Trigger Warning: This episode discusses the murder of a child and racially motivated violence.

On 21 August 1955, fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till boarded a train from Chicago to Mississippi. He carried a small suitcase, his father’s ring engraved “L.T.” — and the excitement of a summer adventure.

Four days later, he was dead.

What happened to Emmett in the Mississippi Delta became one of the most infamous lynchings in American history. Abducted in the middle of the night by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam, brutally beaten, shot, and thrown into the Tallahatchie River with a 70-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck, Emmett’s murder exposed the lethal reality of Jim Crow America.

Emmett Till’s death became a catalyst. Rosa Parks later said she thought of Emmett when she refused to give up her bus seat. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked his name in sermons. Activists would later call themselves the “Emmett Till Generation.”

Justice in a courtroom never came and Emmett Till never saw his fifteenth birthday.

But his story helped ignite a movement that reshaped America.

:

• Timothy B. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till

• National Museum of African American History and Culture

• FBI Historical Case File: Emmett Till

• U.S. Department of Justice (2021 Cold Case Closure Report)

• Civil Rights Cold Case Records Review Board (2025 document release)

• PBS American Experience

• Library of Congress Civil Rights History Project

• White House Proclamation (Emmett Till & Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, 2023)

• Congress.gov (Emmett Till Antilynching Act)

• Chicago History Museum

• Mississippi Free Press (2025 records release coverage)

• Murder in America episode 55

Sources

A hedgerow on a hill. A winter field. And a 74-year-old man who doesn’t come home.

On 14 February 1945, in the quiet Warwickshire village of Lower Quinton, Charles Walton set out to cut hedges on The Firs farm. By dusk, he was dead — brutally beaten, slashed, and pinned to the ground with his own pitchfork.

Within hours, rumours spread that this was no ordinary murder.

Some called it ritual.Others called it witchcraft.The newspapers called it Britain’s strangest killing.

In this episode, we unpack one of the UK’s most unsettling unsolved crimes — the case that inspired The Wicker Man and became Chief Inspector Robert Fabian’s final investigation.

Charles Walton’s murder remains Warwickshire’s oldest unsolved homicide.

There is no grand memorial.Only a headstone in All Saints churchyard:“Killed on Meon Hill.”

Sources

• Darryl Howe, The Cotswold Murder Files: The Killing of Charles Walton

• Robert Fabian, Fabian of the Yard

• Vice News – “The Unsolved ‘Witchcraft’ Murder That Shocked Britain”

• Our Warwickshire – Local history archives

• Warwickshire Constabulary archival material

• Gerald Gardner, The Meaning of Witchcraft

• James Morton, The Who’s Who of Unsolved Murders

• BBC archival reporting

The only solicitor ever hanged for murder in Britain.

Hay-on-Wye. 1920s respectability.A provincial solicitor.A dying wife.A poisoned rival.And Britain’s most famous forensic pathologist taking the stand with absolute certainty.

Herbert Rowse Armstrong — known locally as “Major Armstrong” after his WWI service — was a pillar of society in Hay-on-Wye. Churchwarden. Freemason. Clerk to the justices. A respectable man with a prosperous home at Mayfield in Cusop Dingle.

In 1922, he became the only solicitor in UK history to be executed for murder.

But did he do it?

• Martin Beales, The Hay Poisoner

• Stephen Bates, The Poisonous Solicitor

• Law Society Gazette (2022 retrospective)

• Ross Gazette centenary article

• Hektoen International – forensic analysis of Spilsbury

• Leamington History Group – profile of Spilsbury

• Aquila Blog – forensic legacy review

• Project Gutenberg Australia – public domain account

• Murder Maps Podcast (S5E5)

• She Done It Podcast episode

• Poisoner's Cabinet podcast

Sources