Murder of Julia Martha Thomas
Encyclopedia
The murder of Julia Martha Thomas, dubbed the Barnes Mystery or the Richmond Murder by the press, was one of the most notorious crimes in late 19th-century Britain. Thomas, a widow in her 50s who lived in Richmond in west London, was murdered on 2 March 1879 by her maid, Kate Webster, a 30-year-old Irishwoman with a history of theft. Webster disposed of the body by dismembering it, boiling the flesh off the bones, and throwing most of what was left into the River Thames
. It was alleged, although never proven, that she had offered the fat to neighbours and street children as dripping
and lard
. Part of Thomas's remains were subsequently recovered from the river. Her severed head remained missing until October 2010, when it was found during building works being carried out for Sir David Attenborough
, the naturalist.
After the murder, Webster posed as Thomas for two weeks; but was exposed and fled back to Ireland and her uncle's home near Enniscorthy
, County Wexford
. She was arrested there on 29 March and was returned to London, where she stood trial at the Old Bailey
in July 1879. At the end of a six-day trial she was convicted and sentenced to death after a jury of matrons
rejected her last-minute attempt to avoid the death penalty by pleading pregnancy. She finally confessed to the murder the night before she was hanged, on 29 July, at Wandsworth Prison. The case attracted a huge amount of interest and was widely covered by the press in Great Britain and Ireland. Webster's behaviour after the crime and during the trial further increased the notoriety of the murder.
called The Hole in the Wall.
Thomas was described by her doctor, George Henry Rudd, as "a small, well-dressed lady" who was about fifty-four years old. According to Elliot O'Donnell, summing up contemporary accounts in his introduction to a transcript of Webster's trial, Thomas was said to have an "excitable temperament" and was regarded by her neighbours as eccentric. She frequently travelled, leaving her friends and relatives unaware of her whereabouts for weeks or months at a time. She was a member of the lower middle class
and as such was not wealthy, but she habitually dressed up and wore jewellery to give the impression of prosperity. Her desire to employ a live-in domestic servant probably had as much to do with status as with practicality. However, she had a reputation for being a harsh employer and her irregular habits meant that she had difficulty finding and retaining servants. Before 1879 she had only been able to keep one maid for any length of time.
On 29 January 1879, Thomas took on Kate Webster as her servant. Webster had been born as Kate Lawler in Killane in County Wexford in about 1849. She was later described by the Daily Telegraph as "a tall, strongly-made woman of about 5 feet 5 inches in height with sallow and much freckled complexion and large and prominent teeth." Many details of her early life are unclear, as many of her later autobiographical statements proved unreliable, but she claimed to have been married to a sea captain called Webster by whom she had four children. According to her account, all of the children died, as did her husband, within a short time of each other. She was imprisoned for larceny
in Wexford
in December 1864, when she was only about 15 years old, and came to England in 1867. In February 1868 she was sentenced to four years of penal servitude for committing the same crime in Liverpool
.
She was released from jail in January 1872 and by 1873 she had moved to Rose Gardens in Hammersmith
, London where she became friends with a neighbouring family called Porter. On 18 April 1874 she gave birth to a son, whom she named John W. Webster, in Kingston-upon-Thames. The identity of the father is unclear, as she named three different men at various times. One, a man named Strong, was her accomplice in further robberies and thefts. She later claimed to have been forced into crime as she had been "forsaken by him, and committed crimes for the purpose of supporting myself and child". She moved frequently around West London using various aliases, including Webb, Webster, Gibbs, Gibbons, and Lawler. While living in Teddington
she was arrested and convicted in May 1875 of 36 charges of larceny. She was sentenced to eighteen months in Wandsworth Prison. Not long after leaving prison she was arrested again for larceny and was sentenced to another twelve months' imprisonment in February 1877. Her young son was cared for in her absence by Sarah Crease, a friend who worked as a charwoman for a Miss Loder in Richmond.
In January 1879 Sarah Crease fell ill and Webster stood in for her as a temporary replacement at Loder's house. Loder knew Julia Martha Thomas as a friend and was aware of her wish to find a domestic servant. She recommended Webster on the basis of the latter's temporary work for her. When Thomas met Webster, she engaged her on the spot, though she did not appear to have made any inquiries about Webster's character or past. After Webster was taken on by Thomas, the relationship between the two women appears to have deteriorated rapidly. Thomas disliked the quality of Webster's work and frequently criticised it. Webster later said:
Webster in turn became increasingly resentful of Thomas, to the point that Thomas attempted to persuade friends to stay with her as she did not like to be alone with Webster. It was arranged that Webster would leave Thomas's service on 28 February. Thomas recorded her decision in what was to be her last diary entry: "Gave Katherine warning to leave".
The neighbours, a woman named Ives (who was Thomas's landlady) and her mother, heard a single thump like that of a chair falling over but paid no heed to it at the time. Next door, Webster began disposing of the body by dismembering it and boiling it in the kitchen copper and burning the bones in the hearth. She later described her actions:
The neighbours noticed an unusual, unpleasant smell. Webster spoke later of how she was "greatly overcome, both from the horrible sight before me and the smell". However, the activity at 2 Mayfield Cottages did not seem to be out of the ordinary, as it was customary in many households for the washing to begin early on Monday morning. Over the next couple of days Webster continued to clean the house and Thomas's clothes and put on a show of normality for people who called for orders. Behind the scenes she was packing Thomas's dismembered remains into a black Gladstone bag
and a corded wooden bonnet-box. She was unable to fit the murdered woman's head and one of the feet into the containers and disposed of them separately. She threw the foot onto a rubbish heap in Twickenham. The head was buried under the Hole in the Wall pub's stables a short distance from Thomas's house, where it was found 131 years later.
On 4 March, Webster travelled to Hammersmith to see her old neighbours the Porters, whom she had not seen for six years. Wearing Thomas's silk dress and carrying a Gladstone bag which she had filled with some of Thomas's remains, Webster introduced herself to the Porters as "Mrs. Thomas". She claimed that since last meeting the Porters she had married, had a child, had been widowed and had been left a house in Richmond by an aunt. She invited Porter and his son Robert to the Oxford and Cambridge Arms pub in Barnes. Along the way she disposed of the bag she was carrying, probably by dropping it into the River Thames
, while the Porters were inside the pub drinking. It was never recovered. Webster then asked young Robert Porter if he could help her carry a heavy box from 2 Mayfield Cottages to the station. As they crossed Richmond Bridge
, Webster dropped the box into the Thames. She was able to explain it away and did not arouse Robert's suspicions.
