Crime & Law

THE CASE THAT INSPIRED THE PODCAST PHENOMENON SERIAL, AND THE HBO DOCUSERIES THE CASE AGAINST ADNAN SYED.

On February 28, 2000, Adnan Syed was convicted and sentenced to life plus thirty years for the murder of his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee, a high school senior in Baltimore, Maryland. From the moment of his arrest, Syed has consistently maintained his innocence. Rabia Chaudry, a family friend, always believed him and has never given up the hope that he might someday be released. By 2013, however, after almost all appeals had been exhausted, things looked bleak. That's when Rabia contacted Sarah Koenig, a producer at This American Life, in the hopes of finding a journalist who would bring greater attention to Adnan's story and might shed new light on the case. Koenig's investigation turned into Serial, an international phenomenon and Peabody Award-winning podcast.

In 2022, after 23 years in prison, Adnan's conviction was overturned, and he was finally freed. But Hae Min Lee's real killer is still out there.

Adnan's Story re-examines the investigation that led to Adnan Syed's arrest, shares his life in prison, covers new evidence and possibilities that have since come to light, and reviews the recent court successes - including a ruling by a Maryland judge to reopen Syed's case. Woven with personal reflections from Adnan himself, including new never-before-seen letters he penned from prison, the story of his family, community, and public advocate Chaudry, the book gives brilliant insight into the story that captivated the attention of millions as his legal team and investigatory team, along with countless others who have crowd-sourced an investigation like never before, seek to exonerate him and find out the truth of what really happened on that day in 1999.

But this is not only a personal story, but a testament to a thoroughly broken system that convicts tens of thousands of innocent people, and how the power of the media and public can move rigid institutions to bring about justice.

As Professor of Anatomy and Forensic Anthropology, Sue Black confronts death every day. She focuses on mortal remains in her lab, at burial sites, at scenes of violence, murder and criminal dismemberment. Here she reveals the many faces of death she has come to know, using key cases to explore how forensic science has developed, and what her work has taught her.

Straight from the harsh streets, American Cops is a first-person account of the days and nights of America's police force. PROTECT: These men and women are our eyes. Our ears. Our protectors. Those who wear a badge, doing their best to help people. SERVE: These cops serve their communities. They serve their country. They're in the business of saving lives-even at the risk of their own. DEFEND: These patrol officers and K9 handlers, sheriffs and detectives, reveal what it's really like to wear the uniform, to carry the weight of the responsibility they've been given. This is a calling. This is the job.

Thomas Reppetto provides a balanced history of the mafia's rise from the 1880s to the post-World War II era. He draws on a lifetime of field experience and access to unseen documents, and features the stories of Lucky Luciano and Al Capone, noting the role that Prohibition had in the establishment of the mafia's defining characteristics.

When Ghana declared independence from Britain in 1957, it immediately became a target for opportunists determined to lay hold of whatever assets colonialism hadn't already stripped. The military ousted the new nation's first president, Kwame Nkrumah, then falsely accused him of stealing the country's gold and hiding it overseas. Into this story stepped one of history's most charismatic scammers, John Ackah Blay-Miezah - a con man to rival the trickster god Anansi. Born into poverty, Blay-Miezah declared himself the custodian of an alleged Nkrumah trust fund worth billions. You, too, could claim a piece, if only you would help him rescue it - with a small investment.

Over the 1970s and '80s, he grew his scam to epic proportions, amassing hundreds of millions of pounds from thousands of marks all over the world. He baffled Henry Kissinger, scandalised Shirley Temple-Black, and had Nixon's former attorney-general at his beck and call. Many tried to stop him, but Blay-Miezah continued to live in luxury, protected by ex-SAS soldiers while he deceived lawyers, businessmen and investigators around the globe. 

In Anansi's Gold, Yepoka Yeebo chases the ever-wilder trail of Blay-Miezah - and unfolds a riveting account of Cold War entanglements and African dreams - revealing the untold story of the grifter who beat the West at its own thieving game.

A novelist's gripping investigation of the forces that led his childhood best friend from academic stardom to the psychiatric hospital where he has lived since killing the woman he loved When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle, New York in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of professors, the boys were best friends and fierce rivals who soon followed each other to Yale University. Michael blazed through Yale in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. Then one day, Jonathan received a devastating call: Michael had suffered a psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Michael was still in hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School, and living in a halfway house when he decided, against all odds, to enroll.

