Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is a true crime podcast unlike any other; because every word of it was written nearly 300 years ago. Each week, we read aloud one chapter from a remarkable book first published in London in 1735: a sprawling collection of murderers, highwaymen, coiners, housebreakers, pirates and worse, recorded in vivid and unsparing detail. The crimes are real. The voices are authentic. And the world they reveal, brutal, strange, and surprisingly familiar, has been waiting three centuries to be heard again. True crime did not begin with podcasts. It began here by the burning light of a ca...
Episode 024: James Booty: The Young Ravisher of Holborn
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In the dim workshops of early Georgian London, a boy barely into his teens finds himself infected by a disease he does not understand, and in his desperate ignorance he becomes something monstrous. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures his story with the blunt clarity of a court record: a fatherless apprentice, left to the mercy of older hands, absorbing the worst possible counsel from the men around him.
James Booty is no hardened criminal when his life begins to unravel; he is a child without capacity, as the old...
Episode 023: Richard Whittingham: The Young Footpad of London's Streets
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Richard Whittingham is barely past boyhood when he abandons his apprenticeship and steps into London's criminal underworld. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals recounts, his downfall begins not with malice but with weakness: an easy temper exploited by the wrong company and the relentless demands of women who trade affection for coin.
His story is the kind of true crime narrative that reveals how quickly a young life can unravel in Georgian London. Whittingham is not born a villain; he is made one, piece by piece, by appetite and circumstance...
Episode 022: Thomas Reeves: The Notorious Highwayman and Footpad
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Thomas Reeves is raised with every advantage a tradesman's son could hope for: an indulgent father, a respectable apprenticeship, and a clear path forward. But as Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells it, the young tinman falls under the influence of men who mock religion and treat morality as nothing more than a convenient fiction.
It is a corruption of the mind before it becomes a corruption of the hands. This true crime account captures the precise moment a young man trades honest work for the company of thieves; his...
Episode 021: John Thomson: Sailor Turned Highway Robber
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John Thomson grows up in London among dishonest company, learning the taste of easy money before he ever learns a trade. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals records how this weaver's apprentice abandons his loom for the sea, where years of plunder and bloodshed remake him into something harder than the boy who left the shore.
When Thomson finally returns to land, the violence he has absorbed does not stay at sea. His story is the kind of true crime account that reveals how a man's character can curdle slowly, shaped...
Episode 020: William Burridge: The Soldier Turned Highwayman
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William Burridge grows up strong, handsome, and restless in Northamptonshire, a young man built for the wrestling ring and the cudgel match but never for the carpenter's bench his father sets him to. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures him at the pivot point: a boy indulged too long, slipping easily from stolen poultry at country fairs to something far darker on the open road.
His is the kind of story that feeds the oldest appetite in true crime: a man whose physical gifts and inflated sense of his own...
Episode 019: William Colthouse: The Jacobite Highwayman of Yorkshire
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William Colthouse is a well-educated Yorkshire man with firm religious principles and even firmer political convictions; it is these convictions that first drag him into the orbit of criminality. As recorded in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, his outspoken Jacobite sympathies land him inside Newgate, where the company he keeps teaches him a new and darker set of skills.
What emerges from this true crime account is a figure caught between conscience and temptation: a man who knows the difference between right and wrong yet finds the lure of easy...
Episode 018: James Shaw: Highwayman and Murderer of the Hampstead Road
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James Shaw is a man who cannot settle. Born into a family with the means to set him on a respectable path, he drifts through one trade after another, never sticking, never satisfied; Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures him at the precise moment restlessness curdles into something far more dangerous.
He blames a negligent wife, he blames circumstance, but beneath every excuse lies a temperament that finds honest labour unbearable. It is a story that belongs to the oldest tradition of true crime: the man who convinces himself that...
Episode 017: John Smith: The Soldier Who Pulled the Trigger
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John Smith is a man shaped by war; bold, fierce, and trained to violence on the battlefields of Flanders, he returns to civilian life carrying a soldier's instincts into a world that has no place for them. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals preserves his story as one of the most compact and unsettling true crime accounts of the early eighteenth century: a decorated veteran who squanders his pay and drifts toward theft and rage.
There is something volatile inside him that the wars merely sharpened. Discharged from military and naval...