The following day, however, the box was found washed up in shallow water next to the river bank about a mile downstream. It was spotted by Henry Wheatley, a coal porter, who was driving his cart past Barnes Railway Bridge shortly before seven in the morning. He initially thought that the box might contain the proceeds of a burglary. He recovered the box and opened it, finding that it contained what looked like body parts wrapped in brown paper. The discovery was immediately reported to the police and the remains were examined by a doctor, who found that they consisted of the trunk (minus entrails) and legs (minus one foot) of a woman. The head was missing and was later assumed to have been thrown into the river by Webster. Around the same time, a human foot and ankle were found in Twickenham. Although it was clear that all of the remains belonged to the same corpse, there was nothing to connect them with Thomas and no means to identify the remains. The doctor who examined the body parts erroneously attributed them to "a young person with very dark hair". After an inquest on 10–11 March, which resulted in an open verdict
on the cause of death, the unidentified remains were laid to rest in Barnes Cemetery on 19 March. The newspapers dubbed the unexplained murder the "Barnes Mystery", amid speculation that the body had been used for dissection and anatomical study.
It was later alleged that Webster had offered two pots of lard, supposed to have been rendered from Thomas's boiled fat, to a neighbour. However, no evidence about this was offered at the subsequent trial and it seems likely that the story is merely a legend, particularly as several versions of the story appear to exist. The proprietress of a nearby pub claimed that Webster had visited her pub and tried to sell what she called "best dripping" there. Leonard Reginald Gribble, a writer on criminology
, commented that "there is no acceptable evidence that such a repulsive sale was ever made, and it is more than possible that the episode belongs rightfully with the rest of the vast collection of apocryphal stories that has accumulated, not unnaturally, about the persons and deeds of famous criminals."
Webster continued to live at 2 Mayfield Cottages while posing as Thomas, wearing her late employer's clothes and dealing with tradespeople under her newly assumed identity. On 9 March she reached an agreement with John Church, a local publican, to sell Thomas's furniture and other goods to furnish his pub, the Rising Sun. He agreed to pay her £68 with an interim payment of £18 in advance. By the time the removal vans arrived on 18 March, the neighbours were becoming increasingly suspicious as they had not seen Thomas for nearly two weeks. Her next-door neighbour Miss Ives asked the deliverymen who had ordered the goods removed. They replied "Mrs. Thomas" and indicated Webster. Realising that she had been exposed, Webster fled immediately, catching a train to Liverpool and travelling from there to her family home at Enniscorthy. Meanwhile, Church realised that he had been deceived. When he went through Thomas's clothes in the delivery van he found a letter addressed to the real Thomas. The police were called in and searched 2 Mayfield Cottages. There they discovered blood stains, burned finger-bones in the hearth and fatty deposits behind the copper, as well as a letter left by Webster giving her home address in Ireland. They immediately put out a "wanted" notice giving a description of Webster and her son.
Scotland Yard
detectives soon discovered that Webster had fled back to Ireland aboard a coal steamer in the company of her young son. The head constable of the Royal Irish Constabulary
in Wexford realised that the woman being sought by Scotland Yard was the same one whom they had arrested 14 years previously for larceny and were able to trace her to her uncle's farm at Killanne
near Enniscorthy. She was arrested there on 29 March by the local police and was taken by the police to Kingstown (modern Dún Laoghaire
); from there she travelled, under arrest, back to Richmond via Holyhead
. On hearing of the crime for which she was charged, her uncle refused to give shelter to her son and the authorities sent the boy to the local workhouse
, until such time as a place could be found for him in an industrial school.
Webster went on trial at the Central Criminal Court – the Old Bailey – on 2 July 1879. In a sign of the great public interest aroused by the case, the prosecution was led by the Solicitor General, Sir Hardinge Gifford
. Webster was defended by a prominent London barrister, Warner Sleigh, and the case was presided over by Mr. Justice Denman
. The trial was just as well-attended as the earlier hearings in Richmond and attracted the intense interest of London society; on the fourth day of the trial, the Crown Prince of Sweden
– the future King Gustaf V
– turned up to watch the proceedings.
Over the course of six days, the court heard a succession of witnesses piecing together the complicated story of how Thomas had met her death. Webster had attempted before the trial to implicate the publican John Church and her former neighbour Porter, but both men had solid alibis and were cleared of any involvement in the murder. She pleaded not guilty and her defence sought to emphasise the circumstantial nature of the evidence and highlighted her devotion to her son as a reason why she could not have been capable of the murder. However, Webster's public unpopularity, impassive demeanour and scanty defence counted strongly against her. A particularly damning piece of evidence came from a bonnetmaker named Maria Durden who told the court that Webster had visited her a week before the murder and had said that she was going to Birmingham
to sell some property, jewellery and a house that her aunt had left her. The jury interpreted this as a sign that Webster had premeditated the murder and convicted her after deliberating for about an hour and a quarter.
Shortly after the jury returned its verdict and just before the judge was about to pass sentence, Webster was asked if there was any reason why sentence of death should not be passed upon her. She pleaded that she was pregnant in an apparent bid to avoid the death penalty. The Law Times reported that "[u]pon this a scene of uncertainty, if not of confusion, ensued, certainly not altogether in harmony with the solemnity of the occasion." The judge commented that "after thirty-two years in the profession, he was never at an inquiry of this sort." Eventually the Clerk of Assize
suggested using the archaic mechanism of a jury of matrons
, constituted from a selection of the women attending the court, to rule upon the question of whether Webster was "with quick child". 12 women were sworn in along with a surgeon named Bond, and they accompanied Webster to a private room for an examination that only took a couple of minutes. They returned a verdict that Webster was not "quick with child", though this did not necessarily mean that she was not pregnant – a distinction that led the president of the Obstetrical Society of London to protest at the use of "the obsolete medical assumption that the unborn child is not alive until the so-called 'quickening
.'"
A few days before Webster was due to be executed an appeal was submitted on her behalf to the Home Secretary
, R. A. Cross
. It was turned down with an official statement that after considering the arguments put forward, the Home Secretary had "failed to discover any sufficient ground to justify him in advising Her Majesty to interfere with the due course of the law."
