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PODCAST

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals

Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals is a true crime podcast unlike any other; because every word of it was written nearly 300 years ago.Each week, we read aloud one chapter from a remarkable book first published in London in 1735: a sprawling collection of murderers, highwaymen, coiners, housebreakers, pirates and worse, recorded in vivid and unsparing detail.The crimes are real. The voices are authentic. And the world they reveal, brutal, strange, and surprisingly familiar, has been waiting

true crime

All Episodes

6:52

Episode 015: Nathaniel Hawes: The Young Highwayman of...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/08/24

Send us your Feedback Nathaniel Hawes is barely out of his apprenticeship when he begins stealing from his master's cash box, a slow slide from mischief into something far darker. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals presents him as one of those young men who mistakes recklessness for courage; a Norfolk grazier's orphan who falls into expensive company and never finds his way back out. Among the true crime figures of early Georgian England, Hawes stands out not for cunning or calculation ...

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3:42

Episode 014: James Wright: The Weeping Highwayman of...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/08/17

Send us your Feedback A respectable wigmaker on the Old Bailey begins to spend faster than he earns, drawn into pleasures he cannot afford and will not abandon. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures his slide with quiet precision: James Wright does not turn to crime out of malice but out of want, a man whose appetites gnaw through his livelihood until nothing remains but the road. What makes Wright linger in the annals of true crime is not his daring but his conscience. He is desc...

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5:12

Episode 013: Richard James: The Highwayman of the...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/08/10

Send us your Feedback Richard James comes into the world already half abandoned: the son of a nobleman's cook, fatherless before he can remember, cast to sea at twelve years old. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals recounts his story, what emerges is a man shaped less by malice than by a relentless current of misfortune; a figure whose slide toward highway robbery feels almost inevitable, and who belongs to the long, dark tradition of true crime that stretches from Georgian England to o...

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4:21

Episode 012: John Dykes: The Gambler Turned Highwayman

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/08/03

Send us your Feedback John Dykes cannot stop gambling. It is this single compulsion; documented in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals; that drags a young man from indulged eldest son to pickpocket to something far worse, tracing the kind of spiral that still defines true crime centuries later. Born to parents of middling means who sacrifice their own comfort for his education, Dykes refuses every apprenticeship, every honest path set before him. Instead he haunts the gaming tables when ...

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5:26

Episode 011: William Casey: The Soldier Accused of...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/07/27

Send us your Feedback William Casey is barely out of boyhood when military life delivers him into the world of violence and accusation that defines his story. Enlisted at fifteen into the Guards by his own soldier father, Casey serves in Spain and returns to London carrying the restless habits of a young man raised among regiments; Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures his brief, troubled trajectory in vivid detail. His is a case where the line between righteousness and brutality ...

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3:31

Episode 010: John Wigley: The Lone Highwayman of...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/07/20

Send us your Feedback A plasterer by trade, John Wigley abandons honest work early and slides into what Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals calls 'felonious methods of getting money.' His is a solitary brand of criminality; he rides out alone onto the dark roads around the commons north of London, trusting no one, convinced that gangs always betray themselves in the end. This true crime story from the early eighteenth century carries the smell of damp hedgerows and cheap brandy. Wigley d...

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6:01

Episode 009: John Meff: The Housebreaker Who Could...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/07/13

Send us your Feedback John Meff is the son of French Protestant refugees who fled persecution under Louis XIV, raised in London with great care and bound apprentice to a weaver. He serves faithfully, marries, and then finds himself unable to keep his family alive on honest wages; it is poverty, not wickedness, that first pushes him toward housebreaking, a trajectory recorded in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals with the unsentimental clarity that makes it one of the earliest works of tru...

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5:17

Episode 008: John Winship: The Young Highwayman of...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/07/07

Send us your Feedback He is seventeen, an apprentice carpenter in Covent Garden, and he has just noticed a young woman standing in a doorway. In Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, the story of John Winship begins not with violence but with infatuation; a boy whose idle upbringing leaves him entirely unprepared for the cost of courtship, and who drifts toward the road when honest wages fall short. There is something quietly inevitable about Winship's slide from lovesick youth to mounted...

