Showing results by author "ALANA SANCHEZ" in All Categories

In August 1892, two people were brutally murdered inside a locked house in Fall River, Massachusetts. The case that followed would become one of the most enduring mysteries in American history. Lizzie Borden: A True-Crime Historical Account returns to the original record to examine what is known—and what remains uncertain—about the deaths of Andrew and Abby Borden. Drawing exclusively from police reports, inquest testimony, trial transcripts, and contemporary accounts, this book traces the lives, routines, and tensions within the Borden household, the events of 4 August 1892, and the ...

The Maid of Orléans is a historical autobiography told in the imagined voice of Joan of Arc. Drawing closely on trial records, letters, and contemporary testimony, this book traces her life from Domrémy to Orléans, from coronation at Reims to trial and execution at Rouen. Written with restraint and reverence, it presents Joan not as legend or martyr alone, but as a young woman of faith, courage, and human doubt whose obedience altered the course of France. This is the story of how her voice was condemned, silenced, and—years later—vindicated.

Versailles raised her in mirrors—then the Revolution taught her what stone can do to a girl. Marie-Thérèse Charlotte, Madame Royale, was born into silk, ceremony, and a world that believed itself permanent. But when France turns on its monarchy, she is forced from palace corridors into the Tuileries—then into the Temple, where keys decide everything and childhood becomes a thing she is no longer allowed to hold. In Madame Royale: Daughter of Versailles, Prisoner of France, Alana Sanchez follows the forgotten survivor of the French Revolution—not as a footnote to famous parents, but ...

In nineteenth-century Edinburgh, bodies disappeared from the city’s poorest streets and reappeared on the dissection tables of its medical schools. History remembers the men who supplied them. This book tells a different story. The Silent Partner examines the Burke and Hare murders through the life and trial of Helen McDougal, the woman who lived inside the household where the killings occurred and who survived when the law demanded a single villain. Acquitted with the verdict Not Proven, McDougal was released into a city that no longer distinguished between suspicion and guilt. Drawing ...

What if the dead were the price of medical progress? In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Britain’s medical schools faced an impossible dilemma: anatomy demanded human bodies, yet the law provided almost none. The result was a hidden trade in the dead—grave robbing, body snatching, and, in its darkest moments, murder. The History of Grave Robbing traces the rise and fall of the resurrection men, the legal contradictions that enabled them, and the social inequalities that made the poor uniquely vulnerable in death. From the Burke and Hare murders to the Anatomy Act of 1832, from ...

Southwell Workhouse: 1860–1869 is a forensic examination of a Victorian institution at the height of its administrative maturity. This third volume in the Southwell Workhouse series traces a decade not of scandal or collapse, but of consolidation—when the Poor Law learned how to absorb reform, satisfy scrutiny, and endure without becoming humane. Drawing exclusively on documentary evidence, this study follows the daily mechanics of control: classification, labour, diet, punishment, inspection, and record-keeping. The workhouse of the 1860s was cleaner, more efficient, and more ...

Madame Restell was the most famous abortion provider in nineteenth-century America. She advertised openly in New York newspapers, built a lucrative business serving women in secret, and became a household name—denounced from pulpits, pursued by reformers, and feared by authorities. In Madame Restell: Abortion, Secrecy, and the Making of a Public Enemy, traces how a single woman came to embody a private market the public refused to acknowledge. Drawing on court records, contemporary reporting, and modern scholarship, this book reconstructs Restell’s rise, her repeated encounters with the...

In July 1895, a quiet house in Plaistow became the centre of one of Victorian England’s most disturbing domestic cases. When a mother was found dead upstairs and her two sons continued living below, the story shocked the nation—not for its violence alone, but for what followed: silence, routine, and days lived beneath a locked door. The Plaistow Case reconstructs the events of that summer and traces their long aftermath, from the courtroom at the Old Bailey to institutions, emigration, war, and adulthood. Grounded in historical records and contemporary accounts, this narrative examines ...

Marie Antoinette has been tried for centuries: in pamphlets, caricatures, gossip, and myth. This is her life — and the autopsy of the reputation that consumed it. Sent from Vienna to Versailles at fourteen, Marie Antoinette became the most visible woman in France just as a nation began to fracture under debt, inequality, and hunger. As public anger rose, her clothes, friendships, foreign birth, and even her motherhood were turned into evidence of corruption. Long before the guillotine, she was executed in story — reduced to a symbol that made complex failures feel like the fault of one ...