Before she was executed, Webster made two statements confessing to the crime. In her first, she implicated Strong, the father of her child, whom she said had participated in the murder and was responsible for leading her into a life of crime. She recanted on 28 July, the night before she was due to be executed, making a further statement in which she took sole responsibility and exonerated Church, Porter, and Strong of any involvement. She was hanged the following day at Wandsworth Prison at 9 am, where the hangman, William Marwood
, used his newly developed "long drop" technique to cause instantaneous death. After her death was certified, she was buried in an unmarked grave in one of the prison's exercise yards. The crowd waiting outside cheered as a black flag was raised over the prison walls, signifying that the death sentence had been carried out.
An auction of Thomas's property was held at 2 Mayfield Cottages on the day after Webster's execution. John Church, the publican, managed to obtain Thomas's furniture after all, along with numerous other personal effects including her pocket-watch and the knife with which Thomas had been dismembered. The copper in which Thomas's body had been boiled was sold for five shillings. Other visitors contented themselves with taking small pebbles and twigs from the garden as souvenirs. The house itself remained unoccupied until 1897, as nobody would live there after the murder. Even then, according to the occupant, servants were reluctant to work at such a notorious place.
. Within days of her execution an enterprising publisher on the Strand
rushed into print a souvenir booklet for the price of a penny, "The Life, Trial and Execution of Kate Webster", which was advertised as "compris[ing] Twenty Handsome Pages, containing her entire History, with Summing-up, Verdict, and interesting particulars, together with her last words, and a FULL-PAGE ENGRAVING of the EXECUTION – Portraits, Illustrations &c." The Illustrated Police News published a souvenir cover depicting an artist's impression of the day of the execution. It depicted "the prisoner visited by her friends", "the process of pinioning", the final rites being said, "hoisting the black flag", and finally "filling up the coffin with lime".
The case was also commemorated, while it was still ongoing, by street ballads—musical narratives set to the tune of popular songs. H. Such, a printer and publisher in Southwark
, issued a ballad entitled "Murder and Mutilation of an Old Lady near Barnes" shortly after Kate Webster had been arrested, set to the tune of "Just Before the Battle, Mother
", a popular song of the American Civil War
. At the end of the trial Such issued another ballad, set to the tune of "Driven from Home", announcing:
Webster herself was characterised as malicious, reckless and wilfully evil. Commentators saw her crime as both gruesome and scandalous. Servants were expected to be deferential; her act of extreme violence towards her employer was deeply disquieting. At the time, about 40% of the female labour force was employed as domestic servants for a very wide range of society, from the wealthiest to respectable working-class families. Servants and employers lived and worked in close proximity, and the honesty and orderliness of servants was a constant cause of concern. Servants were very poorly paid and larceny was an ever-present temptation. Had Webster succeeded in completing the deal with John Church to sell Thomas's furniture, she stood to gain the equivalent of two to three years' worth of wages.
Another cause of revulsion against Webster was her attempt to impersonate Thomas. She had managed to perpetrate the impersonation for two weeks, implying that middle-class identity amounted to little more than cultivating the right demeanour and having the appropriate clothes and possessions, whether or not they had been earned. John Church, the publican whom Webster had attempted to implicate, was himself a former servant who had risen to lower middle-class status and earned a measure of prosperity and effective management of his pub. His commitment to bettering himself through hard work was in keeping with the ethic of the time. Webster, in contrast, had simply stolen her briefly-held middle-class identity.
Perhaps most disturbingly for many Victorians, Webster was seen as having violated the expected norms of femininity. Victorian ideals saw women as moral, passive and physically weak or restrained. Webster was seen as quite the opposite and was described in lurid ways that emphasised her lack of femininity. Elliott O'Donnell, writing in his introduction to the trial transcript, described Webster as "not merely savage, savage and shocking... but the grimmest of grim personalities, a character so uniquely sinister and barbaric as to be hardly human". The newspapers described her as "gaunt, repellent, and trampish-looking", though the reporter for The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times commented that she was "not so ill-favoured as she has been described."
Webster's appearance and behaviour were seen as key signs of her inherently criminal nature. Crimes were thought to be committed by a social "residuum" at the bottom of society who occupied themselves as "habitual criminals", choosing to live a lifestyle of drink and theft rather than improving themselves through thrift and hard work. Her strong build, the result of the hard physical labour that was her livelihood, ran counter to the largely middle-class notion that women were meant to be physically frail. Some commentators saw her facial features as indicative of criminality; O'Donnell commented upon her "obliquely set eyes", which he declared "are not infrequently found in homicides ... this peculiarity, which I consider was sufficient in itself, as one of nature's danger signals, to have warned people to steer clear of her".
Webster's behaviour in court and her sexual history also counted against her. She was widely described by reporters as "calm" and "stolid" in facing the court and only cried once during the trial, when her son was mentioned. This contradicted the expectation that "properly feminine" women should be penitent and emotional in such a situation. Her succession of male friends, one of whom had fathered her child outside wedlock, suggested promiscuous female sexuality—again, strongly counter to expected norms of behaviour. During her trial she attempted unsuccessfully to evoke sympathy by blaming Strong, the father of her child, for leading her astray: "I formed an intimate acquaintance with one who should have protected me and was
led away by evil associates and bad companions." This claim played on social expectations that women's moral sense was inextricably linked with sexual chastity—"falling" sexually would lead to other forms of "ruin"—and that men who had sexual relations with women acquired social obligations that they were expected to fulfil. Webster's attempt to implicate three innocent men also caused outrage; O'Donnell commented that "public opinion, as a whole, undoubtedly condemned Kate Webster, as much, perhaps, for her attempts to bring three innocent men to the scaffold as for the actual murder itself".
According to Shani D'Cruze of the Feminist Crime Research Network, the fact that she was Irish was a significant factor in the widespread revulsion felt towards Webster in Great Britain. Many Irish people had emigrated to England since the Great Famine of 1849, but met widespread prejudice and persistent associations with criminality and drunkenness. The Irish were at worst depicted as bestial and subhuman, and there were repeated episodes of violence between Irish and English workers as well as attacks by Fenians (Irish nationalists) in England. The demonisation of Webster as "hardly human", as O'Donnell put it, was of a piece with the public and judicial perceptions of the Irish as innately criminal.
On 22 October 2010, workmen carrying out excavation work at the rear of the old pub uncovered a "dark circular object", which turned out to be a woman's skull. It had been buried underneath foundations that had been in place for at least 40 years, on the site of the pub's stables. It was immediately speculated that the skull was the missing head of Julia Martha Thomas, and the coroner asked Richmond police to carry out an investigation into the identity and circumstances of death of the skull's owner.
