Contained within the pages of this book are the stories behind some of the most notorious murders in the history of Greater Manchester. They include the case of notorious cat burgler, Charlie Pearce, who killed 20-year-old PC Nicholas Cook in Seymour grove, and only confessed when he had already been sentenced to death for another murder; the sad tale of William Robert Taylor, whose young daughter was killed in a boiler explosion and whom, later, desperate and in debt, murdered a bailiff as well as his three remaining children; John Jackson, who escaped from Strangeways Gaol by killing a prison warder while mending a gas pipe for the prison matron; and the death of Police Sergeant Charles Brett, who stuck bravely to his post despite an armed attack on his prison van by the 'Manchester Martyrs'.