More Foul Deeds and Suspicious Deaths Chesterfield

Wives battered or slashed to death by brutal, jealous husbands. A young woman butchered in broad daylight on a Chesterfield street, another done to death with a billhook in a rural barn. A mother's poisoning of her sons in order to buy drink with the insurance payments and the respectable Mosborough tradesman prepared to butcher his family rather than admit to the stigma of debt. These are some of the twenty-six violent crimes covering a period from the Victorian 1880s to the Pottery Cottage massacre of 1977, which show all too plainly that cruelty and greed have been a danger to life in Chesterfield and North Derbyshire through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing on a number of sources, this book presents an account of Derbyshire's darker past which combines detailed research with a lively insight into characters and events.