Carbon dating carried out at the University of Edinburgh
found that it was dated between 1650 and 1880, but it had been deposited on top of a layer of Victorian tiles. The skull had fracture marks consistent with Webster's account of throwing Thomas down the stairs, and it was found to have low collagen
levels, consistent with it being boiled. In July 2011, the coroner concluded that the skull was indeed that of Thomas. DNA testing was not possible as she had died childless and no relatives could be traced; in addition, there was no record of where the rest of her body had been buried.
The coroner recorded a verdict of unlawful killing
, superseding the open verdict recorded in 1879. The cause of Thomas's death was given as asphyxiation and a head injury. The police called the outcome "a good example of how good old-fashioned detective work, historical records and technological advances came together to solve the ‘Barnes mystery’."
River Thames
The River Thames flows through southern England. It is the longest river entirely in England and the second longest in the United Kingdom. While it is best known because its lower reaches flow through central London, the river flows alongside several other towns and cities, including Oxford,...
. It was alleged, although never proven, that she had offered the fat to neighbours and street children as dripping
Dripping
Dripping, also known usually as beef dripping or more rarely, as pork dripping, is an animal fat produced from the fatty or otherwise unusable parts of cow or pig carcasses...
and lard
Lard
Lard is pig fat in both its rendered and unrendered forms. Lard was commonly used in many cuisines as a cooking fat or shortening, or as a spread similar to butter. Its use in contemporary cuisine has diminished because of health concerns posed by its saturated-fat content and its often negative...
. Part of Thomas's remains were subsequently recovered from the river. Her severed head remained missing until October 2010, when it was found during building works being carried out for Sir David Attenborough
David Attenborough
Sir David Frederick Attenborough OM, CH, CVO, CBE, FRS, FZS, FSA is a British broadcaster and naturalist. His career as the face and voice of natural history programmes has endured for more than 50 years...
, the naturalist.
After the murder, Webster posed as Thomas for two weeks; but was exposed and fled back to Ireland and her uncle's home near Enniscorthy
Enniscorthy
Enniscorthy is the second largest town in County Wexford, Ireland. The population of the town and environs is 9538. The Placenames Database of Ireland sheds no light on the origins of the town's name. It may refer either to the "Island of Corthaidh" or the "Island of Rocks". With a history going...
, County Wexford
County Wexford
County Wexford is a county in Ireland. It is part of the South-East Region and is also located in the province of Leinster. It is named after the town of Wexford. In pre-Norman times it was part of the Kingdom of Uí Cheinnselaig, whose capital was at Ferns. Wexford County Council is the local...
. She was arrested there on 29 March and was returned to London, where she stood trial at the Old Bailey
Old Bailey
The Central Criminal Court in England and Wales, commonly known as the Old Bailey from the street in which it stands, is a court building in central London, one of a number of buildings housing the Crown Court...
in July 1879. At the end of a six-day trial she was convicted and sentenced to death after a jury of matrons
Jury of Matrons
The jury of matrons was a form of special jury at English common law, usually used to resolve legal disputes over whether or not a party to a legal action was pregnant.- Civil juries :...
rejected her last-minute attempt to avoid the death penalty by pleading pregnancy. She finally confessed to the murder the night before she was hanged, on 29 July, at Wandsworth Prison. The case attracted a huge amount of interest and was widely covered by the press in Great Britain and Ireland. Webster's behaviour after the crime and during the trial further increased the notoriety of the murder.
Background
Julia Martha Thomas was a former schoolteacher whom had been twice widowed. Since the death of her second husband in 1873 she had lived on her own at 2 Mayfield Cottages (also known as 2 Vine Cottages) in Park Road in Richmond. The house was a two-storey semi-detached villa built in grey stone with a garden at the front and back. The area was not heavily populated at the time, although her house was close to a public housePublic house
A public house, informally known as a pub, is a drinking establishment fundamental to the culture of Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. There are approximately 53,500 public houses in the United Kingdom. This number has been declining every year, so that nearly half of the smaller...
called The Hole in the Wall.
Thomas was described by her doctor, George Henry Rudd, as "a small, well-dressed lady" who was about fifty-four years old. According to Elliot O'Donnell, summing up contemporary accounts in his introduction to a transcript of Webster's trial, Thomas was said to have an "excitable temperament" and was regarded by her neighbours as eccentric. She frequently travelled, leaving her friends and relatives unaware of her whereabouts for weeks or months at a time. She was a member of the lower middle class
Middle class
The middle class is any class of people in the middle of a societal hierarchy. In Weberian socio-economic terms, the middle class is the broad group of people in contemporary society who fall socio-economically between the working class and upper class....
and as such was not wealthy, but she habitually dressed up and wore jewellery to give the impression of prosperity. Her desire to employ a live-in domestic servant probably had as much to do with status as with practicality. However, she had a reputation for being a harsh employer and her irregular habits meant that she had difficulty finding and retaining servants. Before 1879 she had only been able to keep one maid for any length of time.
On 29 January 1879, Thomas took on Kate Webster as her servant. Webster had been born as Kate Lawler in Killane in County Wexford in about 1849. She was later described by the Daily Telegraph as "a tall, strongly-made woman of about 5 feet 5 inches in height with sallow and much freckled complexion and large and prominent teeth." Many details of her early life are unclear, as many of her later autobiographical statements proved unreliable, but she claimed to have been married to a sea captain called Webster by whom she had four children. According to her account, all of the children died, as did her husband, within a short time of each other. She was imprisoned for larceny
Larceny
Larceny is a crime involving the wrongful acquisition of the personal property of another person. It was an offence under the common law of England and became an offence in jurisdictions which incorporated the common law of England into their own law. It has been abolished in England and Wales,...
in Wexford
Wexford
Wexford is the county town of County Wexford, Ireland. It is situated near the southeastern corner of Ireland, close to Rosslare Europort. The town is connected to Dublin via the M11/N11 National Primary Route, and the national rail network...
in December 1864, when she was only about 15 years old, and came to England in 1867. In February 1868 she was sentenced to four years of penal servitude for committing the same crime in Liverpool
Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough of Merseyside, England, along the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary. It was founded as a borough in 1207 and was granted city status in 1880...
.
