Never Caught: 5 Unsolved Murders of Victorian London

On Christmas morning, 1872, a landlady in Bloomsbury broke down the door of a locked room. The man who had come home with the young woman inside was gone, and he had taken the key with him. He was never found. Victorian London had the first modern police force, the first detectives and newspapers that printed every word of every inquest. And yet, again and again, its killers simply walked away into the fog. Tonight we count down five London murders that were never solved: a pair of gloves under a pillow, a German clergyman picked out of a line of strangers, the Thames mysteries that some linked to Jack the Ripper, a postcard that sent an artist to the Old Bailey, and a death so baffling that one of England's greatest surgeons said the acquitted woman should explain, for the sake of science, how she had done it. CHAPTERS 0:00 The locked door 1:38 #5 The pair of gloves (1838) 5:34 #4 The German chaplain (1872) 8:37 #3 The Thames mysteries (1887–1889) 11:40 #2 The postcard (1907) 14:33 #1 The Pimlico mystery (1886) 19:00 What remains SOURCES • Charles Dickens, "Three Detective Anecdotes: The Pair of Gloves", Household Words, 1850. • The Times, December 1872 – January 1873 (Great Coram Street). • Reports of the inquests into the Thames discoveries, 1887–1889. • Reports of the trial of Robert Wood, Central Criminal Court, December 1907. • Reports of the trial of Adelaide Bartlett, Central Criminal Court, April 1886. IMAGES Paintings by John Atkinson Grimshaw, Arthur E. Grimshaw, Walter Sickert, James McNeill Whistler and Charles De Lacy; engravings from Gustave Doré's London: A Pilgrimage (1872); Vanity Fair caricatures of James Monro, Edward Clarke, Sir James Paget and Sir Charles Russell; and other period prints, photographs and plans are in the public domain (via Wikimedia Commons). Gustave Doré, Dudley Street, Harrow Alley and London slums; chloroform bottles: Wellcome Collection, CC BY 4.0. New Scotland Yard plan: Shakespearesmonkey, CC BY 2.0. The Old Bailey: It's No Game, CC BY 2.0. St James the Less, Pimlico: Jim Linwood, CC BY 2.0. Narration and music: Fog and Gallows. #TrueCrime #VictorianLondon #UnsolvedMysteries