In the autumn of 1900, thousands of people in Manchester began falling ill.

They were mostly working-class beer drinkers, and the diagnosis was straightforward: alcoholic neuritis, the doctors said. The drinking had caught up with them.

For four months, no one looked further. Then one physician at the Manchester Workhouse Infirmary noticed something that didn't fit.

What he found changed everything - and almost nothing. This is the story of the 1900 Manchester arsenic beer epidemic: how industrial corner-cutting put poison into the city's pubs, how class assumptions in medicine allowed it to go undetected for months, and how, when the truth finally emerged, the people who suffered most received the least.

On Boxing Day 2011, twenty-three-year-old postgraduate student Anuj Bidve was walking through Ordsall, Salford with friends when he was shot dead in an unprovoked and motiveless attack. He had been in England for threemonths.

His killer, local factory worker Kiaran Stapleton, was convicted of murder in July 2012 and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of thirty years.

This is Anuj's story.

In December 1972, a sixteen-year-old boy beat seventy-four-year-old shopkeeper Margaret Potts to death in her shop in Scouthead, Oldham.

He was convicted and sentenced. Then he escaped. Then he escaped again.

Then he vanished to Ireland for fifteen years under a false name, while Margaret's daughter Irene spent four decades calling for him to be found.

This is the story of a murder, an indeterminate sentence, and a family still waiting for closure that never quite came.

Karen Youdell was fifty years old, a mother of four, known and well liked in Newton Heath. In the early hours of a July morning in 2023, she was attacked in the garden of a house on Rosebank Road and left with catastrophic injuries. She never regained consciousness.

She spent nearly ten months in a persistent vegetative state before dying in May 2024. Her daughters said it plainly: they had to lose their mum twice.

This episode covers the attack, the hours that followed it, the cover-up constructed by three people who arrived at the scene and chose not to call for help, and the legal process that eventually brought a murder conviction - nearly two years after the night on Rosebank Road.

Dean Johnstone was sentenced to life imprisonment in July 2025.

On 18 September 1867, Sergeant Charles Brett became the first officer of the Manchester City Police to be killed on duty. He was inside a prison van on Hyde Road when a group of armed Fenians ambushed it, attempting to free two leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. A shot was fired through the keyhole. Brett died instantly. The two prisoners walked free and were never recaptured.

Three men were hanged for his murder two months later — the last public executions in the Manchester area. None of them had fired the shot. The man who had almost certainly fired it escaped to America.

The three men hanged became the Manchester Martyrs. Monuments stand to them across Ireland. The song their defiance inspired became, for a time, the unofficial national anthem of a nation. Charles Brett lies in Harpurhey, his headstone fallen and cracked, largely forgotten by the city he served.

This episode tells the story of a September afternoon on Hyde Road, the trial that followed, and what the law decided — and what it got wrong.

In 1997 and 1998, two women went missing from the same stretch of Manchester's red light district. Julie Jones was found six days later, her body hidden at the old Smithfield Market site near Shudehill. Helen Sage has never been found at all.

Julie's murder has never been solved. A £50,000 reward remains unclaimed. DNA evidence exists, but no one has been charged. Her mother has spent twenty-seven years asking the same question.

Helen Sage is still classified, in the formal language of Greater Manchester Police, as a missing person.

This episode asks what happened to two women on the same streets in the same summer — and what it means that, more than two decades later, neither case has been resolved.

Mariann Borocz was fifty-five years old, originally from Hungary, and had been living and working quietly in Bolton for five years. On the morning of the fourteenth of December 2024, she walked into a shop on Chorley Old Road. A man followed her in. When she left, he followed her out.

She was reported missing the next day. For nine days, Greater Manchester Police searched for her — issuing appeals in English and Hungarian, speaking to hundreds of residents, reviewing hours of CCTV. The breakthrough came from a neighbourhood officer, a shop doorway, and a photograph taken years earlier on a Bolton street.

Rania Alayed was twenty-five years old when she was killed by her husband in a flat in Salford in June 2013.

She had grown up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, married at fifteen, and spent years trying to find a way out. By the time she reached Manchester, she was learning English, building something new, and fighting through the courts to protect herself and her children.

Her body was not found for twelve years.

This episode covers the murder, the cover-up, the investigation, and the long, slow work of bringing Rania home — including the moment in 2025 when her son Yazan helped police find what his father had hidden.

Susan May left prison in 2005 having served twelve years. Her conviction was intact. She had refused, throughout, to say she was guilty of something she maintained she had not done — and the system had made her pay for that refusal at every turn.

This episode covers what came next: the appeals, the scientists, the politicians, and three applications to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Twenty years of fighting.

The conviction was never overturned. Susan May died in October 2013.

In episode 11, we covered the murder of Ibrahima Seck in summer 2025, a young man who went out to play football and never returned. His killers have now been sentenced. This brief update covers the sentencing, and some additional information which came out during the trial.