Ep 32: First and Last Part 2 - Mary Ann Britland

Ep 32: First and Last Part 2 - Mary Ann Britland

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 Ann Britland - mother, wife, and friend to the dead. She would become the first woman hanged at Strangeways. This is the story of the three people she poisoned, of the burial-club pennies and the over-the-counter poison that made it possible, and of the one question the case never answered: whether she did it alone.

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