After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - The Victorian Era's Wildest Murder

Episode Date: April 6, 2026

It was one of the most gruesome crimes of the Victorian era... and it ended up in David Attenborough's garden! Kate Webster, a servant, killed and dismembered her mistress, Julia Martha Thomas in 1879. It's a story that show us the everyday life of Victorian Londoners, and how that world can be turned upside down.Edited by Tomos Delargy, Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.You can now watch After Dark on Youtube: www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitProduced by Stuart Beckwith. Edited by Tom Delargy. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Looking for more shady and sinister stories, sign up to History Hit. You can join us to explore the tragic life of the Bronties or discover the chilling story of Burke and Hair. Plus, with your History Hit subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe to start exploring the past. Hello after-dart listeners. It's Maddie here. I'm not quite back on the pod. I'm coming to you from my maternity leave. The sleep-deprived blur that is being a new mum, I'm so missing after dark, the whole family, and I cannot wait to be back in front of the mic. Now, in the meantime, it's Easter, and we're putting out a repeat from the good old days today. We've picked a favourite episode, the wildest murder in Victorian England. This is the one about the body in David Atter. Because of Garden, if you remember that. If you haven't heard it, you're really in for a treat. If you've listened before, listen again. It's great stuff. Also, I'm here to tell you that Anthony and I will be live at Conway Hall on the 7th of May. We're so excited to be doing this. We're going to be in conversation celebrating the launch of my new book, Hoax, Truth and Lies in the Age

of Enlightenment. Please, please come along. We want to see as many of you as possible. We'll be selling copies of the book. I'll be signing them on the night and chatting after the show. Tickets are on Now, Link is in the show notes. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And today we are talking about a particularly gruesome case. So if there are little ears around, then maybe this isn't the one for them. Or if you're eating your lunch, this also might not be the best time to do that.

Because we're talking about murder. We're talking about 19th century servants. We're talking about dismemberment. And we're talking about a head that appears in the back garden of a national treasure. This is the history that Maddie's just about to tell us of Kate Webster. It's 2010, and in the autumn sunshine, a mini-digger is clawing at the thick London clay in a back garden in Richmond, a wealthy suburb on the bank of the River Thames. Making his way through the lush vegetation of the garden towards the workman and the yellow digger is the 84-year-old homeowner. He opens his mouth and asks in his mouth.

and asks in a hushed, husky tone famous across the world, who'd like a cup of tea? Yes, we are in The Garden, as you will be able to tell from my fantastic impression, of Sir David Attenborough, friend of gorillas, penguins, and legendary presenter of BBC Nature documentaries. As Attenborough heads off with the tea order, the digger returns to work, scraping up the thick London sod that holds so much. so many secrets and is about to offer up one more.

The digger suddenly pauses. The workmen peer into the hole. There's something strange at the bottom that doesn't look quite right. Something dark, circular. Digging by hand now, they uncover more of it. A cold shiver passes over them. For looking up from the bottom of the hole is the empty eye socket of a human skull. Oh, and welcome to After Dark. I am Anthony. And I'm Maddie. And at first, I thought Maddie was reading

wrong script there. I was like, why are we in a garden? Why is it the 21st century? I don't really understand. And why is David Attenbrother? Well, that was where I did get really confused. And then, of course, there was a skull and I was like, ah, of course it's After Dark. We found a skull. It's so bizarre to me that, like, this is such a perfect story in many ways, isn't it? It's like a crime unearthed It's a national treasure. It's not even Alison Hammond. It's David Attenborough. It's the nationalist of all nationalist treasures.

