Within these pages are accounts of Robert James Lees, the Ilfracombe spiritualist who claimed to have unmasked Jack the Ripper; Charles De Ville Wells, the Plymouth-based fraudster who famously broke the bank at Monte Carlo; Herbert Rowse Armstrong, the former Newton Abbot solicitor who remains the only member of his profession to be executed for murder; Lord Frederick Cavendish, the Duke of Devonshire’s son who was assassinated in Dublin; Oscar Wilde, whose downfall was initiated by an incriminating letter sent from Babbacombe; and Robert Hichens, the helmsman of the Titanic who later in life was jailed for attempted murder in Torquay.
