Manchester Murders: A True Crime Podcast

Episode 26: The Murders at Stepping Hill Hospital

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-born nurse who had worked night shifts on wards A1 and A3 since 2009. He had, it emerged, a past he had kept carefully out of sight. He had written, twelve months before the first patient died, of being an angel who had turned into a devil. This is the story of Tracey Arden, Derek Weaver, and the other patients on those wards - of Rebecca Leighton, a young nurse arrested, charged, and imprisoned for crimes she did not commit - and of a three-and-a-half-year investigation that ended in a Manchester Crown Court jury deliberating for eleven days. Victorino Chua is currently serving a life sentence with a minimum term of thirty-five years.

Episode 25: Mohammed Isa

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 Crown Court for weeks. Abbas Hussain was convicted of manslaughter, not murder, and sentenced to seven years. Two other defendants were acquitted entirely. This episode tells the story of Isa's death, the trial that followed, and the family left behind.

Episode 24: The Moors Murders - The Ones Left Behind

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 Evans; the people caught in the wreckage around the killers; the communities that absorbed the weight of what happened; and a case that, in 2026, remains formally open. Keith Bennett has never been found.

Episode 23: What's Your Poison?

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 everything - and almost nothing. This is the story of the 1900 Manchester arsenic beer epidemic: how industrial corner-cutting put poison into the city's pubs, how class assumptions in medicine allowed it to go undetected for months, and how, when the truth finally emerged, the people who suffered most received the least.

Episode 22: Anuj Bidve

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 story.