Less than 10 days before Christmas 1998 in the seaside resort of Southport a search was on to find the missing mother of two young children who had vanished from the family home. Mitchell Quy appeared to be the dutiful and worried husband and joined the Police search for his wife Lynsey, even appearing on talk shows and phoning radio stations, appealing for help. The 23 year old croupier who seem to bask in the attention of the media, was however hiding a dark and chilling secret, he had killed and dismembered his own wife. It would not be until summer of 2000 when a grisly discovery of a human torso in a shallow grave, near an amusement park in the town, that Quy was finally revealed to be a monster. After his arrest he told police that his wife was seeking a divorce and that in a confrontation with her, while holding her on the floor for some 20 minutes, had strangled her to death. Enlisting the help of his brother , a butcher, the body was chopped up. The remains aside from the torso were never recovered after allegedly being disposed of on a trash heap.

Stuart Diamond began his criminal career at a young age, robbing a post office at knife point at just 14 years old. He was involved in a stabbing, and even attacked his own stepmother before being detained in a young offenders institution for yet another violent incident with a knife. During one of his spells of detention as a young offender he told Doctors he fantasised about "killing someone and cutting them up", but incredibly he was released, a decision that only 3 months later would result in an horrific murder in 1997. After luring back a 17 year old man to his bedsit flat, with the promise of a warm bed on a cold night in the northern resort of Blackpool , Diamond savagely attacked, strangled , stabbed and decapitated his victim, Christopher Hartley, with a kitchen knife The body was stuffed into a holdall and dumped in a swill bin of a local hotel, however a keen-eyed policeman spotted blood stains at the bedsit, despite attempts by Diamond to clean the scene and he was promptly arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment at the subsequent trial. Gruesomely the head was never recovered. Diamond only admitted to the murder and revealed in 2006 that he thrown the head into the sea, as a pathetic attempt to manipulate the legal process and have his charge reduced to manslaughter by diminished responsibility at a later appeal in 2008. The appeal was rightly unsuccessful and Diamond remains detained for life in Ashworth High Security Hospital.

The discovery in 1961 by three cavers of a sack containing human bones in a disused lead mine close to the town of Caswell near the Gower Peninsula, South Wales, would finally resolve a mystery more than 40 years old. In the December of 1919 26 year old former chorus girl, Mamie Stewart, and her husband George Shotton, some 13 years her senior, both vanished from a Swansea hotel. With only a trunk containing women's clothing, jewellery and vitally, a piece of paper with Mamie's parents address on it, the Police followed up on this lead. The Police interviewed the parents who told them Mamie had written them letters saying George was a violent and abusive husband and that she feared for her life. Mamie had left home in Sunderland at the age of 15 to purse a stage career, eventually some years later falling for fellow wearsider Shotton, and after marrying they relocated to Caswell. During the investigation of the missing persons case , it was found that Shotton was already married and father to a son with another woman. He was tracked down, charged and convicted for bigamy and served 18 months of hard labour, however the Police were convinced he had killed his second wife. After the remains were recovered and identified to be Mamie, the police attempted to locate Shotton, but unfortunately he had died some 3 years prior in 1958 aged 78.

59 year old landlord Alec Warburtorn was savagely beaten, by what was in the view of the pathologist, most likely a hammer. His assailant David Ellis,41, then coolly drove the body over 140 miles to a disused quarry in North Wales that he had visited as a child, and thought was the perfect spot for disposing of his victim's body. He attempted a getaway to Northern Ireland by ferry, but was arrested there by the Garda after the victim was reported missing by his brother, some 3 days later. Most remarkably though, the heartless Ellis tried to claim self defence due to unwanted sexual advances from the older man, a claim that was not to sway the jury who were told by a forensic pathologist that the attack consisting of at least three heavy blows, was most likely from behind and there were no defensive injuries.

The strange relationship between mother and son Penelope and Barry Rogers, with eyewitness reports of overly close contact, leading some to believe incest was a possibility, was overshadowed by a much more sinister crime. The two planned and eventually murdered Penelope's own mother Betty Guy, intoxicating her with booze and drugs before callously smothering her. A rare case of both a mother and son involved in matricide.

A look back at the 1953 poisoning of Blackpool resident 79 year old Sarah Ann Ricketts by her new housekeeper , Louisa May Merrifield aged 49. Lousia was married to a much older man of 71 who was famously described as a simpleton , leaving the jury at Manchester Assizes unable to reach a verdict for his involvement. Louisa however was not so lucky and was dispatched by Albert Pierrepoint who coincidentally had honeymooned in the town.