On 17 January 1990, 92-year-old Doris Kellett was beaten to death inside her home in Cleckheaton—just twenty yards from a police station. Forty-five minutes earlier, a witness saw her talking to two men on her doorstep, one holding a clipboard. Her pension money, a ring and an amber paperweight were taken. More than three decades later, her killer has never been caught. Host Alexander Lawson examines the case that still remains unsolved.

In the early hours of January 11, 1990, 70-year-old Bridget Brosnan was found dead in her bed on a psychiatric ward. Staff claimed cardiac arrest. The mortuary attendant saw something very different.

Bruises. Defensive scratches. No hanging marks. Toxic levels of drugs already in her system. Then the nurses changed their story.

More than 30 years later, no one has ever been charged with her murder.

Host Alexander Lawson investigates the chilling case of Ward 14 at Lister Hospital — the lies, the cover-up, and the killer who was never caught.

January 1990. A retired vet is found face-down in his Worthing flat — arms and legs bound with electrical cable, face smashed, ribs broken, strangled to death.

The killers tore the place apart looking for a hidden safe packed with cash and jewellery. They never found it. Then they walked out covered in blood… and disappeared.

More than 35 years later, no one has been charged.

Tonight, Alexander Lawson unravels the brutal, still-unsolved murder of William Howe — the cold case that refuses to die.

In a locked Mayfair drawer, a Duke discovered Polaroids that would destroy his wife. Naked except for her signature pearls. With a man whose face had been carefully cropped out of every frame.

Eighty-eight names. Ministers. Movie stars. Whispers of royalty.

It was 1963, and the divorce of the Duke and Duchess of Argyll became the longest, costliest, and most scandalous in Scottish legal history. When the photographs were entered as evidence, Margaret Campbell was no longer a glamorous socialite — she was the Dirty Duchess.

In this episode, Alexander Lawson unravels the bitter marriage, the stolen images, the ruthless courtroom battle, and the power imbalance that left one woman permanently marked while the other walked free.

A story of privilege, humiliation, and photographs that refused to stay private.

On a freezing Paris morning in 1836, the guillotine jammed halfway down. The condemned man calmly turned his head… and watched the blade finish the job.

His name was Pierre-François Lacenaire — poet, dandy, and cold-blooded murderer who treated killing like a glass of wine and turned his own trial into the greatest show in Paris.

From a brutal double murder in a quiet alley to a courtroom performance that captivated high society, Lacenaire rewrote the rules of crime and celebrity. His story would later inspire Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

This is the true story of the elegant monster who made murder an art form.

Hosted by Alexander Lawson.

A soft-spoken stranger approaches a young woman in 1850s Lyon and offers her the perfect position as a maid—steady pay, a comfortable house, a better life. She packs her few belongings and follows him into the countryside.

She never comes back.

Between 1855 and 1861, Martin Dumollard and his wife turned hope into a deadly trap. He lured desperate domestic servants with false job offers, led them deep into the woods, and attacked. Some were robbed and left for dead. Others were raped, murdered, and buried—sometimes while still alive. When police finally searched his cottage, they found hundreds of pieces of women’s clothing.

This is the true story of the man history calls the Murderer of Maids—the predator many consider France’s first modern serial killer.

Host Alexander Lawson recounts the chilling crimes, the survivor who escaped, the investigation that finally stopped him, and the public guillotine that ended it all.

Press play if you’re ready for one of the most disturbing true crime cases of the 19th century.

In September 1869, a farmer digging in a field outside Paris uncovers a child’s hand rising from the earth. By nightfall, six bodies are pulled from a shallow grave — a pregnant mother and five of her children, their faces destroyed, throats cut, and skulls crushed. Two more members of the same family are already dead.

The killer is only twenty years old.

This is the story of Jean-Baptiste Troppmann, the young Alsatian mechanic whose cold-blooded slaughter of the Kinck family became one of the most shocking crimes of 19th-century France. From a poisoned glass of wine in the Alsatian woods to a midnight massacre in the fields of Pantin, and finally to a public guillotine before tens of thousands, host Alexander Lawson recounts the full horror of the Pantin Massacre.

In 19th-century Brittany, a simple bowl of soup could be a death sentence. Hélène Jégado, a seemingly devoted cook and servant, is believed to have poisoned as many as 36 people — priests, children, entire households — while sitting at their bedsides and praying over them as they died in agony.

Between 1833 and 1851 she moved from rectory to manor, leaving a trail of arsenic deaths that were long mistaken for cholera. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, host Alexander Lawson uncovers the chilling story of France’s most prolific female serial killer: the woman who turned the kitchen into a slaughterhouse and made murder look like mercy.

In the lonely fields of southeastern France, a scarred wanderer in a white rabbit-fur hat left a trail of mutilated adolescents between 1894 and 1897. They called him the Killer of Shepherds. They called him the French Ripper.

Host Alexander Lawson unravels the true story of Joseph Vacher—his brutal crimes, his capture, and the guillotine that finally ended his reign of terror. A forgotten serial killer whose body count may have surpassed Jack the Ripper’s… and whose victims were mostly children watching sheep under an open sky.

On a hot July night in 1934, America’s most wanted man walked out of a Chicago movie theater and into a hail of bullets. In this episode, Alexander Lawson traces John Dillinger’s path from small-town Indiana farm boy to the Depression-era outlaw who robbed banks, escaped from “escape-proof” jails, and captured the imagination of a nation. From the wooden-gun breakout at Crown Point to the bloody raid at Little Bohemia and the final ambush outside the Biograph Theater, this is the rise and fall of the Gentleman Bandit.