Manchester Murders: A True Crime Podcast

You guys. I'm so tired, and so busy. So - I'm taking a short break. Back with you on August 7th. Meanwhile, can I urge you to support Count Binface in the fight against fascism? You can donate here. https://ko-fi.com/countbinface Let me know if you do (hello@manchestermurders.com) and I'll even give you a shoutout!

Part two of our short series on Strangeways Prison and the first and last to be executed there. In the spring of 1886, on one short street in Ashton-under-Lyne, three people died in nine weeks - a nineteen-year-old mill girl, her father, and the neighbour who was the family’s closest friend. Each death was certified as natural; each was followed by a small insurance payment to the same woman, Mary...

In this episode I covered the murder of Stuart Everett. I've taken the decision to delete it - you can listen if you want to know why. We'll return to the case in future.

The first in a short series on Strangeways Prison and the people who were first and last to be executed there. On Christmas night, 1868, in a crowded Salford beerhouse, a fiddler named Patrick Nurney tried to talk a drunk young man into going home - and was stabbed to death for it. His killer, twenty-year-old Michael James Johnson, would become the first person ever hanged at the newly built Stran...

Eliza Wood was born in Oldham on the sixth of August 1914. She was murdered in Room 7 of the Prince of Wales Hotel, Ashton-under-Lyne, on the twentieth of August 1950 - fourteen days after her thirty-sixth birthday. She left two daughters: Laura, aged eight, and Edith, aged four. Her killer, James Henry Corbitt, had recorded his intentions across eight months of diary entries and had assaulted her...

On 15 June 1996, the IRA detonated a 1,500kg lorry bomb on Corporation Street in Manchester city centre. It was the largest bomb detonated on British soil since the Second World War. Two hundred and twelve people were injured. No one died. No one has ever been convicted. In this episode, Susan tells the story of the bombing and its aftermath: the ninety-minute evacuation that saved hundreds of liv...

On the morning of Friday the 6th of June 1969, thirty-five-year-old Isabella Skelton left her home on Lidiard Street in Crumpsall, Manchester, and was never seen again. Her husband told their children she had gone away for work. One of her sons was in hospital with a broken leg. Her daughter's fifteenth birthday was a fortnight away. Nobody reported her missing for fifty years. Isabella was a Glas...

On the afternoon of Monday the 15th of September 2025, fifteen-year-old Mohanad Abdullaahi Goobe was stabbed to death on a street in Moss Side, Manchester. He had left Whitworth Park with two friends, believing a confrontation was over. It had only just begun. Mohanad was the youngest of three children - funny, loyal, loved. His death came at the end of an escalating conflict that began with an ar...

In the summer of 2011, patients began dying on the acute medical wards of Stepping Hill Hospital in Stockport. A nurse noticed that several patients had blood sugar levels that made no clinical sense. When the saline supplies were tested, contamination was confirmed. What followed was one of the largest murder investigations in Greater Manchester Police's history. Victorino Chua was a Filipino-bor...

On the evening of 1 August 2025, nineteen-year-old Mohammed Isa Afzal was driven away from a car park in Bury, bleeding and saying his prayers. He died at the side of a road shortly before ten o'clock. What led him to that car park - a dispute, a decision to turn a car around, a baseball bat taken from a Jaguar - and what happened in the few seconds that followed, would be examined at Manchester C...

The Moors Murders - committed by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley between 1963 and 1965 - are among the most documented crimes in British history. This episode is not about the crimes themselves. It is about the radius of destruction that spread outward from five murders and continued for more than sixty years: the families of Pauline Reade, John Kilbride, Keith Bennett, Lesley Ann Downey, and Edward Ev...

In the autumn of 1900, thousands of people in Manchester began falling ill. They were mostly working-class beer drinkers, and the diagnosis was straightforward: alcoholic neuritis, the doctors said. The drinking had caught up with them. For four months, no one looked further. Then one physician at the Manchester Workhouse Infirmary noticed something that didn't fit. What he found changed everythin...

