Showing results by author "Alana Sanchez" in All Categories

In December 1786, a small Connecticut town gathered behind its meeting house to witness a hanging. The condemned was Hannah Ocuish, twelve years old. Told through the surviving record—especially the execution sermon printed on the day she died— Hannah: The Condemned Child traces the case from a summer morning on the road outside New London to the courtroom, the gaol, the pulpit, and the scaffold. It asks how fear hardens into certainty, how a child’s words are filtered through adult authority, and how print can turn a girl into an “example” for generations to come. Written in a ...

A boarding house promised safety. Inside, people disappeared. In Sacramento, Dorothea Puente took in vulnerable tenants — elderly, disabled, and isolated — then quietly redirected their benefits and erased them from view. For years, the system accepted her explanations. Then bodies were found buried behind the house. The Boarding House is a chronological account of the Dorothea Puente case, separating record from rumour and restoring the victims to the centre of the story. A true-crime manuscript about greed, control, and what happens when disappearance becomes normal.

She called herself a countess. Europe believed her. In the grand hotels of the Belle Époque, a woman known as the Comtesse de Monteil drifted through the Riviera’s glittering corridors—charming the elite, earning their trust, and leaving behind empty jewel cases and unanswered questions. Police traced her across Brussels, London, Nice, and beyond, but her disguise held until one night in 1908, when she was finally caught in the act. The Comtesse of Crime is a glam-noir true crime story of deception, luxury, and the dangerous power of belonging—told through verified contemporary ...

Seven Victorian cases. Seven women. One court that turned private life into public evidence. Women of the Old Bailey follows a nurse in the sickroom, a servant inside the house, a respectable wife under scrutiny, a sensational defendant made into warning, a poisoner explained through obsession, a baby-farmer in a hidden economy of shame, and a household where cruelty was made routine. Drawn from the Old Bailey record, this narrative history traces how the Victorian courtroom judged women—by class, by respectability, by domestic role—long before any verdict was spoken.

London, 1886. A husband dies in a rented room in Pimlico. Chloroform is found in his stomach. Adelaide Bartlett was accused of murdering her husband, Thomas Edwin Bartlett, in one of the most perplexing poison cases of the Victorian era. The medical evidence revealed a lethal quantity of chloroform — yet no clear explanation of how it had been administered. At the Old Bailey, expert witnesses clashed. The marriage was dissected. A minister’s involvement deepened suspicion. But suspicion is not proof. Acquitted in April 1886, Adelaide Bartlett walked free. The question of how chloroform ...

In 1895, Bridget Cleary was killed by those closest to her. Convicted she had been taken by fairies and replaced by a changeling, her death has long been misremembered as folklore. In truth, it was the result of sustained domestic violence, collective belief, and a legal system that failed to protect her. Drawing on contemporary trial records, newspaper accounts, and social history, The Burning of Bridget Cleary strips away myth to examine how power, belief, and authority converged to erase a woman who resisted submission. This is not a story about superstition. It is a true-crime ...

In 1890 London, Phoebe Hogg is a young wife and mother trying to survive the soot, the rent, and a marriage that offers little safety. Then she vanishes—and her name is swallowed by a scandal the city can’t stop consuming. At the centre stands Mary Pearcey: the “other woman,” a figure the newspapers are eager to turn into a monster. A pram, a jealous narrative, and a courtroom hungry for certainty propel the case toward a verdict that satisfies the public… but leaves haunting questions behind. Phoebe Hogg: A Life in the Shadows retells the Hampstead case through the woman history ...

Sophie Lyons was trained to steal as a child and spent decades moving through the crowded cities of the nineteenth century, surviving by skill, performance, and constant motion. In The Woman on the Circuit, Alana Sanchez traces Lyons’ life across New York, Canada, and the wider urban crime circuit, not as spectacle, but as labour. Drawing on court records, newspaper reporting, and Lyons’ own writing, this book examines the systems that shaped her choices: women’s criminal networks, policing and courts, public morality, and the narrow paths available to women who lived outside ...

The true story of Belle Gunness, America's most deadly female serial killer. To her neighbours, in early 1900's Indiana, Belle Gunness seemed like a pious widow searching for a new husband on her secluded farm. In truth, she was luring unsuspecting men from across the country with promises of love. Her name was Belle exposes the brutal yet gripping reality of a woman who murdered without remorse - in a case more terrifying than fiction.

