Dark secrets of the Black Museum, 1835-1985 - Gordon Honeycombe

A fascinating, if uncomfortable, insight into the minds and methods of those who practice murder

The Crime Museum of New Scotland Yard—invariably known as "the Black Museum"—houses a remarkable collection of exhibits, photographs, and documents connected with some of the most notorious crimes in the country's history. Although the museum is closed to the general public, Gordon Honeycombe was granted privileged access to its classified records, and his book reveals the stories behind 21 murders committed in Britain between 1835 and 1985. The author's painstaking research, which reaches beyond the Black Museum to other archives, as well as contemporary newspaper and similar reports, allows him to give detailed accounts of the murders and manslaughter committed by such infamous characters as William Palmer, Charles Peace, Donald Nielson (the "Black Panther"), the necrophiliac serial killer Dennis Nilsen, and Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Here too is the political assassination of the Bulgarian novelist and playwright Georgi Markov, and the murder by IRA bomb of four soldiers of the Household Cavalry in London's Hyde Park.