Cozy Crime

037 | The Shakespeare Forgeries of William Henry Ireland: A Lost Play Staged | London, 1796

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores how a seventeen-year-old clerk in a London law office spent a year and a half forging Shakespeare's handwriting, producing love letters, legal deeds, a Protestant profession of faith, and ultimately two complete plays, all to give his father the thing his father most wanted, and what happened when one of England's greatest actors delivered a single line on the night of April second, 1796.

036 | The Princes in the Tower: Two Boys, One Unsolved Cold Case | London, 1483

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores one of the most genuinely unresolved cold cases in the world: two royal children who entered the Tower of London in the summer of 1483 and were never seen publicly again, leaving behind five centuries of competing theories, managed history, and a question that modern science could potentially answer but has so far chosen not to ask.

035 | The Rugeley Poisoner: One Conviction, Fourteen Suspected Dead | Staffordshire, 1856

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the life and crimes of Dr. William Palmer of Rugeley, Staffordshire, a trusted physician, compulsive gambler, and the man Victorian England came to know as the Rugeley Poisoner. Formally convicted of a single murder, Palmer was suspected of killing as many as thirteen or fourteen people over the course of a decade, among them his wife, his brother, and several creditors. He was hanged at the age of thirty-one, and the country was so afraid he might escape justice that Parliament changed the law specifically because of him.

034 | The South Sea Bubble: A Nation's Savings Lost to Fiction | London, 1720

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores one of the most audacious financial frauds in British history: a company that barely moved a single legitimate cargo, convinced a nation to pour its savings into a fiction, and then collapsed, leaving tens of thousands of ordinary people with nothing.

033 | The Trials of Oscar Wilde: He Walked Into the Trap | London, 1895

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the three trials of Oscar Wilde in the spring of 1895, and the quiet, ordinary moment that set them all in motion: a calling card left at a London gentlemen's club, slipped into an envelope by a hall porter who couldn't quite make out the handwriting, and left on a shelf for ten days.