Well, those are the only the two options. Yeah, those are your two. Allison or David. And this is not something I was aware of. I didn't even know that the school was found, let alone the actual history behind it. So this is an interesting way of understanding how crime, history, history of immigration,

history of 19th century servitude, comes into ideas of Britishness now. And it's essentially a strange excavations. tea party that's happening. How much more British could it be with David Attenborough? I don't think there's much more to say to that. I think that's the end. Thank you. But it's not the end, is it? Because we take me to the time, take me to the time of the crime, I think, first of all. We'll come back to David. But we're talking 19th century here, right? Yeah. And I'm going to give you the context in just a second. But first of all, I want to say as well that this is about history that is incredibly

tangible. Often we talk about darker aspects of history that have happened so far in the past that they do feel removed from us. And we can still talk about their effects, their victims in ways that are as critical, as rigorous and as empathetic as possible. But this is us in 2010 being confronted with the evidence of a crime, a vicious, brutal, violent crime. And there's something about that being unearthed in the Garden of David Attenborough that just makes it so immediate and so shocking. And it sort of catapults it into our national consciousness, I suppose. So, okay, let me give you some context. We are in, we're travelling all the way back to 1879.

Obviously, Queen Victoria is on the throne in Britain. Who? Never heard of her. We have multiple episodes on Queen Victoria. So Anthony go back and listen to those. You're so good at telling people to go back and listen to old episodes. I always forget to do that. You literally, every episode now, we say, Anthony can't remember the episodes, but he truly can't, like he really never.

No, I never have a clue what's going on. I don't even know what's going on right now, Apart from the fact that it says in my notes that there's an Anglo-Zulu war going on. So you're going to have to tell you about that. Yeah, there is. So there's Victoria on the throne. Benjamin Disraeli is the Prime Minister in Great Britain. There is a war going on between the British and the Zulus in Africa.

And this is within the context of a wider British Empire. And the British soldiers there are armed predominantly with very modern weapons. And the Zulus mainly are using spears against them. So there's a sort of inequality and imbalance and a violence going on across the world under the British Empire. There are other innovations happening on the 3rd of February of that year, 1879, mostly street in Newcastle

becomes the first street in the world to be lit by electricity. Which surprises me. That's quite late, the 1870s. Why do you hate Newcastle? Wow. Cancel! She said that.

I love Newcastle actually. I actually really love it. Some great 18th century buildings. Yeah, it's quite five you too. Shout out to Newcastle and the North East Germany. You redeemed yourself. I have. Okay.

moving swiftly on, less happy news. In Ireland, there is a famine and there's about to be the land war that year. Good transition there. Less happy news. Less happy. I can laugh at it. I'm Irish. Also cancelled in Ireland. You're safe with me, Maddie. Wow. The other thing, and I think this is really relevant to the story that we're about to tell, is that people are becoming increasingly obsessed with murder. Remember, we are only a decade away here from Jack the Ripper. And in this time, the press have really caught on to this public interest. And a good murder case, something really shocking that has different implications that unearths and exposes tensions of class or gender, as so often these violent crimes do. A good story can sell up to a million pamphlets. So this is

big business. And of course, the decade later, Jack the Ripper is going to explode that completely. So we have David Attenborough. We do. We have a skull. the back garden. We now have the context of that kind of Victorian crime era. We know where we are situated in terms of being 1879. We've also heard the name Kate Webster. So I'm not forgetting that. We'll come back to that. But what I guess I want to know next is who owns that school? Sounds like a terrible game show. Whose school is this? Time to play. Probably shouldn't be joking about that. But go on. Who is it? Do we know? Okay. So, well, we do know. We do know. And before I tell you, We need to establish some geography, I think, here, of the site where this skull is found.

So we've got the house that now belongs to David Attenborough. He then bought an old Victorian pub that was adjoining his property. It's called The Hole in the Wall. And he buys this pub. On the other side of the Attenborough property dynasty dynasty that's being expanded in Richmond is the house of a woman in the Victorian era called Julia Martha Thomas. Now, we think. that the skull is hers. She was murdered in the year 1879

and her head was never found. The rest of her was found and we're going to get into the details of what happened to that because, spoiler alert and put your sandwich down, it's not great. But yeah, we think that the skull was hers.

