Salford, April 2024. A walker in the woods at Kersal Dale finds a package wrapped in plastic near a ruined bunker. Inside is a human torso, and Greater Manchester Police face a question few murder inquiries ever meet: who is the victim, when no one has been reported missing?

The answer is Stuart Everett, a retired civil servant of sixty-seven, a kind and jolly Derby man of Polish heritage who taught English to new arrivals, and whose housemate had been answering his texts, spending his pension and signing his birthday cards for three weeks after his death.

This is the story of a murder for money in a quiet house in Winton, of the man with the heavy bag who crossed the city by bus, and of the CCTV investigation, among the largest in the force’s history, that gave a forgotten man back his name.

Sale, Greater Manchester, July 2012.

Robert and Patricia Seddon, sixty-eight and sixty-five, married for forty-seven years, are found shot dead in their home on Clough Avenue. A shotgun lies across Robert's lap, and the scene tells a simple, dreadful story of murder and suicide.

It is a lie. Four months earlier, a hired BMW carrying the couple and their grandson had plunged into the Bridgewater Canal, and the man who climbed clear, then posed as a hero on the sinking roof, was the same man who stood to inherit everything: their son.

This is the story of Stephen Seddon, of the parents who gave him money, houses and unconditional loyalty, of the father who worked out the truth and confided it to his doctor the day before he was murdered, and of the trial that ended with a life sentence and a minimum term of forty years.

Shaw, on the edge of Oldham, February 1987. Susan and Florence Egerton, aged ninety-two and eighty-one, had lived in the same end-terrace house on Beal Lane for forty years.

Around the town they were known as the little sparrows: two tiny, trusting sisters who kept their savings in coffee jars and would open the door to anyone. One Sunday afternoon, their niece found them dead.

Within nine days, a quiet local teenager had confessed to the murders and was in custody. He was innocent. While he waited in Strangeways for a trial that would never come, the man who had really killed the sisters was still walking the streets of Shaw, publicly calling for the murderer to be hanged.

It took the courage of a woman who survived him to bring the truth out.

This episode tells the story of two crimes: the murder of the little sparrows, and the eleven months an innocent man spent behind bars in the killer's place.

On a March afternoon in 2025, paramedics were called to a house on Butterstile Lane in Prestwich, where 84-year-old David Berman lay dead on his kitchen floor.

His wife of twenty-seven years said he had slipped while carrying a lunch tray, and fallen on a small knife. For five days, that account stood - until a post-mortem examination told a different story.

This episode follows the case of Daryl Berman: the 999 call, the pathologist who called an accident inconceivable, the jury that couldn't decide, and the retrial that ended in a life sentence.

The final episode in a short series on Strangeways Prison and the people who were first and last to be executed there.

At eight o'clock in the morning on the thirteenth of August 1964, in two prisons thirty-five miles apart, Peter Anthony Allen and Gwynne Owen Evans were hanged for the murder of Jack West - and nobody watching, not even the hangmen, knew that capital punishment in Britain had just ended.

This episode follows the five weeks between verdict and rope: the appeal that never mentioned the one defence that might have worked, a mother's letter begging for a merciful judgement, and eight words in red ink on a Home Office file.

And then the sixty years after: the Parliament that abolished hanging, the town that petitioned in both directions at once, the mother who changed her mind, the son who learned, fifty years on, that he had been outside the house that night - and the files, opened at last in 2017, that led a QC to call the last hanging in Britain a miscarriage of justice.

The fourth in a short series on Strangeways Prison and the people who were first and last to be executed there.

In April 1964, in the village of Seaton on the Cumberland coast, a laundry van driver named Jack West - a careful, quiet man who kept his spare key in a box of nails and told the neighbours where to find it - was beaten and stabbed to death in his own hallway.

Within two days, a folded raincoat and an engraved gold watch had led police to two young men in Preston, each of whom swore the other had done the killing.

The trial that followed, at Manchester Crown Court, turned on a wife's evolving evidence, a set of forged love letters, a defence that vanished without explanation on day two - and a distinction in law, seven years old, that would decide whether the two men lived or died.

The story concludes in the next episode.

The last woman ever hanged at Strangeways - and the old woman she killed for a bungalow.

In the spring of 1953, seventy-nine-year-old Sarah Ann Ricketts took a married couple into her Blackpool home as live-in help, and within a fortnight she had left them everything she owned. Eleven days later she was dead, poisoned with rat poison slipped into the food she trusted - while her housekeeper, Louisa Merrifield, told half of Blackpool she’d been “landed” before the old lady had

even died.

This is the story of the will, the boasting that hanged her, the medical battle that nearly unmade the case, and the strange, complicated woman who became the last to die on the rope at Strangeways.

You guys. I'm so tired, and so busy. So - I'm taking a short break. Back with you on August 7th.

Meanwhile, can I urge you to support Count Binface in the fight against fascism? You can donate here.

https://ko-fi.com/countbinface

Let me know if you do ([email protected]) and I'll even give you a shoutout!

Part two of our short series on Strangeways Prison and the first and last to be executed there.

In the spring of 1886, on one short street in Ashton-under-Lyne, three people died in nine weeks - a nineteen-year-old mill girl, her father, and the neighbour who was the family’s closest friend.

Each death was certified as natural; each was followed by a small insurance payment to the same woman, Mary Ann Britland - mother, wife, and friend to the dead.

She would become the first woman hanged at Strangeways.

This is the story of the three people she poisoned, of the burial-club pennies and the over-the-counter poison that made it possible, and of the one question the case never answered: whether she did it alone.

In this episode I covered the murder of Stuart Everett. I've taken the decision to delete it - you can listen if you want to know why. We'll return to the case in future.