What this site is
Skellyweb is an independent publication producing long-form journalism on historical and contemporary criminal cases. Each article is researched from public-record sources — court proceedings, official investigations, contemporaneous news reporting, and published scholarly work — and written to a standard intended to outlast the news cycle.
True crime, as a genre, has a reputation it has often earned. A great deal of what gets published under that heading is rushed, sensationalised, indifferent to the people at the centre of the cases, and built around the assumption that readers want only the bare details of what happened and as many lurid descriptions as the format will permit. Skellyweb is built on the opposite assumption: that readers who care about these cases are also capable of caring about the people in them, and that the most interesting versions of these stories are usually the most honest ones.
How articles are written
The pieces published here are typically between 3,000 and 8,000 words. Each one takes the case it covers and works through it carefully: the biographical context, the events themselves, the investigations and trials where relevant, the suspects where they remain unresolved, the lasting legacy, and — wherever possible — the lives of the victims as something more than the prelude to their own deaths.
Where cases involve contested interpretations, multiple credible suspects, or unresolved questions, articles say so plainly rather than pretending to settle what has not been settled. Where graphic detail is required to understand what happened, it is included with restraint. Where it is not required, it is left out.
Content warnings appear at the start of articles where the material is likely to be especially distressing. Readers can decide what they want to read.
What kind of cases
The editorial focus is broad — historical and contemporary, British and international, solved and unsolved, individual perpetrators and institutional disasters. Recurring categories include American and British serial killers, unsolved historical cases, cult and standoff incidents, and miscarriages of justice. The selection criterion is not novelty but whether the case repays careful treatment.
Who runs it
Skellyweb is edited and written by Stuart Skelton, a sole trader based in south London. The site has no parent publication, no corporate backer, and no editorial agenda beyond the careful telling of difficult stories. The custom WordPress theme that powers the site, Stumate, is built and maintained in-house.
Editorial standards and corrections
Articles are researched as carefully as time and access permit, but no publication is free of error. If you spot a factual mistake in an article, or if you are an individual named in an article and wish to raise a concern about its content, please email snakeballs@skellyweb.co.uk. Reasonable requests for correction or clarification are taken seriously and acted on where the underlying point is sound.
Articles concerning living individuals are written on the basis of public-record information and present each individual’s legal status accurately as of the publication date. Where new developments occur in an ongoing case, relevant articles are updated.
Sources and further reading
The articles here are not academic papers and do not carry formal footnotes, but they are not written from memory either. Specific factual claims rest on a combination of court records, official inquiry reports, contemporary press archives, and serious published research. Where a single book has materially shaped the article’s interpretation — Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five for the Jack the Ripper piece, Adam Selzer’s H.H. Holmes: The True History of the White City Devil for the Holmes piece, John Lucas’s Britain’s Forgotten Serial Killer for the Patrick Mackay piece, and others — it is named in the article itself.
Readers wishing to go deeper on any case covered here are encouraged to seek out the primary sources. The articles are intended as careful summaries and as starting points, not as final words.
Contact
For editorial enquiries, corrections, or any other matter: snakeballs@skellyweb.co.uk
