Welcome to News of the Times!
Step into the shadowed alleyways and gaslit parlours of the 18th and 19th centuries with News of the Times — a meticulously curated journey through historical crime. Each episode draws from authentic reports and court records, bringing you the darkly fascinating tales that gripped Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian Britain.
With over 500 episodes and counting, we explore true accounts of mischief, murder, and mayhem from days gone by — all delivered with a wry nod and a love for the curious corners of the past.
🕵️ For those with a taste for the peculiar, you may also enjoy our new side project: Volume 1: Slightly Unreliable Memoirs — a whimsical collection inspired by the lives (and occasional misadventures) of our research team. Think cravats, crumpets, and the occasional cactus on the lam. Intrigued? Find it here:
👉 https://ko-fi.com/s/b406f6f11e (https://ko-fi.com/s/b406f6f11e)
The Putney Mystery: The Death of Ellen Matilda Franklin (1892)
In October 1892, a young woman arrived quietly at a respectable house in Putney.
Within four days she was dead.
The death certificate appeared entirely straightforward — embolism, thrombosis, and chronic kidney disease. Natural causes. The body was buried, and the matter might easily have ended there.
But suspicion soon began to grow.
Within weeks the Home Secretary ordered the grave to be opened, and what Victorian forensic surgeons discovered during the post-mortem revealed that the medical certificate had told a very different story.
A doctor and his wife were arrested.
An undertaker was accused of helping conceal the truth.
And the man believed to have carried out the fatal operation — Dr Richard Freeman — had already vanished.
The newspapers soon gave the case a name:
The Putney Mystery.
Tonight we explore the strange death of Ellen Matilda Franklin — the hurried burial, the evidence hidden inside the coffin, and the sensational Old Bailey trial that followed when Victorian forensic science began to expose what had really happened in a quiet house in Chelverton Road.
13 Mar 2026
The Cambridge Pudding Mystery: The Suspected Poisoning of Henry Day | True Crime 1871
Today we travel to Cambridge in the summer of 1871, where a young labourer collapsed after his morning meal and died within hours.
The symptoms pointed unmistakably to poison.
The chemistry insisted there was none.
And between the two, a newly married wife found herself facing the full weight of public suspicion.
This is the story of Henry Day — a sudden death that baffled doctors, divided neighbours, and revealed just how uncertain early forensic science could be.
A case of meat pudding, mixed evidence, and a courtroom struggling to make sense of answers that simply refused to align.
If you enjoy these deeper Victorian mysteries, we’d be delighted to have you join us over on Patreon, where we keep our longer investigations, early releases, and a great deal more from the archives.
Settle in — Cambridge awaits.
11 Mar 2026
The Death of Ellen Warder: A Victorian Poisoning Mystery | True Crime 1866
Tonight we travel to Brighton in the summer of 1866, where the sudden illness of a newly married woman set in motion one of the most troubling Victorian inquests of the decade.
Ellen Warder’s decline was abrupt, her symptoms baffling, and every doctor who attended her agreed on one unsettling point: nothing about her illness could be explained by natural causes.
But it was only when investigators began looking more closely at her husband’s past that the real unease began. For Ellen was not his first wife to die suddenly. Nor his second.
As the evidence gathered pace — and as the era’s leading toxicologist was called to examine her organs — the case widened into a far darker question:
How many tragic “misfortunes” can surround a single man before coincidence becomes impossible?
If you enjoy our Victorian true-crime investigations and would like access to our full archive, plus early ad-free episodes and bonus material, you can find all of that on Patreon, where we post additional stories that never appear elsewhere.
Settle in, and let’s step back to Brighton, 1866.
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