A woman with a gun. A federal conviction. A sentence the system could not sustain. In 1899, Pearl Hart took part in one of the last stagecoach robberies in the American West. The crime was brief, poorly planned, and quickly punished. What followed was not. Convicted under federal law and sent to Yuma Territorial Prison, Hart became an administrative problem the justice system had not prepared for: a notorious female offender confined inside an institution built for men. Within months, the punishment imposed with public certainty began to unravel behind the scenes. The Stagecoach Robbery is ...

In the early twentieth century, Linda Burfield Hazzard claimed she could cure disease through fasting. Patients came to her retreat seeking health, discipline, and certainty. Many left dangerously weakened. Some did not leave at all. The Woman with the Cure examines the rise and fall of Hazzard and her infamous sanitarium, known as Starvation Heights. Through careful historical analysis, this book traces how authority, belief, and isolation combined to turn care into coercion — and why intervention came too late. A sober work of historical true crime, this is not a story of spectacle, but...

Florence Cook was a teenager when her name became evidence. In Victorian England, séances promised proof of life after death. Cabinets were built, conditions negotiated, and belief tested under dim light. At the centre of one of the era’s most disputed cases stood Florence Cook, a young medium whose performances drew the attention of scientist William Crookes—and ignited a controversy that would never fully close. This book examines the Florence Cook case as historical true crime: not as ghost story, and not as spectacle, but as an investigation into procedure, reputation, power, and ...

The Maid of Orléans is a historical autobiography told in the imagined voice of Joan of Arc. Drawing closely on trial records, letters, and contemporary testimony, this book traces her life from Domrémy to Orléans, from coronation at Reims to trial and execution at Rouen. Written with restraint and reverence, it presents Joan not as legend or martyr alone, but as a young woman of faith, courage, and human doubt whose obedience altered the course of France. This is the story of how her voice was condemned, silenced, and—years later—vindicated.

When poisoned chocolates spread terror through Victorian Brighton, suspicion fell on no one — until it fell on Christiana Edmunds. Respectable, intelligent, and outwardly composed, Edmunds defied every expectation of a criminal. Her case forced Victorian England to confront uncomfortable questions about obsession, insanity, and female violence. The Chocolate Poisoner is a gripping true crime history of a woman who reasoned carefully, acted deliberately, and was silenced for the rest of her life.

Rome whispers about a poison that looks like holy water. They call it Aqua Tofana—a saint-faced bottle passed hand to hand, a rumour with a price, a promise made to desperate wives behind shuttered windows. Men call it evil. Priests call it temptation. The streets call it justice. But Giulia knows what it really is: a brand built in the cracks of a city that leaves women no safe exits. When a quiet network of laundresses, servants and midwives begins to fray under pressure—boots on stone, coins offered for silence, and the Church leaning close—Giulia must protect the one person she ...

After working in the hospitality industry all his life, Aaron had seen and endured so much abuse of power and people that the pleasure the industry used to give to him was gone, replaced with anger and resentment. What he thought he could never do finally happened. His fantasies of getting revenge finally came to the surface, and he decided to create a cookbook of recipes—recipes for revenge.

A Victorian murderess who shocked her age. A condemned woman who still haunts ours. London, 1849. Marie Manning went to the gallows with her husband for a crime so dark it gripped the nation. What began as an intimate entanglement of money, marriage, and old loyalties ended in one of the most notorious murders of the nineteenth century. Patrick O’Connor, a customs officer and moneylender, came to supper in Bermondsey and never returned home. After his disappearance, the truth uncovered beneath the kitchen floor horrified Victorian England and turned Marie Manning into a figure of lasting ...

In a world where women were caregivers, where death among the poor was expected. Mary Ann Cotton became respectable. She was a nurse, a wife, a mother. And while she comforted, she poisoned. Arsenic and Respectability is a precise, unnerving portrait of a society where poisoning was easier concealed than suspected.

London made her notorious. History made her a legend. In the crowded, dangerous streets of early modern London, Mary Frith defied every rule meant to keep women silent, modest, and unseen. Known to the city as Moll Cutpurse, she strode through taverns and theatres in men’s clothing, smoked in public, moved among thieves and brokers, and scandalized authorities who could not decide whether to punish her, fear her, or profit from her fame. But Moll was more than a criminal curiosity. She was a public woman in a world that wanted women contained. Condemned by moralists, rebuked by the church...

In July 1895, a quiet house in Plaistow became the centre of one of Victorian England’s most disturbing domestic cases. When a mother was found dead upstairs and her two sons continued living below, the story shocked the nation—not for its violence alone, but for what followed: silence, routine, and days lived beneath a locked door. The Plaistow Case reconstructs the events of that summer and traces their long aftermath, from the courtroom at the Old Bailey to institutions, emigration, war, and adulthood. Grounded in historical records and contemporary accounts, this narrative examines ...