When you think about Victorian murderers, Jack the Ripper is probably the first, and
perhaps only, one that comes to mind. But he wasn't the only one leaving a trail of
bodies in his wake. Keep watching to discover the other deadly, dastardly men and women
of the Victorian era.
Richard Dadd was once known as one of the best artists of his time, and he painted throughout
his lifetime, eventually doing so from within the walls of Bedlam. In 1842, he was asked
to accompany Sir Thomas Phillips on his trip around the world. When they travelled to Egypt,
he became entranced by Cairo, and after that, things began to noticeably change. He was
in a troubled state of mind when they headed to Italy, and he came to believe that he was
being stalked by the Devil. When in Rome, he stepped right into the figurative fire.
Dadd came up with a plan to kill the pope, though he ultimately changed his mind about
it. He then fled back to London and went into seclusion, and that's when his father contacted
a doctor who recommended that he be committed. Instead, Dadd invited his father on a trip
to their hometown, where he killed him in what he later claimed was a sacrifice to the
old gods. He was then arrested on his way to Austria, when he attempted to kill a passenger
on a train, as he insisted that the spirit of Osiris was using him to kill demons. He
was then extradited to England and committed to Bethlem Royal Hospital, also known as Bedlam.
He ultimately died in 1886 in Broadmoor Hospital.
Francis Saville Kent wasn't even four years old in 1860 when his body was discovered in
the outhouse of his family's Road Hill House in Wiltshire, England. What followed was a
completely botched investigation that led to the family's maid being arrested and then
released. The next person to be arrested was Francis's half-sister Constance. She was ultimately
released without a trial and sent to France and then to the St. Mary's Home for Penitent
Females. It was there that she confessed to the Reverend Arthur Wagner that she had killed
her brother.
Constance's stepmother Mary, who was Francis's mother, had been her father Samuel's mistress.
Mary had made no secret of the fact that she thought Samuel's legitimate wife wasn't just
unhappy, but mentally ill. Samuel and Mary married not long after the mysterious death
of Constance's mother, and the killing of Francis was revenge for the whole sordid mess.
Constance told the reverend that she wanted to turn herself in, and he helped her, while
refusing to share her confession with authorities because of the privilege of the confessional.
Nevertheless, she was sentenced to die, and she would've indeed been hanged if Queen Victoria
hadn't intervened. Instead, Constance served 20 years in prison before being released and
moving to Australia, where she became a nurse.
William Palmer started out on a path to a successful medical career, but he was more
interested in gambling. In 1855, he found himself seriously strapped for cash, and that
was also when his brother Walter, who he'd just taken an insurance policy out on, happened
to die. The insurance company was suspicious enough to withhold the payment.
"This claim has a bunch of little red flags on it."
Palmer had a back-up plan, which was to poison his friend John Cook. The first dose didn't
quite kill him, though. And here's where it gets weird. Cook admitted to his friends that
he thought his mysterious illness was Palmer's doing, but he also allowed Palmer to help
nurse him back to health. Instead of helping, though, Palmer picked up some strychnine,
and Cook died screaming in agony. Palmer then attempted to sabotage the autopsy by pushing
the doctor and spilling his friend's stomach contents during the investigation, but by
this point everyone was already suspicious. That's when it was decided that it was time
to exhume Palmer's dead wife as well. Palmer was ultimately found guilty of killing Cook
and then executed before it could be confirmed whether or not he'd also killed his wife,
mother-in-law, and four children.
Young Fanny Adams was only 8 years old when she headed off to play with her sister and
friend on a Saturday afternoon in 1867, at an area called Flood Meadows. Along the way,
they ran into a local man named Frederick Baker. He offered Adams money to go with him
to a nearby hop garden and gave the other girls a bribe to go away. She refused, but
then he grabbed her and dragged her screaming into the garden. By the time the two other
girls were able to convince some adults that something was dreadfully wrong, several hours
had passed.
When Baker was confronted, he denied any wrongdoing. But then Fanny's head was found by a local
hop farmer, and it wasn't long before Baker was on trial. He was found guilty and hanged,
but here's where poor little Fanny's name gets dragged through the proverbial mud. The
story dominated headlines for a while, and it was still fresh in everyone's minds a couple
years later when rations were introduced in the British Navy. A running joke developed
that the rations tasted so bad that they must've been made from the pieces of sweet Fanny Adams
that were never recovered. And thus, "Sweet F.A." became slang for a massive disappointment.
The trial of Fred and Maria Manning captured the Victorian imagination so completely that
it's tough to tell exactly what's true about their story. What is known is that when Fred
and Maria met, she was already involved in an on-and-off relationship with an Irishman
named Patrick O'Connor. She was a Swiss immigrant and a maid in the orbit of British royals
while she courted both men. After O'Connor made it clear that a marriage proposal wasn't
coming, she accepted Fred's proposal instead. But even after the marriage, she carried on
an affair with O'Connor.
