Latest Features
An audacious museum heist, in which a unique timepiece made for Queen Marie Antoinette was among the haul worth hundreds of millions of dollars, left police clutching at thin air. It was only when the watch turned up 25 years later that the pieces of the jigsaw began to fall into place. Read more about The Queen, her Watch and the Master Burglar... ...
"In his frail last years, the impressionist master Auguste Renoir created a series of sculptures with the help of an assistant, Richard Guino. Their descendants have been embroiled in a messy battle of ownership, copyright and authenticity that has gone on for over forty years." Read more about The Renoir Wars.
Welcome
Hello. Welcome to my website. Here you can read all manner of strange stories that I have covered as a non-fiction writer. They include reports of dark acts involving murder and fraud, as well as unsolved mysteries, miscarriages of justice and other corruption.
Many of these tales feature bizarre characters and unlikely environments including medicine, showbusiness and the international art market. What most of the stories have in common is that they remain unresolved - my prime reason for republishing them here. My other intention is to demonstrate that truth is not only stranger than fiction: dark, perhaps horrific acts, whether involving murder, fraud or brainwashing, in real life have a uniquely disconcerting power to settle inside one’s head, to haunt and grip the imagination.
The fascination of all true mysteries, scandals or crimes lies in the question: what happened next? I therefore include news of any developments which occurred since the stories were originally published, mainly in the magazine sections of the national press. I often have to remind myself that however inconceivable the events and sinister the people I have met or written about, all are real, not make believe. Truth is messy. There are no neat explanations or convincing endings. Many of these stories are not only unsettling to write, they also make uncomfortable reading because of the questions and tangle of loose ends that remain.
As a writer, the deeper you delve into the realms of true crime, the more you become sucked into each story, driven by a compulsion to unravel each mystery and understand the shadowy, malign side of the human psyche. Like criminal detective work, journalistic sleuthing becomes an adventure. With each new case or unsolved mystery, there are false leads, frustration, long and tortuous trails, often nasty surprises. Assignments become not only a challenge but an obsession. By sharing that obsession, I expect you will agree that unlike fiction, true tales of intrique and skulduggery are tales without end. Read on. You may become hooked ........