Sinister South

On 16 December 2021, fire broke out at a family home in Sutton. Four little boys were inside on their own: two sets of twins, Kyson and Bryson, aged four, and Logan and Layton, aged three. Their Christmas presents were already wrapped and waiting under the tree. This week we look at how the boys died and at the conviction of their mum, Deveca Rose, for manslaughter. We also cover the warnings that...

In August 1835, a Southwark landlord climbs into his stable loft and looks through a gap into the room he's rented out for thirteen months. His wife looks too, through the keyhole this time. Less than a minute, between the two of them. That's all it took to end up with two men in the dock at the Old Bailey and, three months later, hanged outside Newgate Prison in front of a crowd. James...

On 30 April 2001, 85-year-old Hilda Lockert was a few steps from her front door on the Angel Town estate in Brixton when two people pulled her to the ground and robbed her. They took her shopping, her keys and a purse with £15 in it. Hilda broke her knee in the fall, and after surgery she developed a blood clot. She died on 15 May 2001, her 86th birthday. The case went cold for years, until a tiny...

Part 2 of our first ever two-parter. And before we get into it, Hannah returns from Kilkenny having mugged an old lady 100 feet up a cathedral tower, singing Limp Bizkit to herself in a full-body panic. Meanwhile Rach has learned that some young people apparently do not know who Beyonce or Jay-Z are. Truly a low moment for civilisation. Then it's back to Eltham. Picking up where Part 1 left o...

We're back after two weeks off (during which Rachel's head literally exploded, we killed a sacred crow, a barefoot Sasquatch has been moving dead foxes around New Eltham, and Hannah announced she's off to hairdressing college). But then Rach dives into part one of the biggest case South London has ever seen. On the night of 22 April 1993, 18-year-old Stephen Lawrence was waiting at...

In November 2013, gardeners clearing a garden in Warlingham, Surrey, found a body at the bottom of an old well. It had been there for two and a half years. The man was Damian Chlywka, a Polish national who had come to the UK to work and had been reported missing from Thornton Heath in April 2011. Ten men were arrested over the course of the investigation. None were ever charged. In 2015, an inques...

Today #Trevors, we head to Dulwich, an affluent part of south London where the crime also tends to have a bit of a "posh" edge to it! Hannah walks us through the story of the takeaway Rembrandt, a small painting by an old master that has been stolen more times than any other!  So today's episode is more Oceans Eleven, than Seven but no less interesting! Think heists, capers and a do...

"Today, we're going back to the year 1012." / "Oh, for f***'s sake. Here we go." 😂 In April 1012, the Archbishop of Canterbury was killed at a Viking camp in Greenwich, pelted with bones and finished off with the back of an axe. He had been held captive for seven months. He could have gone free at any point. He refused every time. This week we go back a thousand year...

In August 2024, 72-year-old solicitor Christopher Brown was killed in the Catford house he'd inherited from his parents and later put into joint names with Habiba Naveed, a younger woman he lived with. His cat, Snow, was killed too. The tabloids seized on Naveed's delusions — that she was Princess Diana's secret daughter, that she was Jesus sent to destroy evil — and Christopher nea...

Small change of plan this week. A technical issue took out the episode that was meant to be landing today, and rather than leave you with nothing, we're opening up one of our Patreon-only Sinister Stories instead. So this one is a deviation from the usual. No case file, no victim, no court reports. Sinister Stories is our bonus strand for £10 and up patrons, where the only rule is that the st...

This week Rach is dreaming of Devon (and still hasn't worked out what to do there beyond letting the kids run feral), Hannah's fun employed and doing her best to enjoy it before real life catches back up, and we somehow end up talking about McDonald's drink orders for far too long. Sorry, Trevors. Tucked behind St Paul's Cathedral is Postman's Park, a small memorial garden...

This week Han is living her best funemployed life (interviews pending, privilege duly checked, pottering about as a fun auntie), which means that before we get anywhere near a murder we get into: the great "she's not mine" saga, in which she spent an entire festival being mistaken for Will's wife and handled it with all the grace of a woman several ciders deep; the Broadstairs...