Episode 016: John Jones: The Young Pickpocket of Holborn
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John Jones is barely a man when he stumbles into the trade that will define him. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals recounts, he is a boy raised with too much tenderness and too little discipline; a creature of idleness born in Holborn to parents who indulge every whim, hoping the flaws will simply fall away with age.
They never do. Refused by every honest trade and cut off by his own family, Jones drifts into a London underworld where true crime begins not with malice but with boredom, poverty...
Episode 015: Nathaniel Hawes: The Young Highwayman of Finchley Common
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Nathaniel Hawes is barely out of his apprenticeship when he begins stealing from his master's cash box, a slow slide from mischief into something far darker. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals presents him as one of those young men who mistakes recklessness for courage; a Norfolk grazier's orphan who falls into expensive company and never finds his way back out.
Among the true crime figures of early Georgian England, Hawes stands out not for cunning or calculation but for sheer, blistering nerve. He is sprightly, sharp, and utterly convinced that...
Episode 014: James Wright: The Weeping Highwayman of the Old Bailey
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A respectable wigmaker on the Old Bailey begins to spend faster than he earns, drawn into pleasures he cannot afford and will not abandon. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures his slide with quiet precision: James Wright does not turn to crime out of malice but out of want, a man whose appetites gnaw through his livelihood until nothing remains but the road.
What makes Wright linger in the annals of true crime is not his daring but his conscience. He is described as a highwayman who could hardly rob...
Episode 013: Richard James: The Highwayman of the Oxford Road
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Richard James comes into the world already half abandoned: the son of a nobleman's cook, fatherless before he can remember, cast to sea at twelve years old. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals recounts his story, what emerges is a man shaped less by malice than by a relentless current of misfortune; a figure whose slide toward highway robbery feels almost inevitable, and who belongs to the long, dark tradition of true crime that stretches from Georgian England to our own restless fascination with outlaws.
Captured by Spaniards, taken by...
Episode 012: John Dykes: The Gambler Turned Highwayman
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John Dykes cannot stop gambling. It is this single compulsion; documented in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals; that drags a young man from indulged eldest son to pickpocket to something far worse, tracing the kind of spiral that still defines true crime centuries later.
Born to parents of middling means who sacrifice their own comfort for his education, Dykes refuses every apprenticeship, every honest path set before him. Instead he haunts the gaming tables when flush and plays span-farthing in the gutter with street boys when broke, each loss pushing...
Episode 011: William Casey: The Soldier Accused of Robbery in the Park
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William Casey is barely out of boyhood when military life delivers him into the world of violence and accusation that defines his story. Enlisted at fifteen into the Guards by his own soldier father, Casey serves in Spain and returns to London carrying the restless habits of a young man raised among regiments; Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures his brief, troubled trajectory in vivid detail.
His is a case where the line between righteousness and brutality blurs beyond recognition. It is the kind of true crime account where competing...
Episode 010: John Wigley: The Lone Highwayman of Finchley Common
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A plasterer by trade, John Wigley abandons honest work early and slides into what Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals calls 'felonious methods of getting money.' His is a solitary brand of criminality; he rides out alone onto the dark roads around the commons north of London, trusting no one, convinced that gangs always betray themselves in the end.
This true crime story from the early eighteenth century carries the smell of damp hedgerows and cheap brandy. Wigley drifts between a woman who sells spirits on the common and a...
Episode 009: John Meff: The Housebreaker Who Could Not Stay Away
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John Meff is the son of French Protestant refugees who fled persecution under Louis XIV, raised in London with great care and bound apprentice to a weaver. He serves faithfully, marries, and then finds himself unable to keep his family alive on honest wages; it is poverty, not wickedness, that first pushes him toward housebreaking, a trajectory recorded in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals with the unsentimental clarity that makes it one of the earliest works of true crime writing we possess.
What follows is a life of compounding misfortune...
Episode 008: John Winship: The Young Highwayman of Covent Garden
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He is seventeen, an apprentice carpenter in Covent Garden, and he has just noticed a young woman standing in a doorway. In Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, the story of John Winship begins not with violence but with infatuation; a boy whose idle upbringing leaves him entirely unprepared for the cost of courtship, and who drifts toward the road when honest wages fall short.