She was a widow. She was in her 50s. She was possibly a little bit eccentric. There's some interesting sort of peculiarities about her life. She lived alone except for a servant, Kate. The links or link. The links are linking.

So Kate then is no nothing of her, apart from the fact that she's Irish. We're just handed a card with all the names of Irish people who've done terrible things. Before you're allowed to leave the country, you have to memorize all. Here you go.

These are the ones to avoid. Don't claim them. Don't behave like these people. Yeah, if you're going abroad. They've embarrassed us. So Kate's gone to London and she's working in London in the 1870s. But who is she?

What's the background apart from Ireland? Give us a bit more. Okay, so she's from County, Wexford. What part of Ireland is? Southeast. Okay, southeast. I'm from South East too, but not Wexford. I don't think you want to claim anything in common with this woman.

You're about to find out, like, let's maybe park that. She's from a place called, is it Calain, Killen? Killen, yeah, I've never heard of it. Well, I'm going to pronounce it like that. I'd say it's Calais. She's Catholic. She's born in 1849. Now, she is a really fascinating person because she, her backstory is kind of,

of a web of truth and lies. And it's really murking, nobody really knows what the answers are. So she claimed that she was married to a sea captain called John Webster and that she had four children. However, she then claimed that the husband and all four children had died, which of course, you know, 19th century, it's not necessarily unlikely, but seems like a nice clean break. She comes to England in her teen. So she's been in England for a significant amount of time. and she works on and off as a servant in and around London,

as many women of her social class would have done. That was a sort of generally accessible career path to many people. She then has a child by a man known only as Strong, and this is in 1874, so quite soon before the murder is going to take place. Five Ardura's, right? Yes, good maths. They have a child together and he abandons her, and all we know about him is that he's called Strong,

which in my head I'm picturing like a Victorian strong man. Yeah. I don't know. No, I'm picturing Mark Strong. You know the actor? Oh, yeah. He looks exactly like my dad. Like exactly like my dad.

I've not your dad, so I don't know. No, he really does. It's weird. It's freaky. It was the talk of my wedding, not me getting married, but how much my dad looked like Mark Strong. That is such a niche thing to be able to talk about. Yeah.

Weird. Moving on. She has this child. He abandons them. She then gets a job working for this, Julia, Martha Thomas, next-door neighbor to David Ashwood. He's not that old. And this is in January 1879.

She's working as a general servant. We will get into that later, but this is, as you would imagine, someone who does all the jobs of the house, a bit of everything. And it's, you know, real dog's body work. It's tiring. It's nonstop. It's the most menial and the most complex tasks of the house. It's a lot of work.

At this point, she is around 30 years old. Approximately, again, the backstory. is not necessarily backstoring. So not young, but not old. Certainly, you know, would be expected to have some life experience behind her by the time she was 30 in this period. I mean, as someone in the very early 30s,

I would like to consider not young and not old great. Of course not old, but in terms of the Victorian era, she has established herself in womanhood by this point, put it that way. Okay. Why, have you not? I know I have. Years ahead of me to do this. The other thing about her, which is really, really important,

is that she has been arrested multiple times for larceny, so theft of private property. Which, just to point out at this point, right, big jump between larceny and pretty brutal murder, which is where we're heading. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, she's from an immigrant class, a working class, where opportunities are not open to her.

Obviously, if we are to take her backstory, at face value. She has had multiple sexual and romantic relationships. She had multiple children, presumably all of whom have died, if she had any in the first place. Again, we're not sure. But it's a very unstable life. And it's a life that like so many in this era and in the centuries before that is really fluid and moves in and out of different households, different family structures, different work situations. And so you can see how crime and theft as a means to survive might creep in. I've told you a little bit about her,

but I now want you to meet her. And I want you to look at this image of her, which we'll put on our socials for anyone not watching on YouTube. This is a waxwork done of Kate. Oh, so this isn't an image of her per se. It's an image of her waxwork. This is a photograph of her waxwork. That was created from the life, though, from her.

