Real Whodunnits From British History

Britain’s history is packed with kings, battles, inventions and revolutions. It also contains a surprisingly thick case file of unexplained deaths, suspicious disappearances and murders that generated more conspiracy theories than answers.

Some became national sensations. Others inspired novels, films and generations of amateur detectives convinced they could finally crack the case. There are locked rooms, missing heirs, poisoned lawyers and country-house killings worthy of the wildest detective fiction. The only trouble is, they actually happened.

So, dust off the magnifying glass and prepare to inspect the evidence, because we’re reopening some of the strangest real whodunnits from British history.

Few historical mysteries have attracted as much suspicion as the disappearance of Edward V and his younger brother Richard, Duke of York. After the death of their father, Edward IV, in 1483, the young princes were lodged in the Tower of London while preparations were supposedly made for Edward’s coronation.

Then things changed rather dramatically. Their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, became King Richard III, while the boys were declared illegitimate and gradually disappeared from public view. They were never reliably seen again.

For centuries, Richard III has been the prime suspect, accused of removing two inconvenient obstacles to his throne. Yet others had motives too, and no clear-cut evidence has ever identified a potential killer. More than five centuries later, the Tower is still keeping its secret.

On 8 September 1560, Amy Robsart, wife of Robert Dudley, was found dead at the bottom of a staircase at Cumnor Place in Oxfordshire. Her neck was broken, and immediately the gossip machine of Elizabethan England went into overdrive.

Dudley was extremely close to Queen Elizabeth I, so close that rumours swirled about whether he hoped to marry her. Amy’s death therefore appeared to be extraordinarily convenient. Had she been murdered to clear the path for a royal wedding?

An inquest concluded that Amy had died accidentally, although theories involving murder, illness and suicide have continued for centuries. Dudley’s political enemies certainly benefited from the scandal, which made any marriage to Elizabeth far more difficult. Whether Amy fell, was pushed, or died by some other means remains one of Tudor England’s most baffling questions.

Liverpool insurance agent William Herbert Wallace seemed to have acquired the perfect alibi when his wife Julia was murdered in January 1931.

The previous evening, Wallace had received a mysterious message at his chess club asking him to visit a prospective client at an address in Liverpool. He went as requested but discovered that the address appeared not to exist. When he eventually returned home, he found Julia beaten to death.

Suspicion quickly turned onto Wallace himself. Prosecutors argued that the strange appointment had been fabricated to create an alibi. He was convicted and sentenced to death, but his conviction was overturned on appeal because the evidence was considered insufficient.

The mystery therefore remained. Did Wallace construct an extraordinarily elaborate plan to murder his wife, or had an unknown killer deliberately lured him away? The impossible address and carefully timed phone message have kept armchair detectives busy ever since.

Dinner parties at Victorian country houses might sound like an icon of a bygone age, but they probably became slightly less relaxing after the Charles Bravo case.

In April 1876, barrister Charles Bravo was taken violently ill at his home, The Priory in Balham. Doctors discovered that he’d in fact been poisoned with antimony. Bravo survived for several agonising days but refused, or was unable, to explain how the poison had entered his body.

Suspicion fell on several people close to him, including his wife Florence, her companion Mrs Cox, and a doctor with whom Florence had previously had a relationship. Revelations about Bravo’s marriage, money and behaviour turned the inquest into a spectacular public scandal.

Two lengthy investigations failed to identify the poisoner. Suicide, accident and murder were all suggested. The verdict? Murder by a person or persons unknown. Very Victorian. Very dramatic. Completely unresolved.

No list of British whodunnits could avoid the name Jack the Ripper. In 1888, a series of brutal murders in and around Whitechapel, east London, terrified the capital and generated one of history’s most famous criminal mysteries.

Five killings are traditionally grouped as the so-called canonical murders: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. Police investigated numerous suspects, newspapers printed sensational theories, and letters supposedly written by the killer helped create the sinister nickname still familiar today.

Yet nobody was convicted. Doctors, butchers, immigrants, aristocrats, artists and members of the Royal Family have all been proposed as suspects at one time or another. Modern DNA claims occasionally promise a breakthrough, but the evidence remains fiercely disputed. More than a century later, the world still knows the killer’s nickname better than their actual identity.

In 1943, four boys exploring Hagley Wood in Worcestershire made the sort of discovery guaranteed to ruin an afternoon.

Inside a hollow wych elm tree, they found a human skull. Police later recovered most of a woman’s skeleton from inside the trunk. Investigators believed she’d died roughly 18 months earlier, but identifying her proved impossible.

Then came the graffiti.

Messages began appearing around the Midlands asking, “Who put Bella down the Wych Elm?” The mysterious name “Bella” became permanently attached to the unidentified woman, although nobody knows for certain who wrote the messages or whether the writer actually knew anything about the crime.

Theories ranged from domestic murder to wartime espionage and occult ritual. None has been proved. The victim’s identity, her killer and the meaning of the eerie graffiti all remain unknown.

Not every historical whodunnit results from an immediate event. Sometimes, it takes years for the mystery to take shape.

Between 1928 and 1929, several members and acquaintances of the same Croydon household became seriously ill, with three ultimately dying. Tests revealed arsenic poisoning, raising the alarming possibility that somebody within the family circle was deliberately killing people.

The case attracted enormous newspaper attention. Detectives investigated food, medicine, household products and family relationships but failed to find out how the poison was administered or who was responsible.

Was there a murderer in the house? Had arsenic somehow contaminated something the victims shared? Suspicions flourished, but proof did not. The deaths became one of the interwar period’s strangest poisoning mysteries, and remains unsolved to this day.

On the night of 7 November 1974, Sandra Rivett, nanny to the children of Lord and Lady Lucan, was found murdered in the basement of a London townhouse. Lady Lucan was also attacked but escaped and identified her estranged husband, John Bingham, the 7th Earl of Lucan, as her attacker.

Then Lord Lucan vanished.

His car was found abandoned in Newhaven, East Sussex, containing bloodstains and other evidence, but Lucan himself had apparently disappeared off the face of the earth. A coroner’s jury later named him as Rivett’s killer, yet he was never arrested or put on trial.

Rumours placed him everywhere from Africa and Australia to South America and India. Others believed he took his own life shortly after the murder. Despite decades of alleged sightings, nothing conclusively established what became of him. The unanswered question shifted from “Who did it?” to another mystery entirely: what happened to Lord Lucan?

Britain’s seen plenty of spectacular robberies, and some of the most famous were eventually cracked. After the Great Train Robbery of 1963, for example, most of the gang were caught and convicted. But the Eastcastle Street Robbery was different.

On 21 May 1952, armed men intercepted a Post Office van in central London and escaped with around £240,000, then the largest cash robbery in British history. The raid had been meticulously planned, apparently with inside information helping the gang identify the van and disable its alarm.

Police suspected prominent London criminal Billy Hill and others in his circle, but nobody was ever convicted and almost none of the money was recovered. Decades later, recordings emerged in which criminal Alexander “Sonny” Sullivan claimed involvement and described how the operation worked. Intriguing? Absolutely. A courtroom solution? Not quite. Officially, one of Britain’s boldest robberies remains unsolved.

From royal palaces and Victorian villas to London basements and hollow trees, Britain’s greatest historical whodunnits prove that reality can be every bit as strange as classic detective fiction. Some suspects appear convincing. Others are far murkier, wrapped in rumour, coincidence or circumstantial evidence.

What keeps these cases alive is the missing final piece: the confession never made, the witness never found, or the clue nobody quite understood. History recorded the crime. In these cases, however, it never managed to write the ending.