There is something quietly inevitable about Winship's slide from lovesick youth to mounted robber, a trajectory that feels as urgent now as it did in the 1720...
Episode 007: Matthew Clark: The Cowardly Footpad Who Turned Killer
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Matthew Clark is the kind of figure who makes true crime so unsettling: not a mastermind, not a hardened villain, but a lazy, cowardly young man whose small vices compound into something monstrous. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals introduces him as a creature formed entirely from the worst impulses of low life; idle, drunk, driven by lust, and too timid to commit even the crimes he plans.
Born in St. Albans to parents of modest means, Clark squanders every opportunity placed before him. Dismissed from a gentleman's household for sheer...
Episode 006: Walter Kennedy: The Aspiring Pirate of Wapping
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Walter Kennedy grows up at Pelican Stairs in Wapping, the son of an anchor-smith, a boy with every reason to follow his father into honest labour. But something restless burns in him; as Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells it, he possesses a 'too aspiring temper' that honest trades can never satisfy.
Serving aboard a man-of-war during Queen Anne's wars against France, Kennedy absorbs every whispered tale of buccaneers and maritime desperadoes, and what begins as fascination hardens into ambition. His is a true crime story shaped not by sudden...
Episode 005: Barbara Spencer: The Young Coiner of Cripplegate
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Barbara Spencer is barely out of childhood when the world begins to shape her into something dangerous. Raised without restraint in the cramped lanes of Cripplegate, she is the kind of figure that Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures with unflinching clarity: a young woman too proud for servitude, too restless to stay still, drawn by temperament toward the edges of lawful life.
Her drift into counterfeiting feels almost inevitable; a single act of defiance carries her out of her mother's alehouse and into the company of coiners who see...
Episode 004: Robert Perkins: The Disinherited Baker Turned Thief
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Robert Perkins grows up in Hertfordshire as the son of a prosperous innkeeper, but prosperity does not protect him. After his mother dies and his father remarries, the boy is cast out of his own home; stripped of affection, stripped of inheritance, stripped of everything that might have held him steady.
As recorded in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, Perkins drifts into the kind of company that haunts the margins of Georgian England: drinkers, gamblers, idlers whose appetites outrun their means. His is the sort of true crime story that...
Episode 003: William Barton: The Highwayman Who Could Not Stay Still
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William Barton is born with restlessness in his blood. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells it, his father abandons him as a child, fleeing to Jamaica with a concubine and a hold full of goods; the boy grows up in his grandfather's eating-house, surrounded by comfort he cannot bring himself to accept.
This is true crime at its most unsettled: a young man who cannot sit still, who trades a safe apprenticeship for the open sea and trades the sea for soldiering and trades soldiering for the road. Every...
Episode 002: John Trippuck: The Golden Tinman's Highway Robberies
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They call him the Golden Tinman; a man who robs alone and in company, whose scarred body carries the evidence of musket balls extracted from his flesh, and whose notoriety across the roads of early Georgian England is already the stuff of grim legend. In the pages of Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, John Trippuck stands as one of four men whose intertwined stories form a single devastating chapter of true crime from 1720: a highwayman, a footpad, a thief, and a housebreaker, each pulled toward ruin by separate hungers.
Trippuck...
Episode 001: Jane Griffin: The Mistress Who Turned a Knife on Her Maid
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Jane Griffin is a woman of sharp wit, good reputation and a violent temper she cannot govern. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells it, she keeps a busy inn in Smithfield with her husband, drawing customers with her charm and driving them away with her rages; a figure who belongs as much to the annals of true crime as to any cautionary sermon.
She is well-bred, well-spoken and genuinely kind when calm; yet anger moves through her like weather, sudden and ungovernable. The domestic world she has built is...
Episode 000: Introduction to The Lives Of the Most Remarkable Criminals
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This is not a podcast about true crime. It is true crime — written in 1735 and read aloud for the first time in nearly three centuries.
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals was first published in 1735, covering murderers, highwaymen, housebreakers, coiners, pirates and worse — each one profiled in vivid, unsparing detail. It is one of the earliest works of true crime writing in the English language, and it has been waiting nearly three centuries to be heard aloud.
The crimes are real. The world they reveal — brutal, strange and surprisingly famili...