Still battling delusions, he managed to graduate, and after his triumphant story was featured in The New York Times, sold a memoir for a vast sum. Ron Howard bought film rights, completing the dream for Michael and his tirelessly supportive girlfriend Carrie, and Brad Pitt was set to star. But then Michael, in the grip of psychosis, committed a horrific act that made him a front-page story of an entirely different sort. The Best Minds is Jonathan Rosen's powerful account of an American tragedy, set in the final decades of the American century, an era that coincided with the emptying out of state mental hospitals. It is a story about the bonds of friendship, the price of delusion and the mystery of identity. Tender, funny, and harrowing by turns, The Best Minds is both a beautifully rendered coming of age story and an indictment of the profound neglect of mental illness in our society.

Guns from America reach more than 130 countries, and inundate Mexico, with over 200,000 guns every year crossing the border and arming the drug cartels. In this groundbreaking new work of investigative journalism, master of reportage Ioan Grillo delves into the enormous black market for firearms in the Americas: he travels to gun manufacturers, strolls the aisles of gun shows and gun shops, hangs out on Baltimore street corners, talks to federal agents who have infiltrated gangs, and visits the ATF gun tracing centre in West Virginia. Along the way, Grillo lays bare the many ways that guns slip through the legal cracks and into the hands of criminals, fuelling violence among Mexico's powerful cartels and beyond.

At a time when debates around gun control are rife, this gripping exposé draws a startling a connection between guns and the global drug trade, revealing them to be key accessories in our epidemics of addiction. 

June 2006: Allan Chappelow, an award-winning photographer and biographer, was found battered to death at his house in Hampstead. The man eventually convicted of his murder was a Chinese dissident named Wang Yam; Thomas Harding has spent the past two years investigating the case, and has unearthed shocking new material on the killing.

London, 1932. Thomas James Wise is the toast of the literary establishment. A prominent collector and businessman, he is renowned on both sides of the Atlantic for unearthing the most stunning first editions and bringing them to market. Pompous and fearsome, with friends in high places, he is one of the most powerful men in the field of rare books. One night, two young booksellers - one a dishevelled former communist, the other a martini-swilling fan of detective stories - stumble upon a strange discrepancy. It will lead them to suspect Wise and his books are not all they seem.

Inspired by the vogue for Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes, the pair harness the latest developments in forensic analysis to crack the case, but find its extent is greater than they ever could have imagined. By the time they are done, their investigation will have rocked the book world to its core. This is the true story of unlikely friends coming together to expose the literary crime of the century, and of a maverick bibliophile who forged not only books but an entire life, erasing his past along the way.

The vast majority of our country is entirely unknown to us because we are banned from setting foot on it. By law of trespass, we are excluded from 92 per cent of the land and 97 per cent of its waterways, blocked by walls whose legitimacy is rarely questioned. But behind them lies a story of enclosure, exploitation and dispossession of public rights whose effects last to this day.

The Book of Trespass takes us on a journey over the walls of England, into the thousands of square miles of rivers, woodland, lakes and meadows that are blocked from public access. By trespassing the land of the media magnates, Lords, politicians and private corporations that own England, Nick Hayes argues that the root of social inequality is the uneven distribution of land.

He spent years beating the market; betting against the dot com bubble in the 1990s and the banks before the financial crash in 2008, making blockbuster returns for his investors and earning himself a reputation of 'the man who made Middle England rich'. As famous for his fleet of fast cars and ostentatious mansions, he was the rockstar fund manager that had the lifestyle to match. But, in 2019, after a stream of poorly-judged investments, Woodford's asset management company collapsed, trapping hundreds of thousands of rainy-day savers in his flagship fund and hanging £3.6bn in the balance.

In Built on a Lie, Financial Times reporter Owen Walker reveals the disastrous failings of Woodford, the greed at the heart of his operation, the flaws of an industry in thrall to its star performers and the dangers of limited regulation. With exclusive access to Woodford's inner circle, Walker will reveal the full, jaw-dropping story of Europe's biggest investment scandal in a decade.

The real Line of Duty. 'The first rule of covert surveillance is never disturb the environment. To be an undercover officer, you must watch and wait. Before that, though, is the question of identity. Embarking on a covert operation you first must decide who you are. Who will you be today?' Liam Thomas was an officer in the Met for over a decade, many of those years spent deep at the heart of Britain's most dangerous criminal enterprises in the murky world of undercover surveillance.

Before him, his father had also been a police officer, a pillar of their small community. Fighting corruption was Liam's life. But the murky world of undercover work teaches him that justice is far from black and white - and a family secret reveals that corruption is closer to home than he had ever expected. The revelations push him to the edge of his sanity - and then he discovers that his bosses are investigating him... A thrilling memoir of a life lived amongst a world of corruption, justice and questionable loyalties, this book tells the real story of the police's line of duty.

