History Cold Case UK

An apparently African skeleton, unearthed near a medieval English monastery, pushes Professor Sue Black's forensics team to its limits. Bone analysis offers clues about the true origins of the mysterious skeleton and facial reconstruction painstakingly reveals his face, not seen for centuries. The historical trail points to new evidence about British ancestry and the case takes an unexpected twist when they discover the tragic truth about how he died.

This time the team heads back into a dark corner of the 19th century, to a time when corpses were turned into trophies and children were sold by the inch. Their subject is the bizarre mummified body of a child. Sue and the team pick up the trail that leads to body snatching, serial murder and anatomical science in darkest Victorian Britain. Can they give our boy a home, a face, or a name?

This time the team open up the historical cold case of a mysterious skeleton discovered by accident in a series of forgotten rooms in Scotland's Stirling Castle. The history cold case team is drawn into one of the bloodiest periods of our history when Scotland and England were locked in a war for supremacy. The forensic trail leads to a unique and extraordinary 600 year old document and the team is shocked to discover the skeleton's likely identity.

A skeleton unearthed in an archaeological dig in the historic borough of Southwark in London sparks a new cold case when it is found to be covered with disfiguring scars. Renowned forensics expert Prof Sue Black leads her team at the Centre for Anatomy and Human ID at the University of Dundee in an investigation that will drag them into the seediest corners of early Victorian Britain. They use the latest facial reconstruction techniques to bring the identity of one of history's missing persons back into chilling view but in the process the team discovers much more than they bargained for.

Since the 1950s experts have remained baffled by a jumble of human bones discovered in a unique series of caves on the North York Moors. Known as the ‘Windy Pits’, due to the air which gusts out of the mouths of these caves, this area has been the inspiration for much folklore and mystery for thousands of years. Human and animal remains thought to date right back to prehistoric times have been excavated from the caves but one discovery in particular stands out; one cave, called Slip Gill, where the tangle of bones might belong to a male, female and two adolescents. Now the history cold case team hopes that by throwing the full arsenal of forensic tests combined with up to date historical research at the mystery could finally get some concrete answers. Is this a family of people we are looking at in Slip Gill and, if so, what is a family doing dead at the bottom of a cave in Yorkshire? The trail is set to take us into a dark world of ritual sacrifice, and right back to the limits of British recorded history.

In 2008 construction workers just beyond York’s City Walls uncovered 113 bodies on a site thought to be out of use between the 1580s and 1830s. Almost exclusively young men the skeletons show signs of hard physical labour and extensive scarring leading archaeologists to believe these could be Parliamentary forces who lay siege to the city in 1644 during the Civil War. But only a full forensic and historical investigation will confidently lead to answers about who the people are in this unique grave. If they are civil war soldiers why do they not appear to have died violently? And why do the skeletons of young men show signs of repetitive strains normally seen in old men who have led physically demanding lives? Why do lots of the skeletons have healed wounds caused by sharp objects? This unique case will shed new light on life in a siege army and the training techniques of the Civil War and – ultimately – provide and brand new and personalized perspective on this major turning point in British history. When the team spots an incredibly rare genetic peculiarity in two of the skeletons among the 113 they realize they could have stumbled on a pair of brothers. The trail to find out who these two men could have been and how they ended up dead in a mass grave outside York takes us into an extraordinary tale of bravery in the face of extreme hardship and gives us a brand new perspective on disability centuries ago which can perhaps teach us something about so-called modern attitudes to disability today.