This week starts with the usual...tattoo double-bookings, a very inebriated weekend, Will doing himself a mischief in the pit at The Offspring, and a knife-wielding, mozzarella-eating stand-off with the ghost of Luther. Standard. In the early hours of 28th May 2021, a young woman answered a FaceTime call from her partner, Jack Forde. What she saw on the screen was him attacking his own grandfather...

Once we've covered the essentials (Hannah's official unemployment era, a Duran Duran Father's Day card with some truly phoned-in puns, and the ongoing scandal of Rach absolutely not saying the words "Henry Cavill"), we get into the actual case.  In the spring of 1954, a box of sweets went round a London office. By the end of that night, two of the young women who took a pi...

One hundred episodes. We genuinely can't believe it either. To mark the milestone we've torn up the format. There's no case this week. Instead, Rachel and Hannah are in the hot seat, and for one episode only their long-suffering editor Will steps out from behind the desk to host. Expect Sinister South by the numbers, including the oldest case we've ever covered and exactly how...

But first, the important business: Rach's new hair (currently being hated on a strict day-two schedule), Will's ongoing obsession with the Sidcup goose tattoo man, and the small matter of a Netflix documentary sending a flood of brand-new Trevors our way. If you're one of them, welcome. We have cookies, chocolate, and pins we will absolutely never send you. Then Han takes us back to...

On the morning of 10th October 2011, 58-year-old Sally Hodkin left her house in Bexleyheath for her usual walk to work. She was 500 yards from her own front door when she was attacked and killed by Nicola Edgington, a woman who had murdered her own mother six years earlier and had been released back into the community by the NHS. In the hours before Sally's death, Edgington had told police sh...

This week, we go back to 1831 and the Croydon Canal, where two empty boats were found drifting on still water. A week later, the body of a pregnant woman surfaced. Her name, or at least the name history gives us, was Mary Clarke. Mary had been seen days earlier preparing to meet the father of her unborn child. She was dressed in a fine cotton gown, a black silk cloak and a white straw bonnet, with...

This week, after a truly chaotic opening involving a pork pie-related road traffic incident, pocket hummus at the Palladium, Paul McCartney’s Meat Free Mondays, and the questionable social etiquette of bringing a meze board into a theatre, we turn to the heart breaking unsolved murder of 16-year-old Andrea Troupe. In May 1983, Andrea was found dead in Warwick Gardens, Peckham. She had been stabbed...

Welcome back, Trevors! It's season four and we are BACK, although you'd be forgiven for thinking otherwise given the chaos of recording this one (third intro, second go at the case, Hannah's suitcase touring Luton solo). Stick with us. This week, Hannah takes us to a quiet Wednesday night in October 1993, when a 44 year old former maths teacher turned beat bobby cycled onto Cato Roa...

In February 2003, nineteen-year-old Marsha McDonnell stepped off a bus yards from her front door in Hampton and never made it home. Eighteen months later, twenty-two-year-old Amélie Delagrange was found dying on Twickenham Green after missing her stop on a late-night bus. Two women. Two streets we know. One man responsible for both — and for so much more besides. This week Rachel tells the story o...

This week’s episode comes with a very serious warning. We’re covering the case of Ellie Butler, a six-year-old girl whose death shocked the country and exposed devastating failures within the child protection system. Before we get into the case, we talk honestly about how difficult this one has been for us to research and record, and why we felt it was important to flag that upfront. This is not a...

This week, we start where we always do… somewhere between a rant about marketing “safe spaces” and a full-blown identity crisis over snake trousers 😅 But very quickly, things take a turn. We’re telling the story of 23-year-old Natalie Jarvis, a young woman from Swanley who went out for what she thought was a casual late-night drive… and never came home. Natalie was loud, funny, warm, and deeply l...

After a bit of chat about pub quizzes, questionable general knowledge, and why some people should never be trusted with a quiz answer sheet, we turn to a story that is anything but light. In March 2025, 16-year-old Lethanial Burrell was shot dead on his own street in Stockwell, in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. What followed was the unravelling of a calculated attack involving a stolen moped,...

We start this week as we usually do, a bit of chaos, questionable life updates, and an Oreo milkshake that frankly had no business being that big… before we move into one of the most difficult cases we’ve ever covered. Shirley Oaks was meant to be a safe place. A village of cottages in Croydon, designed to give children in care a sense of normal life. Instead, it became the centre of one of the mo...