When Detective Superintendant Steve Fulcher arrested Christopher Halliwell over the disappearance of 22-year-old Sian O’Callaghan, it was the start of his own downfall. Following the investigation, this is Steve’s inside story of the cat-and-mouse situation, which led him to the discovery of Sian’s body and another victim who had been missing since 2002. The murders shocked the nation and since then, Halliwell has been linked to several more murders and disappearances.

Author and former solicitor John Morris investigates the Clydach murders, which occurred in 1999, for which Dai Morris was convicted in 2006. In a case which shocked the country Mandy Power, her bed-ridden mother and her two young daughters were battered to death. The crime sparked a huge investigation yet the police made little progress. Is Dai Morris a brutal murderer or the victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice?

"I was what the older generation of prison officers called a 'care bear'. It was my job to work with the prisoners most in danger of falling through the cracks and, if not deliver them safely to the community upon release, fully rehabilitated, then at least stop them from killing themselves or anyone else..."

Come with Angela Kirwin for a journey inside prison like no other. For over a decade she was a social care worker in some of Britain's most notorious prisons.

Now she wants to tell the stories of the men she met, because she believes that prison is failing everyone, damaging the most vulnerable people in our societies, creating habitual criminals, leaving us all less safe and contributing to a society that is immeasurably less humane. Every year, we spend billions of pounds on a system that fundamentally doesn't work.

Rather than a separate world full of people that aren't like us, prison is where the most damaged and vulnerable people in our society end up and we all need to urgently care about that, so we can change it. Because the state of our prisons is criminal.

In 1876 it took three tortuous days for Charles Bravo to die of poisoning. At the inquest many people were revealed to have a grudge against the young barrister, but no-one was convicted of his murder. Over a century later the author draws on new evidence to solve a famous case in criminal history.

October 1947. A luxury liner steams over the equator off the coast of West Africa and a beautiful actress disappears from her cabin. 

Suspicion falls on a dashing deck steward with a reputation for entering the cabins of female passengers. When the liner docks at Southampton, the steward is questioned by police. Protesting his innocence, he makes an astonishing admission that shocks everyone, and is charged with murder. His trial at the historic Great Hall in Winchester draws the world's media. He is found guilty and sentenced to hang. But was the verdict sound? Many believe not. Now, for the first time, Antony M. Brown has secured unprecedented access to the police file, allowing the definitive story to be told.

'This time he wasn't getting up. Neither were the two young women he'd just murdered. The two unarmed young police officers he cut down in a hail of 32 bullets and the fragments of a grenade, ending their promising lives so savagely, so senselessly. I felt empty. Cold. How had it come to this?'

Shay grew up on a tough Manchester council estate where drugs and gangs were rife. A life of crime would have been an easy path to take. So it went against everything that was expected of him when he joined the police.

It wouldn't be long before Shay's prodigious talent caught the attention of the top. Then came the call that changed his life: an offer to join the secret Level 1 undercover unit known as Omega. And it was easy to see why they wanted him; he wouldn't have to stray too far from what he already knew. He had all the attributes of a professional criminal - the athletic physique of a cage fighter, the talk, the walk. Streetwise and fearless, he'd be a match for the most hardened villain. He was given a new identity, his DNA and fingerprints were removed from the national database, and so began the life of Mikey O'Brien.

In a distinguished covert career spanning 17 years, former solider Shay infiltrated Moss Side gangs, was part of a hand-picked team hunting Dale Cregan and was brought in to break up a gang war wall of silence after the murder of Salford 'Mr Big' Paul Massey. But there would be a heavy price to pay for a life in the shadows, where any mistake could have lethal consequences...

Denise Mina is well known for her bestselling 'Tartan Noir' novels. She has twice won the Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year Award, and her 'Paddy Meehan' series has been adapted for BBC TV. Before becoming a novelist, she studied law, and she has a particular interest in true crime. In these six episodes, she uncovers some of Scotland's most dramatic trials that continue to fascinate us years later. Also included is a bonus documentary, The Street Lawyer. The Paisley Snail - 1928. When May Donoghue pours ginger beer into her ice-cream float and a decomposed snail slithers out of the bottle, it sparks a case that will make legal history... Oscar Slater - Rich spinster Marion Gilchrist is brutally murdered in her Glasgow home in 1908. The hunt for her killer leads to Scotland's most dramatic miscarriage of justice: the Oscar Slater trial.

