The Dripping Killer-The Woman Who Boiled Her Mistress and Stole Her House

 

 Kate Lawler was born in County Wexford in 1849. As a small child, she was caught stealing and became known as a local pickpocket. She was imprisoned for larceny in Wexford in December 1864, aged only 15. She stole enough money to take a boat to Liverpool where she continued her life of crime. At age 18 she was arrested and sentenced to a further four years for a series of serious thefts.

Liverpool in the 19th Century

 After her sentence was complete she moved to London where she took a job as a charlady during the day and began prostituting herself at night for extra money. In 1873 she managed to get a steady job as a cook/housekeeper and met a man there called “Mr. Strong.” He became both her lover and accomplice in further robberies, but once she became pregnant, he immediately abandoned her.

In April, 1874 she gave birth to a son named John W. Webster, in Kingston-upon-Thames.

Despite the fact she was now a mother she continued her infamous profession and began  stealing from boarding houses. She would rent a room and then sell everything she could get her hands on before leaving. She would later claim to have been “forced into crime” as she had been “forsaken by my lover and I committed the crimes for the purpose of supporting myself and my child.”

Over the next few years she was in and out of prison several times. 

Illustration of troubled female inmate circa. 1880

 When she was finally released she found some domestic work with the Mitchell family in Teddington but left them because she said “they didn’t have anything worth stealing.”

 She was constantly changing her addreses to avoid the police and used several aliases, including:  Webb, Webster, Gibbs, Gibbons and her birth name, Lawler.

 Her young son was cared for during her frequent prison visits by Sarah Crease, a friend who worked as a charlady for a Miss Loder in Richmond. It was Miss Loder who recommended Kate for employment to Julia Martha Thomas in January 1879.   

 Mrs. Thomas was a 54-year-old widow lived at 2 Mayfield Cottages in Richmond. She had a reputation for being a strict employer with an “excitable temperament.” Despite this, the moment she saw Kate Lawler, she hired her immediately without even asking her for any references.

Victim, Julia Martha Thomas, who had an "excitable temperment."

 Kate would later say: “At first I thought her a nice old lady... but I found her very trying, and she used to do many things to annoy me during my work. When I had finished my work in my rooms, she used to go over it again after me, and point out places where she said I did not clean, showing evidence of a nasty spirit towards me.”

 The disputes became daily between the two women and at times became so serious that Mrs. Thomas became too frightened to stay in her own house alone, and often times tried to persuade friends to stay with her as “she was afraid to be alone with the Irish woman who was very fond of drink.”

Kate Webster 

 Mrs. Thomas eventually told Kate her employment would end on February 28th and she wrote this down in what was to be her final diary entry: “Gave Katherine warning to leave.”

 Kate begged her to keep her on for a further three days, until Sunday, March 2nd and for some reason Mrs. Thomas agreed.

On her final day the two women were quarrelling again and several members of the local church said that Mrs. Thomas had appeared “very agitated” during the service.  They said she was so upset that she left church early to confront Kate, who was in fact at that moment lying in wait for her when she got home.

Kate Webster and her Mistress Mrs Thomas

 Kate jumped out from the shadows and threw Mrs. Thomas down the stairs. Then, to stop her screaming, she put her hands around her neck and choked her until she was dead.

 She cut off the dead woman's head with a razor and a meat saw and then hacked off her limbs. She par-boiled the limbs and torso in a copper pot and burned the organs and intestines in the fireplace.

 Kate said later that “even she was revolted by the enormous amount of blood everywhere.”

 She burnt or boiled as much of the body as she could, then packed the remains into a wooden box, except for the head and one foot for which she could not find enough space.

 Kate disposed of the spare foot on a manure heap in Twickenham but was left with the problem of the head which she placed into a black bag. She continued to clean up the cottage on the Monday and Tuesday, then, wearing one of Mrs. Thomas's silk dresses, she visited her former neighbors, the Porter family, taking the black bag with her. They visited several pubs together and in the evening, Kate excused herself and went off, ostensibly to visit a friend, returning later without the black bag, which was never found.

Newspaper illustration of Kate with her bastard son circa. 1879

 She asked the Porter's young son Robert, to help her carry the box containing the torso of Mrs Thomas, she told him she was meeting someone at Richmond bridge who had bought the contents of the box, and asked Robert to go on home once they got there. Later, Robert told police he heard a splash of something heavy hitting the water a few moments before Kate caught up with him again.

 The box was discovered the next morning by a coal man who reported it to Barnes police station near Richmond.

 The local doctor who examined the various body parts could only say that they were “from a human female.”

Newspaper illustration of Vine Cottage, home of Mrs. Thomas

 Kate continued to live at the cottage posing as Mrs. Thomas, wearing her late employer's clothes and jewelry and dealing with tradesmen under her new identity. She made arrangements to sell the house and pawned Mrs. Thomas's gold fillings at a local pawnbrokers.

 On March 9th, she reached an agreement with John Church, a local publican, to sell Thomas's furniture. He agreed to pay her £68 with an interim payment of £18 in advance.

 When a suspicious neighbor, Miss Ives, asked the deliverymen who exactly had ordered the goods removed, they replied “Mrs. Thomas” and pointed to Kate.