She was released from jail in January 1872 and by 1873 she had moved to Rose Gardens in Hammersmith
Hammersmith
Hammersmith is an urban centre in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham in west London, England, in the United Kingdom, approximately five miles west of Charing Cross on the north bank of the River Thames...
, London where she became friends with a neighbouring family called Porter. On 18 April 1874 she gave birth to a son, whom she named John W. Webster, in Kingston-upon-Thames. The identity of the father is unclear, as she named three different men at various times. One, a man named Strong, was her accomplice in further robberies and thefts. She later claimed to have been forced into crime as she had been "forsaken by him, and committed crimes for the purpose of supporting myself and child". She moved frequently around West London using various aliases, including Webb, Webster, Gibbs, Gibbons, and Lawler. While living in Teddington
Teddington
Teddington is a suburban area in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames in south west London, on the north bank of the River Thames, between Hampton Wick and Twickenham. It stretches inland from the River Thames to Bushy Park...
she was arrested and convicted in May 1875 of 36 charges of larceny. She was sentenced to eighteen months in Wandsworth Prison. Not long after leaving prison she was arrested again for larceny and was sentenced to another twelve months' imprisonment in February 1877. Her young son was cared for in her absence by Sarah Crease, a friend who worked as a charwoman for a Miss Loder in Richmond.
In January 1879 Sarah Crease fell ill and Webster stood in for her as a temporary replacement at Loder's house. Loder knew Julia Martha Thomas as a friend and was aware of her wish to find a domestic servant. She recommended Webster on the basis of the latter's temporary work for her. When Thomas met Webster, she engaged her on the spot, though she did not appear to have made any inquiries about Webster's character or past. After Webster was taken on by Thomas, the relationship between the two women appears to have deteriorated rapidly. Thomas disliked the quality of Webster's work and frequently criticised it. Webster later said:
Webster in turn became increasingly resentful of Thomas, to the point that Thomas attempted to persuade friends to stay with her as she did not like to be alone with Webster. It was arranged that Webster would leave Thomas's service on 28 February. Thomas recorded her decision in what was to be her last diary entry: "Gave Katherine warning to leave".
Murder and the disposal of the body
Webster persuaded Thomas to keep her on for a further three days, until Sunday 2 March. She had Sunday afternoons off as a half-day and was expected to return in time to help Thomas prepare for evening service at the local Presbyterian church. On this occasion, however, Webster visited the local alehouse and returned late, delaying Thomas's departure. The two women quarrelled and several members of the congregation later reported that Thomas had appeared "very agitated" on arriving at the church. She told a fellow congregant that she had been delayed by "the neglect of her servant to return home at the proper time", and said that Webster had "flown into a terrible passion" upon being rebuked. Thomas returned home from church early, about 9 pm, and confronted Webster. According to Webster's eventual confession:The neighbours, a woman named Ives (who was Thomas's landlady) and her mother, heard a single thump like that of a chair falling over but paid no heed to it at the time. Next door, Webster began disposing of the body by dismembering it and boiling it in the kitchen copper and burning the bones in the hearth. She later described her actions:
The neighbours noticed an unusual, unpleasant smell. Webster spoke later of how she was "greatly overcome, both from the horrible sight before me and the smell". However, the activity at 2 Mayfield Cottages did not seem to be out of the ordinary, as it was customary in many households for the washing to begin early on Monday morning. Over the next couple of days Webster continued to clean the house and Thomas's clothes and put on a show of normality for people who called for orders. Behind the scenes she was packing Thomas's dismembered remains into a black Gladstone bag
Gladstone bag
A Gladstone bag is a small portmanteau suitcase built over a rigid frame which could separate into two equal sections. Unlike a suitcase, a Gladstone bag is "deeper in proportion to its length." They are typically made of stiff leather and often belted with lanyards...
and a corded wooden bonnet-box. She was unable to fit the murdered woman's head and one of the feet into the containers and disposed of them separately. She threw the foot onto a rubbish heap in Twickenham. The head was buried under the Hole in the Wall pub's stables a short distance from Thomas's house, where it was found 131 years later.
On 4 March, Webster travelled to Hammersmith to see her old neighbours the Porters, whom she had not seen for six years. Wearing Thomas's silk dress and carrying a Gladstone bag which she had filled with some of Thomas's remains, Webster introduced herself to the Porters as "Mrs. Thomas". She claimed that since last meeting the Porters she had married, had a child, had been widowed and had been left a house in Richmond by an aunt. She invited Porter and his son Robert to the Oxford and Cambridge Arms pub in Barnes. Along the way she disposed of the bag she was carrying, probably by dropping it into the River Thames
River Thames
The River Thames flows through southern England. It is the longest river entirely in England and the second longest in the United Kingdom. While it is best known because its lower reaches flow through central London, the river flows alongside several other towns and cities, including Oxford,...
, while the Porters were inside the pub drinking. It was never recovered. Webster then asked young Robert Porter if he could help her carry a heavy box from 2 Mayfield Cottages to the station. As they crossed Richmond Bridge
Richmond Bridge, London
Richmond Bridge is an 18th-century stone arch bridge in south west London, England, which was designed by James Paine and Kenton Couse, and which crosses the River Thames at Richmond, connecting the two halves of the present-day London Borough of Richmond upon Thames.The bridge, which is a Grade...
, Webster dropped the box into the Thames. She was able to explain it away and did not arouse Robert's suspicions.
The following day, however, the box was found washed up in shallow water next to the river bank about a mile downstream. It was spotted by Henry Wheatley, a coal porter, who was driving his cart past Barnes Railway Bridge shortly before seven in the morning. He initially thought that the box might contain the proceeds of a burglary. He recovered the box and opened it, finding that it contained what looked like body parts wrapped in brown paper. The discovery was immediately reported to the police and the remains were examined by a doctor, who found that they consisted of the trunk (minus entrails) and legs (minus one foot) of a woman. The head was missing and was later assumed to have been thrown into the river by Webster. Around the same time, a human foot and ankle were found in Twickenham. Although it was clear that all of the remains belonged to the same corpse, there was nothing to connect them with Thomas and no means to identify the remains. The doctor who examined the body parts erroneously attributed them to "a young person with very dark hair". After an inquest on 10–11 March, which resulted in an open verdict
Open verdict
The Open verdict is an option open to a Coroner's jury at an Inquest in the legal system of England and Wales. The verdict strictly means that the jury confirms that the death is suspicious but is unable to reach any of the other verdicts open to them...
on the cause of death, the unidentified remains were laid to rest in Barnes Cemetery on 19 March. The newspapers dubbed the unexplained murder the "Barnes Mystery", amid speculation that the body had been used for dissection and anatomical study.