The Irishman didn't turn up for work one day in 1849, and he was eventually found buried
under the kitchen floor of the Manning home. He'd been shot and covered in quicklime, and
the Mannings had disappeared. Maria was found in Edinburgh and Fred in Jersey, and during
their trial, they pointed fingers at each other. They were both found guilty and executed
in front of a crowd that famed novelist Charles Dickens described as, quote, "inexpressibly
odious in their brutal mirth."
"Ohhh! Someone must have changed the channel to USA, 'cause I just watched a Burn Notice."
At first glance, Kate Webster's story is a tale as old as time, or at least as old as
the class system. In 1879, she was employed by a widow named Julia Martha Thomas, and
the two women clashed a lot. Thomas eventually reached her breaking point and fired Webster.
Several days later Thomas had seemingly disappeared, and in her place was Webster, wearing her
clothes and heading into town in a bizarre attempt to step into Thomas' life.
An investigation followed, and Webster was quickly arrested. It was determined that she'd
pushed her elderly employer down the stairs, then strangled her to finish the job. She
then chopped the body into pieces, boiled away as much as she could, and dumped a foot
in a garbage dump and the rest in the Thames River. Webster was found guilty at trial and
hanged, but the story doesn't end there.
For a while, it wasn't clear what happened to Thomas's head, until it turned up in 2010
in the back garden of broadcaster and natural historian Sir David Attenborough, who just
happened to live on the same patch of land where Thomas was killed. He was excavating
the remains of an old pub when the skull was found. An investigation determined that the
age, date, and injuries were consistent with Thomas' story.
It's unknown exactly how many babies Amelia Dyer killed during her reign of terror, but
historians are fairly certain that the total is in the hundreds. Dyer was a practitioner
of baby farming, which filled a sadly crucial role in Victorian society. Unmarried women
who found themselves with an unwanted baby could pay a baby farmer to take the child
to find a family willing to adopt. But Dyer adjusted the scheme, as she would take the
baby and the money and then simply kill the baby. And she did it for 30 years before anyone
became suspicious.
In 1879, Dyer was sentenced to a few months of hard labor for neglect because of the huge
number of death certificates she was applying for. So she then simply stopped getting the
certificates. She wasn't arrested until 1896, when her River Thames dump site was discovered,
and bodies started being recovered. When she was questioned, she admitted that the recovered
babies were her victims. Authorities have suggested that most of her young charges were
killed within hours, or at most a few days, after coming into her care. She was found
guilty and hanged the same year, paving the way for the United Kingdom's new child welfare
charities to become very influential.
John Tawell was born in 1784 and raised in the Society of Friends, also known as the
Quakers. And while that religious group has a traditionally peaceful reputation, Tawell
was anything but. After getting a woman pregnant out of wedlock, it seemed like his reputation
was about as bad as it could get. Nevertheless, he married her, picked himself up, and by
all accounts became a picture-perfect Quaker. That is, until 1814, when he was arrested
for forgery and sentenced to 14 years transportation to the penal colony of Sydney, Australia.
Years later, Tawell was back in England and once again a perfect Quaker. But then he hired
a young woman named Sarah to care for his chronically ill wife, took her as a mistress,
remarried another woman named Sarah, had some kids with the latter Sarah, and decided to
kill the former Sarah. He tried to flee, but authorities were alerted to his presence on
a train to London by a telegraph sent ahead of him. He was ultimately arrested and executed.
In 1848, the remains of Isaac Jermy and his son were discovered on a late November evening.
It was said that the killer was a burly masked man who killed both the landlord and his son
before fleeing Stanfield Hall, but he didn't get far. Police quickly arrested James Blomfield
Rush, the man who had a loan coming due with the victims. He was held at Norwich Castle
while on trial, and it was a heck of a trial. The sheriff sold tickets, Rush acted as his
own defense council, and there was also the fact that Rush very much looked the part:
think Mr. Hyde, but not Dr. Jekyll.
It was the testimony of Rush's own mistress Emily Sandford that secured his conviction,
which predictably added to the drama. It got so crazy that pottery figurines were even
made of the couple and put on sale. And when Rush was executed, it happened in front of
thousands of people who'd gathered to see the conclusion of the trial of the decade
Police sketches on "Wanted" posters are commonplace today, and the origin of that practice dates
back to the Victorian-era killing of a man in a British train tunnel.
"I'm unwanted!" "Unwanted!" "Alive and dead!"
On June 27 of 1881, journalist Percy Lefroy Mapleton approached law enforcement at Brighton's
Preston Park railway station with a claim that he'd been assaulted, which was meant
to explain why he was covered in blood. Then some time between Mapleton's questioning and
the discovery of the body of elderly coin dealer Isaac Gold, Mapleton slipped out of
the clink.
Law enforcement drew a sketch of their suspect, and for the first time British media published
a drawing of a wanted criminal. The publicity that followed was huge, and it worked. After
a handful of sightings that initially amounted to a whole lot of nothing, the suspicions
of a landlady and her daughter eventually led to someone raising the alarm at Scotland
Yard. Mapleton was then tried, convicted, and hanged.
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