Shortly
before seven o'clock, just before arriving at Barnes Bridge, South
London, Wheatley noticed a wooden box lying half-submerged in the water.
He got down from his cart and, with some difficulty,
hauled the box on to the bank. Noticing that it was tied with cord,
Wheatley took out his knife and cut it open.
He then
gave the box a kick and it collapsed. What he saw next turned his
stomach. A mass of white flesh fell to the ground. At first, Wheatley's
companion suggested they'd stumbled across a box of butcher's offcuts.
Workmen
building an extension at the Richmond home of Sir David Attenborough
unearthed a skull in the naturalist's garden. The police are almost
certain it is that of Mrs Thomas, who was murdered 130 years ago
But
Wheatley knew his find was far more grisly - in fact, he'd stumbled
across the body parts of a dismembered woman. The date was March 5,
1879. Wheatley immediately reported his find to the police at Barnes.
A pathologist identified the body parts as belonging to a short, somewhat tubby woman.
The
corpse had been cut up with an ordinary meat saw, and a contraction of
flesh away from some of the bones suggested that the pieces had been
boiled.
However, the body was missing not only a foot, but also something vital to help with identification - its head.
Five
days later, another gruesome discovery was made - this time on a
manure heap in an allotment in Twickenham, about five miles from Barnes.
It was a box containing the missing foot, which had been boiled in the
same way as the rest of the corpse.
For the next few
days, the police could only guess as to the identity of the body -
which some newspapers speculated could have been used by medical
students for dissection.
However, by the end of the
month and with help from a key witness, the police and the public
learned the body belonged to a 50-year- old woman called Julia Martha
Thomas, who lived in Richmond.
Kate Webster - who murdered her elderly employer with an axe after she returned home from church on a Sunday evening
She had been murdered by her servant, a 30-year-old Irish woman called Katherine Webster.
Because
of the gruesome nature of the corpse, the public were fascinated by
the case. Some people even removed pebbles and twigs as souvenirs from
the small garden of Mrs Thomas's cottage in Park Road, Richmond.
What was never discovered was Mrs Thomas's head. Its location remaining a secret - until last week, a full 130 years later.
On
Friday, workmen building an extension at the Richmond home of Sir
David Attenborough unearthed a skull in the naturalist's garden, and
the police are almost certain it is that of Mrs Thomas.
Should this indeed be the case, then the final chapter of one of the most foul murders in Victorian London can now be written.
As
a crime novelist, I've long been fascinated by the tale of the
Richmond Murder - and I've even written a book based on the killing.
The
murderer, Katherine Webster, was born in a small village in County
Wexford in 1849. She spent her teenage years in and out of prison. At
around the age of 17, she fled to Liverpool, where she lived as a
drifter and furthered her skills as a burglar.
However, she soon found herself locked up and was sentenced to four years of penal servitude in 1867.
Released after three years, she made her way south to London, where she apparently attempted to make an honest living.
In
1873, she lodged in Rose Gardens, Hammersmith, West London, next to a
family called the Porters, who would play a major part in her fate six
years later.
Some time the following year, she gave birth to a son out of wedlock.
Unable
to make ends meet Webster once more turned to thieving and, in 1875,
she was sentenced to 18 months in London's Wandsworth prison for a
staggering 36 offences of larceny.
As soon as she got
out, she re-offended, and was locked up for another year in February
1877. In January 1879, she finally appeared to turn her back on a life
of crime by taking a job as a servant for Mrs Thomas, at her home in
Richmond.
Aged around 50, and recently widowed, Mrs
Thomas was a small woman who took her religion seriously and was a
devoted worshipper at the local Presbyterian chapel.
Unsurprisingly,
the two women did not get along well. Mrs Thomas often had to
reprimand her new servant for her violent temper and less than capable
serving skills.
Gruesome: Builders unearthed a skull, believed to solve a 131-year-old riddle, in globe-trotter Sir David Attenborough's garden
On
the evening of Sunday, March 2, Mr s Thomas returned from an evening
service at the chapel. She found Webster had been drinking and a row
ensued. The drunken servant girl was unable to contain herself and
during the course of the argument she pushed her employer down the
stairs.
She ran down after her, and seeing that Mrs Thomas appeared to be badly hurt, she decided to strangle her.
What
happened next is like something out of a horror film. For the next 24
hours, Webster cut up the body of Mrs Thomas and boiled the pieces in a
big copper pan.
Why she decided to boil the pieces is
not clear, but it is likely she was hoping to disintegrate the flesh.
She was unsuccessful and her attempts to burn the body parts also
failed.
At this point , Katherine Webster decided that
the only way to dispose of the body was to parcel it up and throw it
in the Thames.
She placed the pieces in a box, and put the box into a large black bag. Then she assumed Mrs Thomas's identity.
On
the late afternoon of Tuesday, March 4, she walked to her friends the
Porters, whom she had not seen for months, and told them that she was
now called Mrs Thomas and that her aunt had left her a house in
Richmond.
Webster asked Mr Porter if he knew of an agent who could sell the house for her.
A
little later, Webster, Mr Porter and his teenage son Robert went for a
drink at a nearby pub. Robert carried the black bag, and it sat under
the table while the three had ales.
Then Webster left - saying that she had to quickly see someone. When she returned, Porter saw that she no longer had the bag.
In fact, she had thrown it off Hammersmith Bridge.
Webster's greed knew no bounds. As well as trying to sell her victim's house, she also attempted to sell all its contents.
A
man called John Church offered her £68 for some of the furniture, and
she took £18 as a down-payment - insisting it be in cash or gold.
However, Webster was worried her crime would soon be discovered, and on or around March 18 she fled back to County Wexford.
Back
in London, John Church began to grow suspicious and tracked down a
friend of the real Mrs Thomas, who informed him that she was in fact in
her 50s - and was most certainly not in her 30s with an Irish accent.
Church informed the police and, with evidence from Church and
the Porters, they quickly put the puzzle together. On the 25th, Webster
was arrested and detained at Clerkenwell prison.
At her trial
that April, huge crowds thronged around the Central Criminal Court in
London. Webster was found guilty, although she denied the murder.
She finally confessed the night before she was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on July 29.
What
she never admitted was the location of Mrs Thomas's head, a secret
which she took to her death at the end of the long rope.
Now, thanks to the unwitting help of Sir David Attenborough, the case can be finally closed.
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