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7:03

Episode 007: Matthew Clark: The Cowardly Footpad Who...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/06/29

Send us your Feedback Matthew Clark is the kind of figure who makes true crime so unsettling: not a mastermind, not a hardened villain, but a lazy, cowardly young man whose small vices compound into something monstrous. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals introduces him as a creature formed entirely from the worst impulses of low life; idle, drunk, driven by lust, and too timid to commit even the crimes he plans. Born in St. Albans to parents of modest means, Clark squanders every opport...

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7:52

Episode 006: Walter Kennedy: The Aspiring Pirate of...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/06/23

Send us your Feedback Walter Kennedy grows up at Pelican Stairs in Wapping, the son of an anchor-smith, a boy with every reason to follow his father into honest labour. But something restless burns in him; as Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells it, he possesses a 'too aspiring temper' that honest trades can never satisfy. Serving aboard a man-of-war during Queen Anne's wars against France, Kennedy absorbs every whispered tale of buccaneers and maritime desperadoes, and what begins ...

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4:54

Episode 005: Barbara Spencer: The Young Coiner of...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/06/15

Send us your Feedback Barbara Spencer is barely out of childhood when the world begins to shape her into something dangerous. Raised without restraint in the cramped lanes of Cripplegate, she is the kind of figure that Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals captures with unflinching clarity: a young woman too proud for servitude, too restless to stay still, drawn by temperament toward the edges of lawful life. Her drift into counterfeiting feels almost inevitable; a single act of defiance c...

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6:00

Episode 004: Robert Perkins: The Disinherited Baker...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/06/08

Send us your Feedback Robert Perkins grows up in Hertfordshire as the son of a prosperous innkeeper, but prosperity does not protect him. After his mother dies and his father remarries, the boy is cast out of his own home; stripped of affection, stripped of inheritance, stripped of everything that might have held him steady. As recorded in Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, Perkins drifts into the kind of company that haunts the margins of Georgian England: drinkers, gamblers, idlers w...

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9:07

Episode 003: William Barton: The Highwayman Who Could...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/06/01

Send us your Feedback William Barton is born with restlessness in his blood. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells it, his father abandons him as a child, fleeing to Jamaica with a concubine and a hold full of goods; the boy grows up in his grandfather's eating-house, surrounded by comfort he cannot bring himself to accept. This is true crime at its most unsettled: a young man who cannot sit still, who trades a safe apprenticeship for the open sea and trades the sea for soldiering...

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9:19

Episode 002: John Trippuck: The Golden Tinman's...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/05/25

Send us your Feedback They call him the Golden Tinman; a man who robs alone and in company, whose scarred body carries the evidence of musket balls extracted from his flesh, and whose notoriety across the roads of early Georgian England is already the stuff of grim legend. In the pages of Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals, John Trippuck stands as one of four men whose intertwined stories form a single devastating chapter of true crime from 1720: a highwayman, a footpad, a thief, and a ho...

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2:11

Episode 000: Introduction to The Lives Of the Most...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/05/19

This is not a podcast about true crime. It is true crime — written in 1735 and read aloud for the first time in nearly three centuries. Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals was first published in 1735, covering murderers, highwaymen, housebreakers, coiners, pirates and worse — each one profiled in vivid, unsparing detail. It is one of the earliest works of true crime writing in the English language, and it has been waiting nearly three centuries to be heard aloud. The crimes are real. The...

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11:15

Jane Griffin: The Mistress Who Turned a Knife on Her...

Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals ·

2026/05/16

Jane Griffin is a woman of sharp wit, good reputation and a violent temper she cannot govern. As Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals tells it, she keeps a busy inn in Smithfield with her husband, drawing customers with her charm and driving them away with her rages; a figure who belongs as much to the annals of true crime as to any cautionary sermon. She is well-bred, well-spoken and genuinely kind when calm; yet anger moves through her like weather, sudden and ungovernable. The domestic ...

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16 results

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