The Douglas Cause - In this notorious 18th Century cause célèbre, two leading aristocratic families go head-to-head in a scandalous inheritance battle involving a secret elopement and stolen babies. The Moorov Doctrine - Glasgow, 1930, and a #MeToo-style case of sexual harassment in the workplace establishes one of the most important legal principles in Scottish law today. Madeleine Smith - In 1857, socialite Madeleine Smith is on trial for murder, accused of poisoning her French lover Emile L'Angelier. But did she do it, or not? Burke and Hare - Denise Mina looks at the notorious 19th Century murderers, talking to fellow authors Marisa Haetzman and Ian Rankin about the legalities of body snatching and the legacy of Burke and Hare's grim deeds. The Street Lawyer - Mina joins street lawyer Emmanuel De Abreu and sixth-formers from Glasgow's Lochend Community High School as they take on the roles of defence and prosecution to simulate a famous US murder case.

In the summer of 1889, young Southern belle Florence Maybrick stood trial for the alleged arsenic poisoning of her much older husband, Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick. The case cracked the varnish of Victorian respectability, shocking and exciting the public in equal measure.

On 7 November 1974, nanny Sandra Rivett was bludgeoned to death in a Belgravia basement. Veronica, Countess of Lucan, was also attacked. The man named in court as perpetrator of these crimes, Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, disappeared in the early hours of the following morning. The case, solved in the eyes of the law, has retained its fascination ever since.

A thrilling and perplexing investigation of a true Victorian crime at Dublin railway station.

Dublin, November 1856: George Little, the chief cashier of the Broadstone railway terminus, is found dead, lying in a pool of blood beneath his desk.

He has been savagely beaten, his head almost severed; there is no sign of a murder weapon, and the office door is locked, apparently from the inside. Thousands of pounds in gold and silver are left untouched at the scene of the crime.

Augustus Guy, Ireland's most experienced detective, teams up with Dublin's leading lawyer to investigate the murder. But the mystery defies all explanation, and two celebrated sleuths sent by Scotland Yard soon return to London, baffled.

Five suspects are arrested then released, with every step of the salacious case followed by the press, clamouring for answers. But then a local woman comes forward, claiming to know the murderer...

Emily has always felt like an outsider, so when a family friend takes her under his wing she is delighted. But soon it becomes clear that his motives are not all they seem. At the age of 11, Emily is groomed into being a ‘county lines’ drug trafficker. It is the beginning of a vicious cycle that sees her become prey to one abuser after another, involving a huge child-sex-trafficking gang. The moving true story of how one girl overcame her traumatic past and learned to love for the very first time.

When her 22-year-old daughter, Julie, went missing, Ann Ming was certain she had been murdered. Three months later she found her decomposing body behind a bath panel. Local man, Billy Dunlop, was tried for her murder but a series of blunders allowed him to walk free. Protected by the law of Double Jeopardy, he callously bragged about his 'perfect crime'. But Dunlop had not reckoned on Ann Ming…This is the extraordinary story of a fight for justice which she never gave up.

In 2007, Bolton Crown Court sentenced Shaun Greenhalgh to four years and eight months in prison for the crime of producing artistic forgeries. Working out of a shed in his parents' garden, Greenhalgh had successfully fooled some of the world's greatest museums. During the court case, the breadth of his forgeries shocked the art world and tantalised the media. What no one realised was how much more of the story there was to tell.

In the aftermath of the Cold War, US intelligence caught three high-profile Russian spies. However, these arrests left major questions unanswered, and rumours have long swirled of another mole, often referred to as the Fourth Man. Three pioneering female veterans of counterintelligence were tasked with unearthing him. With steadfast determination and expertise, they came to a shocking conclusion, one which had, and continues to harbour, dramatic consequences for American security.

In this gripping insider account, Baer tells a thrilling story of Russian espionage and American intelligence. With profound implications for the rise of Vladimir Putin and international relations with Russia, The Fourth Man is a real-life spy thriller with echoes of John Le Carre.

The real story that inspired the BBC drama The Gold On Saturday 26 November 1983 an armed gang stole gold bullion worth almost A26 million from the Brink's-Mat security depot near London's Heathrow Airport. It was the largest robbery in world history and only the start of an extraordinary story.

For forty years myths and legends have grown around the Brink's-Mat heist and the events that followed. The heist led to a wave of international money laundering provided dirty money that helped fuel the London Docklands property boom caused seismic changes in both British crime and policing and has been linked to a series of deaths that continued until 2015.

The Gold is the conclusion of extensive research and includes exclusive testimony from one of the original robbers who gives his version of events for the first time. The result is the astonishing true story of the robbery of the century.

Katra Sadatganj. A tiny village in western Uttar Pradesh. A community bounded by tradition and custom; where young women are watched closely, and know what is expected of them. It was an ordinary night when two girls, Padma and Lalli, went missing. The next day, their bodies were found - hanging in the orchard, their clothes muddied. In the ensuing months, the investigation into their deaths would implode everything that their small community held to be true, and instigated a national conversation about sex, honour and violence.