It was later alleged that Webster had offered two pots of lard, supposed to have been rendered from Thomas's boiled fat, to a neighbour. However, no evidence about this was offered at the subsequent trial and it seems likely that the story is merely a legend, particularly as several versions of the story appear to exist. The proprietress of a nearby pub claimed that Webster had visited her pub and tried to sell what she called "best dripping" there. Leonard Reginald Gribble, a writer on criminology
Criminology
Criminology is the scientific study of the nature, extent, causes, and control of criminal behavior in both the individual and in society...
, commented that "there is no acceptable evidence that such a repulsive sale was ever made, and it is more than possible that the episode belongs rightfully with the rest of the vast collection of apocryphal stories that has accumulated, not unnaturally, about the persons and deeds of famous criminals."
Webster continued to live at 2 Mayfield Cottages while posing as Thomas, wearing her late employer's clothes and dealing with tradespeople under her newly assumed identity. On 9 March she reached an agreement with John Church, a local publican, to sell Thomas's furniture and other goods to furnish his pub, the Rising Sun. He agreed to pay her £68 with an interim payment of £18 in advance. By the time the removal vans arrived on 18 March, the neighbours were becoming increasingly suspicious as they had not seen Thomas for nearly two weeks. Her next-door neighbour Miss Ives asked the deliverymen who had ordered the goods removed. They replied "Mrs. Thomas" and indicated Webster. Realising that she had been exposed, Webster fled immediately, catching a train to Liverpool and travelling from there to her family home at Enniscorthy. Meanwhile, Church realised that he had been deceived. When he went through Thomas's clothes in the delivery van he found a letter addressed to the real Thomas. The police were called in and searched 2 Mayfield Cottages. There they discovered blood stains, burned finger-bones in the hearth and fatty deposits behind the copper, as well as a letter left by Webster giving her home address in Ireland. They immediately put out a "wanted" notice giving a description of Webster and her son.
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard
Scotland Yard is a metonym for the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police Service of London, UK. It derives from the location of the original Metropolitan Police headquarters at 4 Whitehall Place, which had a rear entrance on a street called Great Scotland Yard. The Scotland Yard entrance became...
detectives soon discovered that Webster had fled back to Ireland aboard a coal steamer in the company of her young son. The head constable of the Royal Irish Constabulary
Royal Irish Constabulary
The armed Royal Irish Constabulary was Ireland's major police force for most of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. A separate civic police force, the unarmed Dublin Metropolitan Police controlled the capital, and the cities of Derry and Belfast, originally with their own police...
in Wexford realised that the woman being sought by Scotland Yard was the same one whom they had arrested 14 years previously for larceny and were able to trace her to her uncle's farm at Killanne
Killanne
Killanne is a rural crossroads settlement situated roughly 12 miles west of Enniscorthy in Wexford, Ireland.-See also:* List of towns and villages in Ireland...
near Enniscorthy. She was arrested there on 29 March by the local police and was taken by the police to Kingstown (modern Dún Laoghaire
Dún Laoghaire
Dún Laoghaire or Dún Laoire , sometimes anglicised as "Dunleary" , is a suburban seaside town in County Dublin, Ireland, about twelve kilometres south of Dublin city centre. It is the county town of Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County and a major port of entry from Great Britain...
); from there she travelled, under arrest, back to Richmond via Holyhead
Holyhead
Holyhead is the largest town in the county of Anglesey in the North Wales. It is also a major port adjacent to the Irish Sea serving Ireland....
. On hearing of the crime for which she was charged, her uncle refused to give shelter to her son and the authorities sent the boy to the local workhouse
Workhouse
In England and Wales a workhouse, colloquially known as a spike, was a place where those unable to support themselves were offered accommodation and employment...
, until such time as a place could be found for him in an industrial school.
Kate Webster's trial and execution
As news of the murder broke a considerable number of people travelled to Richmond to look at Mayfield Cottages. Such was the notoriety of the affair that as Webster travelled under arrest from Enniscorthy to Dublin, crowds gathered to gawk and jeer at her at nearly every station between the two locations. The pre-trial magistrates' hearings were attended by "many privileged and curious persons ... including not a few ladies", according to the Manchester Guardian. The Times reported that Webster's first appearance at Richmond Magistrates' Court was greeted by "an immense crowd yesterday around the building ... and very great excitement prevailed."Webster went on trial at the Central Criminal Court – the Old Bailey – on 2 July 1879. In a sign of the great public interest aroused by the case, the prosecution was led by the Solicitor General, Sir Hardinge Gifford
Hardinge Giffard, 1st Earl of Halsbury
Hardinge Stanley Giffard, 1st Earl of Halsbury PC, QC was a leading barrister, politician and government minister. He served thrice as Lord Chancellor of Great Britain.-Background and education:...
. Webster was defended by a prominent London barrister, Warner Sleigh, and the case was presided over by Mr. Justice Denman
George Denman
The Honourable George Denman PC, QC was an English rower, barrister, Liberal politician and High Court judge....
. The trial was just as well-attended as the earlier hearings in Richmond and attracted the intense interest of London society; on the fourth day of the trial, the Crown Prince of Sweden
Sweden
Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....
– the future King Gustaf V
Gustaf V of Sweden
Gustaf V was King of Sweden from 1907. He was the eldest son of King Oscar II of Sweden and Sophia of Nassau, a half-sister of Adolphe, Grand Duke of Luxembourg...
– turned up to watch the proceedings.
Over the course of six days, the court heard a succession of witnesses piecing together the complicated story of how Thomas had met her death. Webster had attempted before the trial to implicate the publican John Church and her former neighbour Porter, but both men had solid alibis and were cleared of any involvement in the murder. She pleaded not guilty and her defence sought to emphasise the circumstantial nature of the evidence and highlighted her devotion to her son as a reason why she could not have been capable of the murder. However, Webster's public unpopularity, impassive demeanour and scanty defence counted strongly against her. A particularly damning piece of evidence came from a bonnetmaker named Maria Durden who told the court that Webster had visited her a week before the murder and had said that she was going to Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
to sell some property, jewellery and a house that her aunt had left her. The jury interpreted this as a sign that Webster had premeditated the murder and convicted her after deliberating for about an hour and a quarter.
