Vol.1 No.4

84 pages of British bloodlust!

Our thickest issue of Serial Killer Quarterly yet, “Cruel Britannia” finishes off 2014 with a four-feature frenzy! Dr. Katherine Ramsland wades through the heavy fog surrounding the “Moors Murders”: a series of high-profile child killings committed in the Swinging Sixties by Scottish sadist Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, his English girlfriend and accomplice. To this day, they continue to be the most shocking and headline grabbing crimes in modern Britain! With Katherine’s background in both psychology and philosophy, there is surely nobody better suited to exploring Brady’s “existentialist exercises” in murder, his psychopathic pedophilia, and folie-a-deux relationship with Hindley.
Where the “Moors Murders” remain Britain’s most notorious series of slayings, the atrocities committed by Fred and Rosemary West are undoubtedly the most depraved. Kim Cresswell churns the stomach with her unbelievable account of incest, bestiality, rape, torture, murder, necrophilia and filicide, culminating in a “Garden of Bones” in Gloucester. Next, Carol Anne Davis looks at one of the greatest abuses of police power in English history: the entrapment of Colin Stagg for the 1992 ripper-style murder of blonde beauty Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common. Meanwhile, the real killer, Robert Napper, was already confined to Broadmoor asylum for the 1993 evisceration murder of Samantha Bisset and the rape and deadly suffocation of her infant daughter. To top it all off, Edgar-Award winning author Burl Barer makes his SKQ debut, lending his highly original voice to an intriguing re-examination of the murders ascribed to “Yorkshire Ripper” Peter Sutcliffe, and the phenomenon of homicidal fame.

Robert J. Hoshowsky, Aaron Elliott, and Kim Cresswell also look at three comparably notorious historical London slayers in their pieces on creepy old John Christie, “Acid Bath Vampire” John George Haigh, and Jack the Ripper suspect and bride poisoner George Smith.

Come take a trip with us into the dark heart of the British Isles, from the gritty northern industrial cities of Leeds, Bradford and Manchester to cosmopolitan London to the verdant countryside of Herefordshire! Warning: this issue contains an abundance of mutilation, necrophilia, and tea.