Murder of Julia Martha Thomas
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 the Victorian period of the United Kingdom. Thomas, a widow in her 50s who lived in Richmond, London, was murdered on 2March 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 the remains into the River Thames.
It was alleged, although never proven, that Webster had offered the fat to a publican, 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 the skull was found during building works being carried out for Sir David Attenborough.
After the murder, Webster posed as Thomas for two weeks but was exposed and fled back to Ireland at her uncle's home at Killanne 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, Webster 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 huge public interest and was widely covered by the press in both 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 who had been widowed twice. Since the death of her second husband in 1873, she had lived on her own at 2Mayfield Cottages in Park Road in Richmond, London. 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 house called The Hole in the Wall.Thomas was described by her doctor George Henry Rudd as "a small, well-dressed lady" who was about 54 years old. Elliot O'Donnell, summing up contemporary accounts in his introduction to a transcript of Webster's trial, said that Thomas had 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. Thomas 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, Thomas had been able to keep only 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 Killanne, County Wexford, near Enniscorthy, in about 1849. She was later described by The Daily Telegraph as "a tall, strongly-made woman of about in height with sallow and much freckled complexion and large and prominent teeth". The details of Webster's 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 Webster's account, all 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 larceny in Liverpool.
Webster was released from jail in January 1872 and, by 1873, she had moved to Rose Gardens in Hammersmith, West London, where she became friends with a neighbouring family named 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".
Webster 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, Webster 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, Crease fell ill and Webster stood in for her as a temporary replacement at Loder's house. Loder knew 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 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 2March. 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 9pm, and confronted Webster. According to Webster's eventual confession:The neighbours, a woman named Ives 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 laundry 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 2Mayfield 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 cleaning the house and Thomas's clothes and to put on a show of normality for people who called for orders. Behind the scenes, she was packing the 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, throwing the foot onto a rubbish heap in Twickenham. The head was buried under the Hole in the Wall'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 the Gladstone bag which she had filled with some of the remains. Webster introduced herself to the Porters as "Mrs. Thomas". She claimed that, since last meeting the Porters, she had married, had a child, been widowed, and had been left a house in Richmond by an aunt. She invited Porter and his son Robert to a pub, the Oxford and Cambridge Arms, in Barnes. Along the way, she disposed of the bag that 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 2Mayfield 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 five miles 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 and legs of a woman. The head was missing and was later assumed to have been thrown into the river separately by Webster.
Around the same time, a human foot and ankle were found in Twickenham. It was clear that all of the remains belonged to the same corpse, but 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". An inquest on 10–11 March resulted in an open verdict on the cause of death, and 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 to a neighbour, supposed to have been rendered from Thomas's boiled fat. 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 establishment 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 2Mayfield Cottages while posing as Thomas, wearing her late employer's clothes and dealing with tradesmen under her newly assumed identity. On 9March, she reached an agreement with John Church, a victualler from Hammersmith, 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 that the removal horse and cart arrived on 18 March, the neighbours were becoming increasingly suspicious, as they had not seen Thomas for nearly two weeks. Her next door neighbour and landlady 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 the clothes in the delivery van, he found a letter addressed to the real Thomas. The police were called in and searched 2Mayfield 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. Detectives from Scotland Yard soon discovered that Webster and her son had fled back to Ireland aboard a coal steamer.
The head constable of the Royal Irish Constabulary in Wexford realised that the woman being sought by Scotland Yard was the same person whom his force had arrested fourteen years previously for larceny. The RIC were able to trace Webster to her uncle's farm at Killanne near Enniscorthy and arrested her there on 29 March. She was taken to Kingstown and from there back to Richmond via Holyhead, in the custody of the Scotland Yard policemen.
On hearing of the crime with which she was charged, Webster's 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.