Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is a true crime podcast unlike any other; because every word of it was written nearly 300 years ago.
Each week, we read aloud one chapter from a remarkable book first published in London in 1735: a sprawling collection of murderers, highwaymen, coiners, housebreakers, pirates and worse, recorded in vivid and unsparing detail.
The crimes are real. The voices are authentic. And the world they reveal, brutal, strange, and surprisingly familiar, has been waiting three centuries to be heard again. True crime did not begin with podcasts. It began here by the burning light of a candle.
Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals
Latest Episodes
Episode 011: William Casey: The Soldier Accused of Robbery in the Park
William Casey is barely out of boyhood when military life delivers him into the world of violence and accusation that defines his story. Enlisted at fifteen into the Guards by his own soldier father, Casey serves in Spain and returns to London ...
Episode 010: John Wigley: The Lone Highwayman of Finchley Common
A plasterer by trade, John Wigley abandons honest work early and slides into what Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals calls 'felonious methods of getting money.' His is a solitary brand of criminality; he rides out alone onto the dark roads ...
Episode 009: John Meff: The Housebreaker Who Could Not Stay Away
John Meff is the son of French Protestant refugees who fled persecution under Louis XIV, raised in London with great care and bound apprentice to a weaver. He serves faithfully, marries, and then finds himself unable to keep his family alive on...
Episode 008: John Winship: The Young Highwayman of Covent Garden
He is seventeen, an apprentice carpenter in Covent Garden, and he has just noticed a young woman standing in a doorway. In Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, the story of John Winship begins not with violence but with infatuation; a boy wh...
Episode 007: Matthew Clark: The Cowardly Footpad Who Turned Killer
Matthew Clark is the kind of figure who makes true crime so unsettling: not a mastermind, not a hardened villain, but a lazy, cowardly young man whose small vices compound into something monstrous. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals introdu...