Shortly after the jury returned its verdict and just before the judge was about to pass sentence, Webster was asked if there was any reason why sentence of death should not be passed upon her. She pleaded that she was pregnant in an apparent bid to avoid the death penalty. The Law Times reported that "[u]pon this a scene of uncertainty, if not of confusion, ensued, certainly not altogether in harmony with the solemnity of the occasion." The judge commented that "after thirty-two years in the profession, he was never at an inquiry of this sort." Eventually the Clerk of Assize
Clerk of Assize
A Clerk of Assize was a clerk of the Assize Courts of England and Wales, a position which existed from at least 1285 to 1971, when the Courts Act 1971 eliminated the Assize Courts...
suggested using the archaic mechanism of a jury of matrons
Jury of Matrons
The jury of matrons was a form of special jury at English common law, usually used to resolve legal disputes over whether or not a party to a legal action was pregnant.- Civil juries :...
, constituted from a selection of the women attending the court, to rule upon the question of whether Webster was "with quick child". 12 women were sworn in along with a surgeon named Bond, and they accompanied Webster to a private room for an examination that only took a couple of minutes. They returned a verdict that Webster was not "quick with child", though this did not necessarily mean that she was not pregnant – a distinction that led the president of the Obstetrical Society of London to protest at the use of "the obsolete medical assumption that the unborn child is not alive until the so-called 'quickening
Quickening
Quickening is the earliest perception of fetal movement by a mother during pregnancy Quickening may also refer to:* Quickening , Final Fantasy XIIs incarnation of "Limit Breaks"...
.'"
A few days before Webster was due to be executed an appeal was submitted on her behalf to the Home Secretary
Home Secretary
The Secretary of State for the Home Department, commonly known as the Home Secretary, is the minister in charge of the Home Office of the United Kingdom, and one of the country's four Great Offices of State...
, R. A. Cross
R. A. Cross, 1st Viscount Cross
Richard Assheton Cross, 1st Viscount Cross, GCB, GCSI, PC, FRS , known before his elevation to the peerage as R. A. Cross, was a British statesman and Conservative politician...
. It was turned down with an official statement that after considering the arguments put forward, the Home Secretary had "failed to discover any sufficient ground to justify him in advising Her Majesty to interfere with the due course of the law."
Before she was executed, Webster made two statements confessing to the crime. In her first, she implicated Strong, the father of her child, whom she said had participated in the murder and was responsible for leading her into a life of crime. She recanted on 28 July, the night before she was due to be executed, making a further statement in which she took sole responsibility and exonerated Church, Porter, and Strong of any involvement. She was hanged the following day at Wandsworth Prison at 9 am, where the hangman, William Marwood
William Marwood
William Marwood was a hangman for the British government. He developed the technique of hanging known as the "long drop".-Early life:Marwood was originally a cobbler, of Church Lane, Horncastle, Lincolnshire, England.-Executioner:...
, used his newly developed "long drop" technique to cause instantaneous death. After her death was certified, she was buried in an unmarked grave in one of the prison's exercise yards. The crowd waiting outside cheered as a black flag was raised over the prison walls, signifying that the death sentence had been carried out.
An auction of Thomas's property was held at 2 Mayfield Cottages on the day after Webster's execution. John Church, the publican, managed to obtain Thomas's furniture after all, along with numerous other personal effects including her pocket-watch and the knife with which Thomas had been dismembered. The copper in which Thomas's body had been boiled was sold for five shillings. Other visitors contented themselves with taking small pebbles and twigs from the garden as souvenirs. The house itself remained unoccupied until 1897, as nobody would live there after the murder. Even then, according to the occupant, servants were reluctant to work at such a notorious place.
Social impact of the murder
The murder had a considerable social impact on Victorian Britain. It caused an immediate sensation and was widely reported in the press. Freeman's Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser of Dublin noted that what it called "one of the most sensational and awful chapters in the annals of human wickedness" had resulted in the press "teem[ing] with descriptions and details of the ghastly horrors of that crime". Such was Webster's notoriety that within only a few weeks of her arrest, and well before she had gone to trialMadame Tussaud's created a wax effigy of her and put it on display for those who wished to see the "Richmond Murderess". It remained on display well into the twentieth century alongside other notorious killers such as Burke and Hare and Dr. CrippenHawley Harvey Crippen
Hawley Harvey Crippen , usually known as Dr. Crippen, was an American homeopathic physician hanged in Pentonville Prison, London, on November 23, 1910, for the murder of his wife, Cora Henrietta Crippen...
. Within days of her execution an enterprising publisher on the Strand
Strand, London
Strand is a street in the City of Westminster, London, England. The street is just over three-quarters of a mile long. It currently starts at Trafalgar Square and runs east to join Fleet Street at Temple Bar, which marks the boundary of the City of London at this point, though its historical length...
rushed into print a souvenir booklet for the price of a penny, "The Life, Trial and Execution of Kate Webster", which was advertised as "compris[ing] Twenty Handsome Pages, containing her entire History, with Summing-up, Verdict, and interesting particulars, together with her last words, and a FULL-PAGE ENGRAVING of the EXECUTION – Portraits, Illustrations &c." The Illustrated Police News published a souvenir cover depicting an artist's impression of the day of the execution. It depicted "the prisoner visited by her friends", "the process of pinioning", the final rites being said, "hoisting the black flag", and finally "filling up the coffin with lime".
The case was also commemorated, while it was still ongoing, by street ballads—musical narratives set to the tune of popular songs. H. Such, a printer and publisher in Southwark
Southwark
Southwark is a district of south London, England, and the administrative headquarters of the London Borough of Southwark. Situated east of Charing Cross, it forms one of the oldest parts of London and fronts the River Thames to the north...
, issued a ballad entitled "Murder and Mutilation of an Old Lady near Barnes" shortly after Kate Webster had been arrested, set to the tune of "Just Before the Battle, Mother
Just before the Battle, Mother
Just before the Battle, Mother was a popular song during the American Civil War, particularly among troops in the Union Army. It was written and published by Chicago-based George F. Root...
", a popular song of the American Civil War
American Civil War
The American Civil War was a civil war fought in the United States of America. In response to the election of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States, 11 southern slave states declared their secession from the United States and formed the Confederate States of America ; the other 25...
. At the end of the trial Such issued another ballad, set to the tune of "Driven from Home", announcing:
- The terrible crime at Richmond at last,
- On Catherine Webster now has been cast,
- Tried and found guilty she is sentenced to die.
