The Havant Boy Ripper: The Murder of Percy Knight Searle

Just after six o'clock on the evening of 26 November 1888, an 8-year-old schoolboy by the name of Percy Knight Searle was brutally stabbed to death in the centre of Havant near Portsmouth. The crime provoked hysteria in the town, igniting fears that Jack the Ripper had switched hunting grounds from London's East End to the Hampshire coast. But as the murder investigation unfolded, evidence increasingly pointed to another young boy as the culprit 11-year-old Robert Husband, the son of a coal...