 After this alarm was raised, Police were called in to search the cottage. There, they discovered blood stains, burned finger-bones in the hearth and fatty deposits behind a large copper pot, as well as a letter left by Kate giving her home address in Ireland. They immediately distributed a “wanted” notice giving a description of Kate and her 5-year-old son.

Victorian era stove similar to what Kate would have used to boil her victim's torso and limbs

 Realizing she had been found out, Kate left London with her son, catching a train to Liverpool and then traveling aboard a coal steamer to her uncle's farm in Enniscorthy, Ireland.

 There, the chief of police realized that the 30-year-old woman being sought by Scotland Yard was the same person he had arrested 15 years earlier for larceny.

 Kate was traced to her uncle's farm and arrested there (still wearing Mrs. Thomas's clothes and jewelry) on March 29th.

 As Kate travelled under arrest from Enniscorthy to Kingstown (near Dublin), crowds gathered at every station to jeer and gawk at her. Her uncle had refused to give her son shelter when he heard about the murder and the authorities sent him to the local workhouse until an industrial school could be found for him.

Nespaper illustration of Kate Webster giving evidence during her own trial 1879

  She was brought back to England via Holyhead and taken to Richmond police station where she made a statement saying John Church (who had bought Mrs. Thomas's furniture) had committed the crime. Fortunately for him, he had a rock solid alibi and was released almost immediately after his arrest.  She then made a statement implicating Henry Porter (her former neighbor) in Richmond but he too had an alibi. She was formally charged with Mrs. Thomas's murder on March 30th, 1879.

 Kate's trial which began at the Old Bailey on July 2, 1879 was rammed with people. Kate pleaded not guilty to both the murder charge and the other charges of theft. Her defense lawyer put the argument of the “circumstantial nature of the evidence” to the jury whilst trying to gain their sympathy with Kate's “devotion to her son.”

The prosecution could not prove that the human remains found by the police were actually Mrs. Thomas, as without the head there was no means of a positive identification.

A drawing of the infamous 19th century courtroom in London

 During the official inquest, the doctor who examined the torso said it belonged to a "young person with very dark hair" and the nature of death remained inconclusive.

 The piece of evidence that was the most damning against Kate was from a witness who sold hats. She testified that Kate had visited her a week before the murder took place and informed her that she was going "to sell a house and some jewellery that an aunt had left her." The jury surmised this as proof that the murder had been planned in advance.

When Kate took to the stand, she tried to garnish the jury's sympathy by putting the blame for her behaviour on the father of her child, Mr Strong. She said that she "found an intimate acquaintence with a man who should have protected me, and not let me be led away by evil associates and their bad companions."

After six days the jury then retired to consider the facts of the case, they only took one hour to deliberate and returned with a guilty verdict.

The Judge then said to Kate "is there any reason why the sentence of death should not be passed" and Kate answered "Yes there is. I am pregnant." This shocking statement through the court into confusion.

A newspaper illustration of a woman in the docks circa. 1870

The court then decided to gather a group of older women who were in the courtroom gallery along with a surgeon named Bond to quickly try and establish whether Kate was indeed pregnant. They accompanied Kate into a private room where she could be examined. They returned a few moments later and told the court that Kate was in fact not in any later stages of pregnancy, but that being said  they could not rule out the possibility of a conception in the early stages.

The presiding Judge then sentenced Kate to death by hanging at Wandsworth prison.

The evening before her execution, Kate finally confessed to the murder of Mrs. Thomas. Her confession was witnessed by a prison warder, and heard by a Catholic priest.

She was executed three Sundays after sentencing on Tuesday the 29th of July 1879.

A newspaper article detailing Kate's trial, sentence and execution 1879

 

 Two newspaper reporters were in attendance to record the event. Inside her cell, Webster was being ministered to by Father McEnrey.

 Kate's last words were “Lord, have mercy upon me.”

 Kate was the only woman after 134 men who had been executed at Wandsworth Prison until capital punishment was abolished in 1965. 

A photograph of the public protesting capital punishment 1960

 The trial and execution caused a sensation on both sides of the Irish Sea.

 Several newspapers had noted down the Kate had only cried once during her trial, and that was when her son was mentioned- this had a negative impact on her character posthoumously, as it was decided she had carried no remorse for her actual crimes.

 Her attempts to also implicate two innocent men for her crime, also caused further public anger, and her brazen impersonation of the victim was publically seen as revolting.

 After a few weeks a wax statue of Kate was made at Madame Tussaud's in London, it was on view along with the caption "The Richmond Murderess" which remained on display long into the 20th century, alongside other notorious killlers such as Dr. Crippen.

 "The Hole in the Wall" pub which was down the road from the cottage where the murder took place was closed in 2007 and then bought for development, ending up being the future site of the house that David Attenborough would own.

 In October 2010 workman found a "dark circular object" which later was proved to be a woman's skull. It had been buried deep beneath the foundations where the stables would have been. 

A photo from an article detailing David Attenborough's connection with the Victorial murderess 2010

 When the skull was carbon dated at Edinburgh University it was determined to have been between 1650 and 1880. It had low collagen levels consistant with being boiled. It also showed fracture marks consistent with someone being thrown down the stairs.

 In July 2011 a coroner concluded that the skull was indeed that of Julia Thomas.

 A verdict was noted that the death would have been caused by death due to asphyxiation and severe head injury.

The discovered missing skull of the victim Mrs. Thomas 2010