A dozen notorious crimes - the evidence that helped solve them

From vicious gangland crimes of 1960s London to sinister Victorian murders where the perpetrators thought they had got away with it - take a look at some fascinating and gruesome evidence used in a dozen criminal cases.

For the Museum of London's, external latest exhibition - The Crime Museum Uncovered - it has secured unique access to hundreds of items from New Scotland Yard's archives.

The show's curators, Jackie Keily and Julia Hoffbrand, say the selected pieces tell powerful stories - but are keen for people to remember they relate to real crimes which had real victims.

Here, they both take us through 12 serious cases from the past - revealing some of the key evidence that helped secure convictions.

"This is the spade that Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen used to bury his second wife Cora, whom he'd murdered at their home in Holloway, north London," says Julia Hoffbrand.

The name Crippen is notorious in the annals of British criminal history.

"The case had all the elements to capture the public's attention at the time," says Hoffbrand.

He was a homeopathic doctor and his second wife, Cora, was a music hall singer who performed under the stage name Belle Elmore.

After her death, he tried to evade arrest by escaping on a liner bound for Canada. He was accompanied by his mistress, Ethel Le Neve, who was disguised as a boy.

The image above is from a booklet published around the time of the case in 1910.

"Alerts were put out for Crippen and Le Neve," continues Hoffbrand.

"The captain of the SS Montrose responded on Marconi wireless saying he suspected they were on board. As a result, the detective in charge of the case got on another ship - a quicker one - and arrested the couple in Quebec."

Crippin was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London in November 1910.

This scary look - a floppy hat and bright red balaclava - was worn by one of three gunmen who held six people hostage in 1975.

The standoff with police at the Spaghetti House restaurant in Knightsbridge lasted for six days after a robbery went wrong. But it did eventually end peacefully.

What's significant about this case is that it involved the early use of a fibre-optic miniature camera - which gave detectives a view into the cellar where the gunmen were holed up.

A psychiatrist was also brought in, says Julia Hoffbrand, "to advise on the mental state of the hostage-takers and how best to wear them down".

The three gunmen received sentences of between 17 and 22 years.

"In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries fly paper was not sticky like it is today," says Julia Hoffbrand. "You would go to the chemist and buy sheets of fly paper impregnated with arsenic."

The paper would then be soaked in water, with a little sugar added to attract the flies.

This next image was an exhibit in a murder case from 1912, involving married couple Frederick and Margaret Seddon from Tollington Park, north London.

They were accused of murdering their lodger Eliza Barrow - by extracting arsenic from fly papers in her room, and then giving it to her in brandy and medicinal tonics.

Hoffbrand says there were suspicious circumstances - because Eliza Barrow had signed over all her finances to Frederick Seddon, he was also the sole executor of her will, and he arranged a pauper's burial for her even though there was space in a family vault.

Frederick Seddon was found guilty and hanged in April 1912. His wife Margaret was acquitted.

In July 1955, Ruth Ellis became the last woman to be hanged in the UK.

She had fatally shot her lover David Blakely - with this Smith and Wesson gun - outside the Magdala pub in Hampstead.

Jackie Keily from the Museum of London says the couple had an abusive relationship, and in court "she freely admitted she intended to kill him".

"These days there are more nuanced defences," she continues. The Homicide Act of 1957 introduced a defence of diminished responsibility in English law. "But these were not available to her at the time".

This is a sketch by a prolific courtroom artist, William Hartley, who was employed by newspapers at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th Centuries.

On this occasion he was in court witnessing the case against Amelia Sach and Annie Walters - two women who became known as the Finchley baby farmers.

"Baby farmers were women who looked after unwanted children for money," says Jackie Keily.

"But often they would kill the child, and continue to get the money. Or they would make up excuses when people asked, as to why youngsters had disappeared."

Sach and Walters were taken to the gallows in February 1903 - in what was the only double hanging of women carried out in modern times.

Powerful, violent and feared - the Kray twins Ronnie and Reggie were notorious gangland leaders in 1960s London. Their story is still well known today.

This next item, shown in court at Bow Street in July 1968, looks like something straight out of a spy novel and is not perhaps what you might expect to have been associated with the brothers.

Inside the leather attache case is a hypodermic needle, a bottle of cyanide and spring mechanism.

Jackie Keily explains that this was to be used by someone employed by an associate of the Krays, to remove a witness from a court case. But it was never used.

