Warwickshire Murders

Book excerpt: Warwickshire has seen its fair share of murder down the centuries. This latest collection explores notorious crimes from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using contemporary documents, trial transcripts and newspaper accounts to examine cases that gripped both the county and the nation. Among the stories included here are the case of Edwin James Moore, who set fire to his mother after an argument over supper at Leamington Spa in 1907; the Coventry bombings in 1939, for which two men were executed in 1940; and the case of Thomas Ball, who was poisoned by his wife in 1848. She was later tried and executed in Coventry and was the last woman to be executed in public.