Steve Keogh: Murder Unpacked

Eight days after Polly Nichols was murdered, another woman was found dead in Whitechapel.

Her name was Annie Chapman.

And as always, before we get to what happened to her, I want to start with the woman herself.

Annie

Annie was born Annie Eliza Smith in London around 1840 or 1841.

Her father had served in the Life Guards, an elite cavalry regiment of the British Army, and in 1869 Annie married a coachman called John Chapman. They went on to have children together and, for a time, appear to...

Ruth Ellis

The last woman to be hanged in the UK.

More than seventy years later, her name still provokes debate.

Most recently, the debate has been ignited by the decision to grant her a posthumous conditional pardon.

Understandably, almost every discussion centres on one question:

Should she have been executed?

However, as I read about the case, I found myself thinking about something I’d experienced many times during my own career.

On the evening of Easter Sunday, 10th April 1955, Ruth Ellis to...

Just over three weeks after Martha Tabram was murdered, another woman was found dead on the streets of Whitechapel.

Her name was Mary Ann Nichols, but she was commonly known as Polly.

And as always, before we get to what happened to her, I want to start with the woman

herself.

Polly

Polly was born Mary Ann Walker in London in 1845.

Her father was a blacksmith and, at the age of eighteen, she married a printer called William Nichols.

They went on to have five...

As I approached the car I gestured for the driver to join me on the pavement.

In the UK, the police don’t normally speak to you through the window, it’s much safer to both be standing. That way you can see their hands, and they’re not able to suddenly speed away in the car.

This was early in my career, when I was still in uniform.

The man was on his own, and so was I.

I hadn’t stopped him for anything he’d done wrong. It was just w...

Four months after the death of Emma Smith, another woman was murdered in Whitechapel.

Her name was Martha Tabram.

And although her murder would later become tangled up in the story of Jack the Ripper, I want to resist doing what history so often does with these women: reducing them to a name on a list.

Before Martha became a murder victim, she’d already lived quite a life.

Martha

Martha was born in Southwark on 10th May 1849, the youngest of five children.

In 1869, she married Henry Sa...

Mention the Yorkshire Ripper investigation to almost anyone and several things will come to mind.

Most will think first of the murders. The crimes were truly abhorrent.

Others will remember the mistakes made during the investigation.

But for me, as someone who investigated murders years after Sutcliffe was caught, I find myself thinking about something very different.

Not what happened during the investigation.

But what happened because of it.

In the early hours of 30th October 1975, detectives were called to Scott Hall Road, Leeds, after...

Jack the Ripper is probably the most famous unidentified murderer in history.

More than 130 years after his crimes, books are still being written about him. Documentaries are still being made. And people still walk the streets of Whitechapel trying to work out who he was.

But that’s not where I want to start.

Before we get anywhere near suspects, I want to look at the crimes.

That’s how I approached murder investigations during my career. The crime scene came before the suspect, not the other way around.

I investigated many murders during my career, more than I can count. But very few sent ripples much further than the communities in which they took place.

Occasionally, though, I found myself at the centre of the country’s biggest news story.

When your investigation dominates the headlines, the pressure is unreal.

Every decision is scrutinised. Every delay criticised. Every mistake magnified.

That attention ratchets up another level when a killer is identified and the manhunt becomes public.

Suddenly, you’re not just trying to solve a murd...

As I sat there on the sofa, sitting across from me was what I could only describe as a broken family.

Two parents who moments before had their whole world come crashing down around them.

It was the message no parent ever expects to hear.

I’m so sorry to tell you this but your son has died as the result of an assault.

Murdered.

Not even out of his teenage years.

Less than an hour after he left the house saying he would see th...

I can’t begin to imagine how many broken families I’ve sat opposite.

People whose world has just been shattered by the news a loved one was murdered.

If you hear me speak often enough, you will know I found this one of the hardest parts of being a murder detective.

We all lose loved ones at some point in our lives. The pain is awful.

But if that person has been taken by the actions of someone else, I can’t begin to imagine how much harder that m...

As I was running, I could feel my lungs burning and the lactic acid was starting to make my legs scream with pain. But there was no way he was getting away.

For the last five minutes I’d been gaining on him, but each shot he fired back at me made me duck for cover.

Then came my chance.

As he sprinted across the next road, he failed to see the oncoming car.

I saw him spin in the air like a cartwheel, landing in a heap on the floor. Al...

As we made our way through Great Ormond Street Hospital, it took a while to find the place we were looking for.

It always did.

No matter which hospital I visited, the mortuary always seemed hidden away.

And for good reason.

It’s the last department anyone wants to think about.

Especially here.

As many times as I’d walked similar corridors, this felt different.

It was different.

When I entered the room, the sights and smells were the same as ever...

If I look back over the murders that have shaped modern Britain, few victims are as immediately recognisable as Rachel Nickell.

As I write this, I immediately picture that image of a happy, loving mother.

More than three decades have passed since Rachel was murdered. In that time, tens of thousands of other people have lost their lives to homicide in the UK. Yet Rachel’s case remains one of the few almost everyone remembers.

So, what is it about Rachel and her murder that has made it remain such a pa...

Harold Shipman: Can We Rule It Out?

Every six weeks, we became the on-call murder team for South London.

For seven days, twenty-four hours a day, we would respond to all murders in our area.

That didn’t mean we were sat in a car, ready to put the lights and sirens on.

We’d be getting on with our existing investigations.

Gathering evidence, preparing for court, doing whatever was needed to progress our cases.

For the duration of that week, we had a mobile phon...

Everywhere you look today, there’s murder.

I don’t mean literal crimes taking place, I mean some kind of media.

Be it documentaries, crime fiction, books, podcasts, even Substack.

So, we must know all there is to know, right?

That’s definitely how I felt about murders.

Until I started investigating them.

I’d been a police officer for eighteen years, most of that time as a detective, investigating virtually every crime imaginable, but not murder.

Looking back now, when I joined the murder teams as...