The Good Girls returns to the scene of Padma and Lalli's short lives and shocking deaths, daring to ask: what is the human cost of shame?

In the summer of 1919, a young woman is found dead in a lonely country lane. She was last seen with a man on a green bicycle, who seemingly vanishes into thin air...Now, dramatic evidence is revealed for the first time, including a vital statement hidden in a police safe for decades and the forgotten testimony of a key witness. But does it solve the case or deepen the mystery?

The story of the brutal murders committed in 1946 by wartime RAF pilot and playboy Neville Heath. This collage of experiences from the women who knew him intimately - his wife, his mother, his lovers - and his victims, probes the schism at the heart of his fascinating, chilling personality.

She grew up in a Chelsea townhouse and on a Devon estate.

She was presented to the Queen at Buckingham Palace as a debutante in 1958.

She trained at Oxford as an academic economist and had a love affair with a female professor (who was on the rebound from Iris Murdoch).

At thirty, she commenced giving her inheritance away to the poor.

In 1972, the deadliest year of the Northern Irish Troubles, she travelled to Ireland and joined the IRA.

Sean O'Driscoll's Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber tells the astonishing story of Rose Dugdale, who went on to become a committed terrorist, participating in a major art heist and a bombing raid on a police and army barracks; who kept a pregnancy secret for nine months in prison and gave birth there; and who ended up at the heart of the IRA's bomb-making operation during its deadly final spasms in the 1990s. Heiress, Rebel, Vigilante, Bomber is both the page-turning biography of a remarkable woman and a groundbreaking account of the inner workings of a terrorist organization.

One night, in a small North Carolina town, a down-on-his-luck guard at Loomis Fargo manages to steal 17 million dollars. Despite being caught on camera wheeling the money from the vault to the getaway van, David Ghantt makes off to Mexico before the FBI can blink. This is the definitive inside account of this astonishing true story.

The true story of a detective, two bronze horses and the dictator who set the world on fire.

When detective Arthur Brand is summoned to a meeting with one of the most dangerous men in the art world, he learns that a clue has emerged that could solve one of the Second World War's unexplained mysteries: what really happened to the Striding Horses, Hitler's favourite statue, which disappeared during the bombing of Berlin.

As Brand goes undercover to find the horses, he discovers a terrifying world ruled by neo-Nazis and former KGB agents, where Third Reich memorabilia sells for millions of dollars. The stakes get ever higher as Brand carefully lays his trap to catch the criminal masterminds trying to sell the statue on the black market. But who are they? And will he manage to bring them to justice before they discover his real identity?

We are in a crucial moment: women are breaking through the cultural reticence around gender-based violence. But just as survivors have begun to feel empowered to speak out, a new form of systematic silencing has made itself more evident: rich and powerful men are using teams of lawyers to suppress allegations and prevent newspaper stories from running. Individual women, advocacy groups and journalists find themselves fighting against censorship. 

The law is being wielded to reinforce the status quo of silence that existed before #MeToo.

In How Many More Women? internationally-acclaimed human rights lawyers, Jennifer Robinson and Keina Yoshida, examine the broken systems and explore the changes needed in order to ensure that women's freedom, including their freedom of speech, is no longer threatened by the laws that are supposed to protect them.

London, during 1964-65, a meticulous serial killer was stalking local prostitutes and dumping their naked bodies on the streets. Possibly eight women fell victim, making this killer more prolific than Jack the Ripper. This is a thought-provoking reinvestigation into perhaps the most shocking unsolved mass murder in modern British history.

Once upon a time there was a beautiful princess who suffered a tragedy, the death of her father, a war hero, a philanthropist, a good man, in suspicious circumstances. She fled to New York where she made a new life with a brilliant mathematician. Her name is Ghislaine Maxwell and her lover was Jeffrey Epstein. Through Jeffrey, and her family name, Ghislaine became friends with some of the most powerful people on earth, ex-President Bill Clinton and President-to-be Donald Trump and the second son of the Queen of England, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York.

But this is no fairy tale. Hunting Ghislaine sets out the other side of the story, and it's one of the darkest you will ever read.

Ghislaine's father, Robert Maxwell, was a sadist, a war criminal, a monster. His cruelty deformed Ghislaine Maxwell long before she met Jeffrey Epstein. Her one-time lover was convicted for being a paedophile. So Ghislaine's life has been spent serving not one monster but two.

In Hunting Ghislaine, legendary investigative journalist John Sweeney uncovers the truth behind this fairy tale story in reverse.