Dark Secrets of the Black Museum, 1835-1985: More Dark Secrets From 150 Years of the Most Notorious Crimes in England.

Book excerpt: 'EXCELLENT WRITING AND RESEARCH' - RUTH RENDELLThe 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 this 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 searching accounts of the murders and manslaughter committed by such infamous characters as William Palmer, Charles Peace, Donald Nielson (the 'Black Panther'), the serial killer Dennis Nilsen, and Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in Britain. Here too are John Lee, the Man They Could Not Hang, George Chapman, a London publican who poisoned his wives, and the murder by IRA bomb of four soldiers of the Household Cavalry in London's Hyde Park, in a work that provides a fascinating, if uncompromising, insight into the minds and methods of those who practise murder.The well-known writer and former ITN newscaster Gordon Honeycombe is also the author of Murders of the Black Museum: 1875-1975 (John Blake Publishing, 2009).