On Boxing Day 2011, twenty-three-year-old postgraduate student Anuj Bidve was walking through Ordsall, Salford with friends when he was shot dead in an unprovoked and motiveless attack. He had been in England for threemonths. His killer, local factory worker Kiaran Stapleton, was convicted of murder in July 2012 and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of thirty years. This is Anuj's...

In December 1972, a sixteen-year-old boy beat seventy-four-year-old shopkeeper Margaret Potts to death in her shop in Scouthead, Oldham. He was convicted and sentenced. Then he escaped. Then he escaped again. Then he vanished to Ireland for fifteen years under a false name, while Margaret's daughter Irene spent four decades calling for him to be found. This is the story of a murder, an indetermina...

Karen Youdell was fifty years old, a mother of four, known and well liked in Newton Heath. In the early hours of a July morning in 2023, she was attacked in the garden of a house on Rosebank Road and left with catastrophic injuries. She never regained consciousness. She spent nearly ten months in a persistent vegetative state before dying in May 2024. Her daughters said it plainly: they had to los...

On 18 September 1867, Sergeant Charles Brett became the first officer of the Manchester City Police to be killed on duty. He was inside a prison van on Hyde Road when a group of armed Fenians ambushed it, attempting to free two leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. A shot was fired through the keyhole. Brett died instantly. The two prisoners walked free and were never recaptured. Three men...

In 1997 and 1998, two women went missing from the same stretch of Manchester's red light district. Julie Jones was found six days later, her body hidden at the old Smithfield Market site near Shudehill. Helen Sage has never been found at all. Julie's murder has never been solved. A £50,000 reward remains unclaimed. DNA evidence exists, but no one has been charged. Her mother has spent twenty-seven...

Mariann Borocz was fifty-five years old, originally from Hungary, and had been living and working quietly in Bolton for five years. On the morning of the fourteenth of December 2024, she walked into a shop on Chorley Old Road. A man followed her in. When she left, he followed her out. She was reported missing the next day. For nine days, Greater Manchester Police searched for her — issuing appeals...

Rania Alayed was twenty-five years old when she was killed by her husband in a flat in Salford in June 2013. She had grown up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, married at fifteen, and spent years trying to find a way out. By the time she reached Manchester, she was learning English, building something new, and fighting through the courts to protect herself and her children. Her body was not...

Susan May left prison in 2005 having served twelve years. Her conviction was intact. She had refused, throughout, to say she was guilty of something she maintained she had not done — and the system had made her pay for that refusal at every turn. This episode covers what came next: the appeals, the scientists, the politicians, and three applications to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. Twenty...

In episode 11, we covered the murder of Ibrahima Seck in summer 2025, a young man who went out to play football and never returned. His killers have now been sentenced. This brief update covers the sentencing, and some additional information which came out during the trial.

On the morning of the 12th of March 1992, Susan May arrived at her aunt's house on Tandle Hill Road in Royton with a sandwich for lunch. She found Hilda Marchbank dead. She was eighty-nine years old, and she had been beaten and suffocated in her own bed. Susan had cared for Hilda almost every day for years. She described her as a second mother. Eighteen days after the murder, she was arrested and...

On the evening of 26 February 1889, a respectable Manchester businessman climbed into a hansom cab with a young stranger. By the time the cab reached the infirmary, he was dead. No marks of violence. No obvious crime scene. Just an empty pocket where a gold watch and a purse of sovereigns had been. This was the case that would test Detective Chief Inspector Jerome Caminada — Manchester's most cele...

On New Year’s Eve 2021, five-year-old Dylan Scanlon was found dead in his home in Oldham. What followed was a criminal trial that revealed harrowing details: a child poisoned with his mother’s antidepressants, repeatedly assaulted, and killed by the one person meant to protect him. Dylan’s mother was later convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. But Dylan’s death was not only a cri...

On a summer evening in New Moston in 2025, fourteen-year-old Ibrahima Seck left home to play football with his friends. Minutes later, a brief confrontation between two groups of teenagers spiralled into a fatal chase, ending with a single stab wound in a local car park. Bleeding and terrified, Ibrahima reached a nearby house and pleaded for help, telling strangers, “I don’t want to die.” Despite...