Murder Maps. Drew Gray

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      SENSATIONALIZED MURDER & THE RISE OF THE DETECTIVE.

      Opposite. a commemorative print of the execution of william corder in 1828 for the murder of maria marten at the red barn. the murder, and then william corder’s trial and subsequent hanging, was one of the most sensational news stories

      of the 19th century.

      M urder has always fascinated us. From Cain to Crippen and from Brutus to Bundy, we want to understand the motivation behind the crime, the manner in which it was carried out and exactly how the perpetrator was tracked down. In the 18th century, our keen interest was exploited by pamphleteers and in the 19th by newspapermen. Up to the mid-1800s, crowds of spectators could watch a murderer hang in front of them and then read the story of their crime reproduced in a cheap ‘murder ballad’ sold as a souvenir of the grisly occasion. Even after that, when executions were conducted behind closed doors, there was no reduction in appetites to read the stories; in fact, the last quarter of the century saw a growth in ‘murder news’.

      Taking its lead from the papers of the time, this book revisits murders and serial killings of the 19th century, focusing on murderers whose gruesome crimes shocked their contemporaries. Every murder is plotted on a map of the area to show exactly where it took place. Psychologist David Canter’s groundbreaking work in plotting the murders committed by Peter Sutcliffe between 1975 and 1980 in Yorkshire, England, to demonstrate the common behaviours of killers has been applied throughout, including to 1880s Whitechapel where the killer known only as ‘Jack the Ripper’ first established serial killing in the public consciousness.

      Mapping murder allows us to explore homicides on both a micro and macro level. Not only can we map individual and serial murders to discover the connections between them, we can also analyse the distribution of murders to observe links between poverty, wealth, architecture and immigration in the geography of killing. By taking a global perspective, this new study also reflects on the comparative nature and distribution of homicides across the world. Were patterns in London, for example, repeated in Paris or New York, both international cities with diverse populations? To what extent were killings in Australia, the American West or other ‘colonial’ locations different (or differently detected)?

      Below. milestones of criminal

      investigation, 1810–1910.

      

      innovation.

      

      case.

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      publication.

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      institution.

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