In 1629, Joan Norkot of Hertfordshire died in a singularly impossible way:

1. “She lay in a composed manner in her bed, the bed cloaths nothing at all disturbed, and her child by her in the bed.”
2. “Her throat was cut from ear to ear and her neck broken, and if she first cut her throat she could not break her neck in the bed, nor e contra.”
3. “There was no blood in the bed saving that there was a tincture of blood upon the bolster whereupon her head lay, but no other substance of blood at all.”
4. “From the bed’s head there was a stream of blood on the floor, till it ponded on the bending of the floor to a very great quantity, and there was also another stream of blood on the floor at the bed’s feet, which ponded also on the floor to another great quantity, but no continuance or communication of blood of either of these two places, the one from the other, neither upon the bed, so that she bled in two places severally, and it was deposed that turning up the matte of the bed there were clotts of congealed blood in the straw of the matte underneath.”
5. “The bloody knife in the morning was found sticking in the floor a good distance from the bed, but the point of the knife as it stuck in the floor was towards the bed and the haft towards the door.”
6. “Lastly, there was the print of a thumb and four fingers of a left hand on the dead person’s left hand.”

No one had entered the house since she had gone to bed, and Joan’s sister Agnes and her husband, John Okeman, had lain in the outer room together with John’s mother, Mary. John was acquitted and his pregnant wife permitted to live, but Joan’s husband Arthur and her mother-in-law, each protesting their innocence, were hanged.

This account was found among the papers of Sir John Maynard, who died in 1690. When it was published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in July 1851, it made a sensation chiefly because it reported that Joan’s month-old corpse had been exhumed and itself accused the killers. “The appellers did touch the dead body, whereupon the brow of the dead, which was of a livid or carrion colour (that was the verbal expression in the terms of the witness) began to have a dew or gentle sweat [which] ran down in drops on the face, and the brow turned and changed to a lively and fresh colour, and the dead opened one of her eyes and shut it again, and this opening the eye was done three several times. She likewise thrust out the ring or marriage finger three times and pulled it in again, and the finger dropt blood from it on the grass.” But setting that aside, it’s hard to understand what happened to Joan. No motive was adduced in the murder, and no one has explained how it was accomplished. Who killed her, and how?

On May 31, 1964, Cyril Church beat Sylvia Nott into unconsciousness. Thinking he’d killed her, he dumped her body in a river, where she drowned.

Is this murder? The deliberate act wasn’t fatal, and the fatal act wasn’t deliberate. “His case is that he genuinely and honestly believed that she was dead,” Justice Glyn Jones told the jury. “I direct you that, if that was his genuine and honest belief, then when he threw what he believed to be a dead body into the river, he obviously was not actuated by any intention to cause death or grievous bodily harm; you cannot cause death or serious bodily harm to a corpse.”

They convicted Church of manslaughter.

One morning in 1727, York pubkeeper Hannah Williams found that her writing desk had been opened and a sum of money stolen. As waiter Thomas Geddely disappeared at the same time, there was little doubt as to the robber.

Twelve months later, a man calling himself James Crow arrived in York and took a job as a porter. The townspeople immediately accosted him as Geddely, but he insisted that he didn’t know them, that his name was James Crow, and that he was new to York.

Williams was called for, instantly identified him as Geddely, and accused him of robbing her. The man protested his innocence before a justice of the peace but had no alibi and admitted to a history as a vagabond and a petty rogue. At the trial a servant testified that she had seen him at the robbery scene with a poker in his hand. He swore again that his name was James Crow but was convicted and executed.

Some time later Thomas Geddely was arrested in Dublin on a robbery charge. While in custody he confessed to the robbery at York. A York resident who was visiting Ireland at the time declared that the resemblance between the two men was so great “that it was next to impossible for the nicest eye to have distinguished their persons asunder.”

See Mistaken Identity.

The world’s greatest jewel thief rarely carried a weapon and never indulged in violence, yet in the 1920s he managed to steal between $5 and $10 million from wealthy victims, whom he called “clients.”

Born in Massachusetts in 1896, Arthur Barry committed his first burglary at 15, creeping in through the window of a merchant’s home to plan the job and then returning to steal his receipts. The value of preparation struck him, and after a stint in the Army he went to New York and began his career in earnest. He would scan the society columns for a wedding party on Long Island, crash it wearing formal wear, then enter the house, wander upstairs, memorize the floor plan, and unlock windows. He’d return later to commit the robbery.

Working in this meticulous way he managed to steal half a million dollars a year in the mid-1920s, including $750,000 in jewels in broad daylight from the suite of F.W. Woolworth’s daughter. “Whoever took those pearls really knew what he was doing,” marveled a police captain at the time. “There were five ropes in the drawer, four imitations and the real one. The imitations were good enough to fool an oyster.”

Ironically, by the time Barry was finally caught and sent to prison in 1927, he had discovered that some of his victims were criminals themselves. “On the day after a job I’d read stories which listed all kinds of things I hadn’t stolen at all,” he told Life in 1956. “The clients would hide them and get the money from the insurance company. Sure, I was a thief and I’m sorry now, but you’ll find a lot of people in the Social Register who are also thieves and aren’t one bit sorry.”