In the heart of New Orleans’ French Quarter, Delphine LaLaurie lived as a woman of wealth, lineage, and reputation — until a fire in April 1834 exposed what her shuttered windows had concealed. The House on Royal Street traces LaLaurie’s rise through the city’s elite, the crime that shocked a slaveholding society, and the legend that followed when she fled. A historical true crime account of power, secrecy, and the lives lost beneath a story that refused to end.

By the 1850s, the workhouse no longer proves itself. The experiment is over. The system continues. This second volume traces a decade inside Southwell Workhouse where hardship becomes routine and “proper management” becomes a language of control. Through dietaries that regulate hunger, classifications that decide fate, labour imposed as a test, punishment administered as procedure, and medical care weighed against cost, the workhouse is shown not as a moment of crisis, but as an institution made ordinary. Ordinary rules. Hard realities. Last resort.

A Hungarian countess. A castle above the village. A trail of whispers that became a case the crown could not ignore. Countess Dracula follows the documented investigation into Elizabeth Báthory and the legend that transformed her into the most infamous female serial killer in European history. Separating record from myth, this true-crime manuscript traces the rise, fall, confinement, and cultural afterlife of the woman history could not keep human.

In late-Victorian London, infant death was common enough to pass without question—especially when the child had never been fully recorded as living. Claymore House examines one such arrangement that operated in plain sight. Women seeking discretion paid to give birth and surrender their infants, trusting that the children would be placed elsewhere. Instead, many disappeared. When the practice finally became visible, it did so not through moral reform but through repetition that could no longer be ignored. Drawing solely on court records, inquests, and co

Castles were not built on romance — they were built on labour. Step inside the real working world of a medieval French castle: servants, peasants, village life, and the dangerous forest boundary. Discover what people ate, what they owned, what they owed, and how survival was managed behind the Great Hall — without the myths.

In the 1840s, the workhouse was the centre of Britain’s response to poverty. This book tells the story of one such institution — Southwell Workhouse — during a single Victorian decade, when the New Poor Law was working exactly as intended. Based entirely on contemporary records, this is not a novel and not a work of fiction. It reconstructs daily life inside the workhouse through its own rules, registers, and reports: admission, classification, routine, labour, diet, punishment, illness, authority, and exit. Families were separated, work was enforced, hunger was regulated, and decline...

In late-Victorian London, Minnie Pheby became a scandal: a young woman accused of burglary at a time when breaking into houses was considered a man’s crime. Branded by the press as the “lady burglar”, she was hunted, punished, and turned into a cautionary tale. Catwoman of West London reconstructs her story from surviving records — and reveals what her crimes exposed about class, gender, and the fragile promise of the Victorian home.

An unflinching examination of trust inside the private household. In the early nineteenth century, Anna Margaretha Zwanziger moved quietly through respectable homes in the German states, working as a housekeeper in a world that relied on discretion, obedience, and trust. When illness and death followed her presence, private fear became public reckoning. The Woman in Service traces Zwanziger’s life from childhood and guardianship through marriage, widowhood, and domestic labour, placing her actions within the fragile systems that shaped women’s lives and work. Rather than ...

In early nineteenth-century Leeds, fear was common and answers were scarce. Mary Bateman sold both. Branded the “Yorkshire Witch”, she promised cures and protection, drawing desperate families into rituals, payments, and obedience. Then a woman died — and the story turned from superstition to murder. The Yorkshire Witch: The Mary Bateman Case is a chronological account grounded in the historical record, separating provable fact from legend while restoring the victims to the centre of the narrative. A true-crime manuscript of fraud, belief, and poison hidden in the domestic world.

Seven Victorian cases. Seven women. One court that turned private life into public evidence. Women of the Old Bailey follows a nurse in the sickroom, a servant inside the house, a respectable wife under scrutiny, a sensational defendant made into warning, a poisoner explained through obsession, a baby-farmer in a hidden economy of shame, and a household where cruelty was made routine. Drawn from the Old Bailey record, this narrative history traces how the Victorian courtroom judged women—by class, by respectability, by domestic role—long before any verdict was spoken.

She offered youth for a price, and discretion as part of the deal. In the fashionable heart of Victorian London, Madame Rachel built a beauty empire on fear: fear of ageing, fear of judgement, fear of being replaced. This historical true crime account follows the clients who came to her, the methods that held them, and the trial that exposed what polite society preferred to keep hidden.