Cozy Crime

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the fate of Lady Harriet Mordaunt, a young Scottish woman whose private confession to her husband in the spring of 1869 set in motion one of the most extraordinary legal scandals of the Victorian era, drawing a future king into a witness box and ending with Harriet herself disappearing into a series of private asylums from which she would never return.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the life of Evelyn Nesbit, the young woman at the centre of one of the most examined crimes in American history, and what it cost her to survive it.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores how a seventeen-year-old clerk in a London law office spent a year and a half forging Shakespeare's handwriting, producing love letters, legal deeds, a Protestant profession of faith, and ultimately two complete plays, all to give his father the thing his father most wanted, and what happened when one of England's greatest actors delivered a single l...

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores one of the most genuinely unresolved cold cases in the world: two royal children who entered the Tower of London in the summer of 1483 and were never seen publicly again, leaving behind five centuries of competing theories, managed history, and a question that modern science could potentially answer but has so far chosen not to ask.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the life and crimes of Dr. William Palmer of Rugeley, Staffordshire, a trusted physician, compulsive gambler, and the man Victorian England came to know as the Rugeley Poisoner. Formally convicted of a single murder, Palmer was suspected of killing as many as thirteen or fourteen people over the course of a decade, among them his wife, his brother, and sever...

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores one of the most audacious financial frauds in British history: a company that barely moved a single legitimate cargo, convinced a nation to pour its savings into a fiction, and then collapsed, leaving tens of thousands of ordinary people with nothing.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the three trials of Oscar Wilde in the spring of 1895, and the quiet, ordinary moment that set them all in motion: a calling card left at a London gentlemen's club, slipped into an envelope by a hall porter who couldn't quite make out the handwriting, and left on a shelf for ten days.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the 1924 murder of Bobby Franks, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago's South Side, and the long, complicated aftermath of the case that followed his death.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores one of the most consequential unsolved crimes in American history: a bomb thrown into a crowd on a Chicago street in 1886, eight men tried for murder, four of them hanged, and not one of them ever proven to have done it.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the strange and still-unsolved death of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, a trusted London magistrate who walked out of his house on a grey October morning in 1678 and never came home. His body was found five days later on a hill north of the city, his own sword driven through his chest - yet the sword had barely drawn a drop of blood.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores a duel that was also a crime, a murder charge that was never collected, and the fifty-year aftermath of a single July morning on the Hudson River — beginning with a man who wrote down, the night before, exactly what he planned to do.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores one of the most quietly brilliant thefts in Victorian history: a conspiracy of wax impressions, duplicate keys, and lead shot that sent three iron safes across the Channel to Paris containing entirely the wrong thing.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the death of Charles Bravo, a young Victorian barrister who collapsed in his bedroom in Balham in April 1876 and died three days later from deliberate antimony poisoning — with three suspects, forty witnesses, and a verdict that named no one.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the Paisley Witch Trial of 1697, in Scotland, in which seven people were condemned to death after an eleven-year-old girl accused her household servants of bewitching her, setting in motion one of the last and most haunting witch trials in Scottish history.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the life of Eustace the Monk: a Benedictine novice who became an outlaw, a licensed privateer, and finally the naval architect of a French invasion of England, before meeting an end that his enemies made very sure everyone would see.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the case of George Chapman, a Polish-born barber and pub landlord who poisoned three women over five years in late Victorian and Edwardian England, and the quiet, determined mother who finally broke the pattern.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the quiet domestic life and sudden disappearance of Cora Crippen - the story leads through the Music Hall Ladies Guild, a pioneering wireless telegraph message, and the contested forensic testimony of a young pathologist, revealing rumours, strange clues, and competing theories that still puzzle historians today. But what really happened to Cora Crippen afte...

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores a meticulously planned theft inside a supposedly impenetrable diamond vault, where years of quiet observation ultimately overcame layers of advanced security.

Tonight's Cozy Crime explores a plot to murder all the British cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool in 1820.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the death of Christopher Marlowe, the most celebrated playwright in Elizabethan England, who died at twenty-nine in a pub in London, in circumstances that have never been fully explained.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the final afternoon of Empress Elisabeth of Austria: a woman who spent most of her life seeking quiet and ordinary freedom, and who was killed on a sunlit lakeside promenade by a man who had originally come to Geneva to kill someone else entirely.

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores one of the earliest and most haunting unsolved sequences of killings in American history: the Servant Girl Annihilator of Austin, Texas. A relaxing cozy crime true story told slowly for sleep, quiet listening.

When the steamship Waratah sailed from Durban on the morning of the twenty-sixth of July 1901, one passenger was not aboard. Then when the Waratah passed from sight of the last ship to see her, somewhere off the Wild Coast of South Africa in a winter storm, she carried two hundred and eleven people into a silence that has never, in all the years since, offered a single answer back. A relaxing cozy...

When Rose Harsent, a young servant woman in the Suffolk village of Peasenhall, was found at the foot of the kitchen stairs of Providence House on the morning of Whit Sunday 1902, the questions that gathered around her death - a letter of uncertain authorship, a stormy night, and a chapel deacon whose respectability had everything to lose - would occupy two juries and remain unresolved for more tha...

A cardinal of France, long excluded from the queen's favour and aching for her forgiveness, received letters he believed were written in her own hand. The stage was set for one of the most elaborate and consequential frauds of the eighteenth century. A relaxing cozy crime true story told slowly for sleep, quiet listening.