True Crime

  It was the biggest bullion robbery of all time. Twenty-six million pounds in gold, stolen from a warehouse at Heathrow. There was still an hour to go before daybreak when the early shift of security guards at the Brinks-Mat company warehouse at Hounslow, west London, turned up for work on the morning of Saturday 26 November 1983. At exactly 6.30 a.m. security supervisor Mick Scouse turned his keys in the locks of the staff entrance and let in his four shivering and bleary-eyed colleagues. Ron Clarke, Richard Holliday, Robin Riseley and Peter Bentley had all volunteered for the unpopular Saturday shift. A fifth man on the roster, Tony Black, was late and Scouse made a mental note to speak to him about his timekeeping. From the outside Unit 7 looked like just another ugly brick and steel goods shed, a soulless box, strictly functional like thousands of others. But inside it was a different world. Unit 7 was one of the most secure buildings in Britain, with an impenetrable steel co...

Ted Bundy seemed to be a friendly young law student. But behind his pleasant façade lurked a demonic psychopath who preyed on young girls. At 7.18 a.m. on the morning of 24 January 1989, an executioner hired by the state of Florida flipped a switch and sent a 2,000-volt surge of electricity coursing through the body of Ted Bundy. For 60 seconds the mass killer arched and twisted against the straps that held him, as if fighting death. Then, as the power was switched off, he sank back, his life extinguished. ‘Old Sparky’, the oldest electric chair in America, had done its duty once again. It was nice years and 277 days since the death sentence had been passed. Across the USA, in a nation used to outbreaks of bizarre and horrific crime, work stopped as people stood around TV sets, popping champagne corks and cheering at the news. After 15 years, America’s most loathed mass killer had finally been dealt with. On the eve of his death, Bundy, the handsome young lawyer, by now 42, finally...