George Orwell was, for once, wrong. In his 1946 essay, “The decline of the English murder”, he designated 1850-1925 as an “Elizabethan age” of murder, whose perpetrators – Jack the Ripper, Dr Crippen, Joseph Smith and Mrs Maybrick among his nine – had stood the test of time. After this era, Orwell’s imagined News of the World reader moaned that “you never seemed to get a good murder nowadays” – they wanted a story that invited pity for both victim and murderer.However, there was plenty of drama in the cases of the Brighton trunk murders (1934) or Francis Rattenbury (1935), murdered by his wife and her young lover. And Orwell was writing three years before John George Haigh, the acid-bath murderer, came to trial, and never lived t