As this and other evidence appeared before the court Reggie Kray asked - "Is James Bond going to give evidence in this case?"

Both brothers were given life sentences.

While the Krays dominated organised crime north of the Thames in the 1960s, the lesser-known Richardson brothers were busy south of the river.

And they had a taste for torture.

Jackie Keily says this wind-up portable generator was meant to be used for testing electrical circuits - but the Richardsons used it to inflict electric shocks on those who had crossed them, by attaching wires to body parts.

At their so-called "Torture Trial" in 1967, Charlie Richardson was sentenced to 25 years, and his brother Eddie had 10 years added to time he was already serving.

This rather sinister stocking mask was presented as evidence in the case against two car thieves - Frederick Browne and William Kennedy - accused of killing an Essex policeman, PC George Gutteridge, in 1927.

The pair stole a doctor's car from Billericay in the middle of the night.

Early next morning, the body of PC Gutteridge was found by a roadside to the north of Romford. He had been shot four times.

The car was found in south London - inside was an empty bullet cartridge.

A Home Office expert was able to show the court, using microscopic technology, that the empty cartridge belonged to a gun which was later found in Frederick Browne's garage in Battersea.

Julia Hoffbrand says the case was significant "for pushing the boundaries of using ballistic evidence in court - and linking a specific gun to a crime."

Brown and Kennedy were both hanged in 1928.

"Hanged by a microscope" read the newspaper headlines.

While not evidence as such, this postcard offers a valuable snapshot of dramatic events on 3 January 1911, at Stepney in east London.

The Siege of Sidney Street saw more than 200 police officers - and Scots Guards from the nearby Tower of London - in a standoff with the remnants of a gang of Latvian anarchists.

The anarchists were linked to the murders of three City of London police officers, who were killed trying to stop a burglary a few weeks earlier.

The Latvians had superior weapons compared to the police rifles which dated back to the 1880s.

The Sidney Street siege ended with the two gunmen dying in a fire at the house in which they were holed up.

The event was memorable for several reasons, says Julia Hoffbrand.

It was the first siege to be caught on film, playing on cinema newsreels that evening.

The Home Secretary at the time, Winston Churchill, turned up at the scene - for which he was strongly criticised.

Police in London were given better weapons. And there were calls for a tightening of immigration laws, given the Latvians "alien" status.

The man who owned this violin - Charles Peace - was an accomplished musician, described in some circles as "the modern Paganini".

But his preferred proclivity was cat burglary.

"He was wanted for murder in Sheffield," says Julia Hoffbrand, "but he escaped to London and lived under an assumed identity".

He could carry this concertina ladder under his arm or in a bag. It would extend so he could get up to first floor windows.

Peace was eventually caught red-handed in Blackheath - and the police managed to establish his real identity.

He was hanged for murder in Leeds in 1879.

In Camden Town in 1933, the body of a builder was found on a chair in a burning shed.

Outside, a note from Samuel Furnace was discovered saying he had money worries and could not go on living.

But the coroner was suspicious - in part, because the body had been found on a dining chair, which was unusual in suicide cases.

Closer examination revealed there was a bullet in the body. Samuel Furnace, it turned out, had killed a young debt collector named Walter Spatchett.

"There was a nationwide hunt for Furnace. For the first time the BBC assisted the Metropolitan Police in an investigation, by broadcasting a radio appeal seeking his whereabouts," says Hoffbrand.

Furnace was was found in a boarding house in Southend and brought back to London - but he didn't survive to stand trial.

He had concealed a bottle of hydrochloric acid in his coat lining, which he took after his arrest.

Our last case, from 1905, saw cutting-edge evidence presented before a court.

"The face masks are made out of woollen stockings, found at the scene of a shop robbery in Deptford High Street which had gone wrong," says Julia Hoffbrand.

"The case became known as the Mask Murders."

The shop manager and his wife had been killed. Two brothers - Alfred and Albert Stratton - were arrested.

"This case is interesting because on an empty cash box there was a fingerprint," says Hoffbrand.

"And Scotland Yard's fingerprint bureau, created only 4 years previously, persuaded the jury that this evidence was reliable."

It was the first case in which fingerprint evidence was used to secure a conviction.

The Stratton brothers were found guilty and hanged.

The Crime Museum Uncovered is at the Museum of London until 10 April 2016.

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