 1858
Ipswich, Suffolk, 1858
St Budock, Cornwall, 1859
London, 1861
8. ‘Send for a policeman, I have murdered that bitch’
Manchester, 1863
9. ‘And yet I loved her as never a woman was loved before’
Batley, West Yorkshire, 1865
10. ‘I would rather die than live with you’
Birmingham, Warwickshire, 1866
11. ‘This is the fruit of going with another man’s wife’
Wood Green, London, 1869
Southsea, Hampshire, 1872
13. ‘I went to that house with nothing but love in my heart’
Glasgow, 1876
Dolgellau, North Wales, 1877
15. ‘Grandfather’s clock, stop clock, never to go again’
Clerkenwell, London, 1879
16. ‘I’ll pay the little devil out’
Douglas, Isle of Man, 1892
17. ‘To kill is one thing; to commit murder is another’
Woodhouse Mill, near Sheffield, South Yorkshire, 1893
18. ‘I am no more a fool than what you are’
Blackburn, Lancashire, 1893
19. ‘We were very jolly all night afterwards’
Wormwood Scrubs, London, 1893
Bolton, Lancashire, 1893
21. ‘I bet he’s strangling her’
Burnley, Lancashire, 1915
22. ‘If I have done wrong, I have got to put up with it’
Bristol, 1917
23. ‘Your wife is not going on as she ought to’/p>
Camden Town, London, 1918
24. ‘I passed from despair to hope and hope to despair’
Central London, 1923
Knightsbridge, London, 1932
26. ‘I could forgive extravagance or anything else but infidelity – never’
Lancaster, 1935
27. ‘She was everything in the world to me’
Letchworth, Hertfordshire, 1937
28. ‘You may wonder if she was as black as was said’
Luton, Bedfordshire, 1943
29. ‘You’ll stand it because you love me’
London, 1955