Blocks I and II — 19th and 20th Centuries
Twenty-six real crimes that defined an era. Each case, a window into the society that produced it.
Manuel Blanco Romasanta
The Romasanta trial forced nineteenth-century Spanish justice to weigh popular superstition against criminal responsibility and an emerging forensic psychiatry.
Read the case →Case II · Madrid, 1888The Fuencarral Street Crime
A murdered widow, a convicted maid, a suspicious son and a press that turned Madrid into a public courtroom.
Read the case →Case III · Whitechapel, 1888Jack the Ripper
Five canonical victims, Whitechapel and a killer never identified. The case that showed the press could manufacture a monster.
Read the case →Case IV · Wiltshire, 1860Constance Kent
A murder inside a respectable house, a discredited detective and a confession five years later.
Read the case →Case V · Barcelona, 1912Enriqueta Martí, the Vampire of Raval
A real kidnapping expanded by the press into a much larger legend. Barcelona, poverty, child exploitation and criminal myth.
Read the case →Case VI · Glasgow, 1857Madeleine Smith
Love letters, arsenic and Scotland's "not proven" verdict in one of the great Victorian trials.
Read the case →Case VII · Suffolk, 1827Maria Marten and the Red Barn
A rural murder, a disappearance and a trial that England turned into popular spectacle.
Read the case →Case VIII · Edinburgh, 1828Burke and Hare
Murder committed to supply bodies for anatomy teaching, and the scandal that exposed the black market in corpses.
Read the case →Case IX · London, 1864Franz Müller
Britain's first documented railway murder and a transatlantic pursuit that turned the train into a place of fear.
Read the case →Case X · Chicago, 1890sH. H. Holmes
Fraud, probable murders and a legend that transformed a Chicago building into a supposed infernal murder castle.
Read the case →Case XI · Spain, 1924The Andalucía Express Crime
Two postal workers murdered in a mail train and a rapid military-judicial response in Primo de Rivera's Spain.
Read the case →Case XII · Cuenca, 1910–1926The Crime of Cuenca
Two men tortured and convicted of murdering José María Grimaldos. In 1926, the supposed dead man reappeared alive.
Read the case →Case XIII · France, 1915–1921Landru, the Bluebeard of Gambais
Matrimonial advertisements, aliases and disappearances in wartime France. The file behind the so-called Bluebeard of Gambais.
Read the case →Case XIV · London, 1910The Crippen Case
A doctor, a cellar, a flight by sea and a pursuit helped by wireless telegraphy.
Read the case →Case XV · Paris, 1933Violette Nozière
Parricide, allegations of incest, public morality and the press in 1933 France.
Read the case →Case XVI · Massachusetts, 1920–1927Sacco and Vanzetti
Two Italian immigrant anarchists convicted in a trial shaped by political and ethnic prejudice, leaving a doubt that outlived their execution.
Read the case →Case XVII · Petrograd, 1916Rasputin
A group of nobles killed Rasputin believing they were saving Tsarism. Months later, the empire collapsed.
Read the case →Case XVIII · New Jersey, 1932The Lindbergh Case
A kidnapping that turned a famous family's grief into national spectacle and changed US federal law.
Read the case →Case XIX · Yekaterinburg, 1918The Romanovs
The execution of Nicholas II, Alexandra, their children and attendants ended a dynasty and opened decades of myth, silence and forensic investigation.
Read the case →Case XX · Massachusetts, 1892Lizzie Borden
Tried and acquitted for the murder of her father and stepmother. The law freed her; popular culture convicted her forever.
Read the case →Case XXI · Le Mans, 1933The Papin Sisters
Two live-in maids, a bourgeois household and a crime that opened debates about class, mental health, justice and domestic silence.
Read the case →Case XXII · Liverpool, 1889Florence Maybrick
Condemned for the alleged arsenic poisoning of her husband. Disputed medicine, a sexual double standard and a conviction that never stopped being questioned.
Read the case →Case XXIII · France, 1894–1906The Dreyfus Affair
A Jewish army captain convicted of treason on manipulated evidence. Antisemitism, the army, the press and a France split in two.
Read the case →Case XXIV · New York, 1841Mary Rogers
A young working woman disappeared in New York, an unsolved crime and Edgar Allan Poe turning the file into detective literature.
Read the case →Case XXV · Brighton, 1934Brighton Trunk Crime
An unidentified victim, two railway stations and a crime in which the loss of identity became the heart of the mystery.
Read the case →Case XXVI · Düsseldorf, 1929–1931Peter Kürten
Düsseldorf lived in fear. The case shows how press, criminology and justice also built a public figure around the criminal.
Read the case →About Criminal Epochs
Criminal Epochs was born from a simple conviction: the great historical crimes are, above all, social documents. They speak not only of the killers. They speak of the cities that produced them, the judicial systems that processed them, the presses that turned them into spectacle, and the victims who were too often reduced to narrative functions.
Every case we publish starts from documentary verification, passes through journalistic rigour, and reaches the reader with the conviction that criminal history, properly told, is one of the most honest ways of understanding the past. And sometimes the present.
No sensationalism here. Only real cases, verified sources and the commitment to telling what happened without unnecessary ornament or gratuitous morbidity.
Carlos S. Montero · Editor · El Archivo Privado