Episode 28: Isabella Skelton

Episode 4: No longer available

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.

Ep 31: First and Last Part 1: Michael Johnson

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 Strangeways, on a scaffold carried over from the old New Bailey, by an ageing executioner whose failures were already notorious. This is the story of that Christmas night, of the trial and the hanging that followed, and of the widow and the daughter the newspapers never thought to ask about - told, as ever, with the victim at its centre.

Ep 30: Eliza Wood

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 once before. He was convicted and hanged at Strangeways in November 1950 by Albert Pierrepoint, a man he knew from a pub in Hollinwood. That connection became the story everyone told. This episode tells a different one.

Ep 29: The 1996 Manchester Bomb

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 lives, the investigation that was quietly shelved, the leaked documents that led to the arrest of a detective and a journalist, and the question of what the rebuilding of the city centre really tells us about modern Manchester. Manchester Murders is a narrative true crime podcast covering murder and related cases connected to Greater Manchester. New episodes every Friday. manchestermurders.com

Episode 28: Isabella Skelton

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 Glasgow-born typist - petite, dark-haired, known as Izzy - who had moved to Manchester in the early 1960s with her husband Lewis and their three children. What her daughter Lynda remembers of her is small but specific: a trip to C&A to buy a dress for the Whit Walks. A mother who looked after the family. A woman whose world, outside the home, was narrow. In 2019, Lynda walked into a police station and reported her mother missing. Greater Manchester Police launched an investigation and reclassified the case as murder. They excavated the family's former home for twelve weeks. They found nothing. One man was interviewed under caution. No charges were brought. In 2024, Isabella's husband Lewis Skelton - by then ninety-one - was jailed for four years for historic child cruelty offences committed in the 1970s and 1980s. He has never spoken publicly about his wife's disappearance. The murder investigation remains open. This episode tells the story of a woman known almost entirely through her absence - and of a daughter who has spent more than fifty years refusing to stop looking.