- From the strong hand of justice she cannot fly.
- She has tried all excuses but of no avail,
- About this and murder she's told many tales,
- She has tried to throw blame on others as well,
- But with all her cunning at last she has fell.
Webster herself was characterised as malicious, reckless and wilfully evil. Commentators saw her crime as both gruesome and scandalous. Servants were expected to be deferential; her act of extreme violence towards her employer was deeply disquieting. At the time, about 40% of the female labour force was employed as domestic servants for a very wide range of society, from the wealthiest to respectable working-class families. Servants and employers lived and worked in close proximity, and the honesty and orderliness of servants was a constant cause of concern. Servants were very poorly paid and larceny was an ever-present temptation. Had Webster succeeded in completing the deal with John Church to sell Thomas's furniture, she stood to gain the equivalent of two to three years' worth of wages.
Another cause of revulsion against Webster was her attempt to impersonate Thomas. She had managed to perpetrate the impersonation for two weeks, implying that middle-class identity amounted to little more than cultivating the right demeanour and having the appropriate clothes and possessions, whether or not they had been earned. John Church, the publican whom Webster had attempted to implicate, was himself a former servant who had risen to lower middle-class status and earned a measure of prosperity and effective management of his pub. His commitment to bettering himself through hard work was in keeping with the ethic of the time. Webster, in contrast, had simply stolen her briefly-held middle-class identity.
Perhaps most disturbingly for many Victorians, Webster was seen as having violated the expected norms of femininity. Victorian ideals saw women as moral, passive and physically weak or restrained. Webster was seen as quite the opposite and was described in lurid ways that emphasised her lack of femininity. Elliott O'Donnell, writing in his introduction to the trial transcript, described Webster as "not merely savage, savage and shocking... but the grimmest of grim personalities, a character so uniquely sinister and barbaric as to be hardly human". The newspapers described her as "gaunt, repellent, and trampish-looking", though the reporter for The Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times commented that she was "not so ill-favoured as she has been described."
Webster's appearance and behaviour were seen as key signs of her inherently criminal nature. Crimes were thought to be committed by a social "residuum" at the bottom of society who occupied themselves as "habitual criminals", choosing to live a lifestyle of drink and theft rather than improving themselves through thrift and hard work. Her strong build, the result of the hard physical labour that was her livelihood, ran counter to the largely middle-class notion that women were meant to be physically frail. Some commentators saw her facial features as indicative of criminality; O'Donnell commented upon her "obliquely set eyes", which he declared "are not infrequently found in homicides ... this peculiarity, which I consider was sufficient in itself, as one of nature's danger signals, to have warned people to steer clear of her".
Webster's behaviour in court and her sexual history also counted against her. She was widely described by reporters as "calm" and "stolid" in facing the court and only cried once during the trial, when her son was mentioned. This contradicted the expectation that "properly feminine" women should be penitent and emotional in such a situation. Her succession of male friends, one of whom had fathered her child outside wedlock, suggested promiscuous female sexuality—again, strongly counter to expected norms of behaviour. During her trial she attempted unsuccessfully to evoke sympathy by blaming Strong, the father of her child, for leading her astray: "I formed an intimate acquaintance with one who should have protected me and was
Was
The was sceptre is a symbol that appeared often in relics, art and hieroglyphics associated with the ancient Egyptian religion...
led away by evil associates and bad companions." This claim played on social expectations that women's moral sense was inextricably linked with sexual chastity—"falling" sexually would lead to other forms of "ruin"—and that men who had sexual relations with women acquired social obligations that they were expected to fulfil. Webster's attempt to implicate three innocent men also caused outrage; O'Donnell commented that "public opinion, as a whole, undoubtedly condemned Kate Webster, as much, perhaps, for her attempts to bring three innocent men to the scaffold as for the actual murder itself".
According to Shani D'Cruze of the Feminist Crime Research Network, the fact that she was Irish was a significant factor in the widespread revulsion felt towards Webster in Great Britain. Many Irish people had emigrated to England since the Great Famine of 1849, but met widespread prejudice and persistent associations with criminality and drunkenness. The Irish were at worst depicted as bestial and subhuman, and there were repeated episodes of violence between Irish and English workers as well as attacks by Fenians (Irish nationalists) in England. The demonisation of Webster as "hardly human", as O'Donnell put it, was of a piece with the public and judicial perceptions of the Irish as innately criminal.
Discovery of Julia Martha Thomas's skull
In 1952, the naturalist David Attenborough and his wife Jane bought a house situated between the former Mayfield Cottages (which still stand today) and the Hole in the Wall pub. The pub closed in 2007 and fell into dereliction but was bought by Attenborough in 2009 to be redeveloped.On 22 October 2010, workmen carrying out excavation work at the rear of the old pub uncovered a "dark circular object", which turned out to be a woman's skull. It had been buried underneath foundations that had been in place for at least 40 years, on the site of the pub's stables. It was immediately speculated that the skull was the missing head of Julia Martha Thomas, and the coroner asked Richmond police to carry out an investigation into the identity and circumstances of death of the skull's owner.
Carbon dating carried out at the University of Edinburgh
University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...
found that it was dated between 1650 and 1880, but it had been deposited on top of a layer of Victorian tiles. The skull had fracture marks consistent with Webster's account of throwing Thomas down the stairs, and it was found to have low collagen
Collagen
Collagen is a group of naturally occurring proteins found in animals, especially in the flesh and connective tissues of mammals. It is the main component of connective tissue, and is the most abundant protein in mammals, making up about 25% to 35% of the whole-body protein content...
levels, consistent with it being boiled. In July 2011, the coroner concluded that the skull was indeed that of Thomas. DNA testing was not possible as she had died childless and no relatives could be traced; in addition, there was no record of where the rest of her body had been buried.
The coroner recorded a verdict of unlawful killing
Unlawful killing
In English law unlawful killing is a verdict that can be returned by an inquest in England and Wales when someone has been killed by one or several unknown persons. The verdict means that the killing was done without lawful excuse and in breach of criminal law. This includes murder, manslaughter,...
, superseding the open verdict recorded in 1879. The cause of Thomas's death was given as asphyxiation and a head injury. The police called the outcome "a good example of how good old-fashioned detective work, historical records and technological advances came together to solve the ‘Barnes mystery’."
External links
- The Barnes Mystery
- The Murderess and the Hangman, a biographical novel by Matt Fullerty about the murder and Webster's trial.