And she was alive during this time when the waxwork was put on display. So, I mean, we'll never know how close it is to how she looked. But I think the way that she's presented here is absolutely fascinating. Yeah. Do you want me to describe it in age old fashion? I think seeing as though this is primarily an audio production, it might be helpful. Okay, so we have somebody who is, well, it's a black and white photograph.

this woman, Kate, or representation of Kate, is slap bang in the centre. Her waxwork is facing us straight on. It's a very masculine face. It's a very hardened face. And then she's dressed in the trappings of very Victorian womanhood. And quite fine clothes. Yeah, I was going to say she wouldn't necessarily have had these clothes unless she has robbed them and larceny is part of her thing. Well, we're going to find out.

out. Oh, okay. So put a pin in that thought because we are going to come back to it. Right. So she's very, very finely dressed, very unsettling. That's a very determined stare. I get that it's a waxwork. It's not necessarily her stare, but they have presented her in this way.

It's very, very, the hands, Maddie. I don't know. There's something about the hands that just seem very, very life-like. Yeah, and I suppose we have to remember as well that this is a waxwork created after people knew about her crimes. Yeah. So there's a heavy dose of sort of sensationalism. and making her into a monster,

and we're going to talk about some of the language that's used to describe her in the press as monstrous. There's something very unsettling about the way she's slightly leaning towards us, ever so slightly, and yeah, that very direct gaze. If you met her in the street, you would be genuinely unsettled. What do you make of how masculine she is presented as? Because I think it's very telling of these ideas of Victorian womanhood and violence and them not going hand in hand necessarily.

And I think what you're saying about her hands in this image, actually, they're very masculine, and they're very lifelike, but they're sort of big and sort of strong looking and capable of terrible things as we're going to find out. With depictions of Irish people in the 19th century, you often get this thing where it's a very heavy brow, very heavy face, almost ape-like. And that was very purposeful. That was designed to be the case that we were uncivilized or we were uncontrollable or we were animalistic. And there are elements of that. It's softer because maybe that's that femininity kind of.

through, but there's certainly a heavy brow there. It's worn. It's a worn face. This is apparently the person, this is apparently the Kate who is in this lady's house and is being her general servant. I have to say, I don't think looking at her waxweight that I would hire her as a servant. Yeah, so she is living in the house of Julia, Martha Thomas, or Mrs. Thomas. And they live together alone. Obviously, we know Mrs. Thomas was a widow. And from the off, Kate really, really, doesn't enjoy her work. She complains about it a lot. We mentioned that she's a general servant. There is an account that I have here of the kinds of, it's a description of not Kate's duties necessarily, but the duties of a general servant. And this is taken from around the same time.

It says she is to cook, slush and butler. She has to be up for the milk in the morning, clean the brasses, wash the steps, light the fires, clean the hall and dining room, lay the table, get breakfast, have the kitchen clean, answer all the knocks in the meantime, and have herself tidy to serve the breakfast and have all the boots polished by that time. So this is a lot for one person. In a bigger, wealthier household, there would be multiple people assigned to each of these roles.

So she's in a middle class house, basically. This is not an elite home. It's not an elite home. And it's, I would say, lower middle class. It's not a sort of socially ambitious household. But, you know, it's wealthy enough to have one servant. They do not get on. Kate is constantly complaining about the work.

she's got to do. Mrs. Thomas, fair enough, she's paying her for the work, finds that quite annoying. On Sunday the 2nd of March in this year, this fateful year, it's a half-day holiday and Kate takes herself off to the hole in the wall, which is on the same. Yeah, exactly. Now, Mrs. Thomas herself has been to church, which interesting sort of class divide there of the different activities of people on a Sunday. I venture, I guess, at which one we would prefer to do, but anyway. Prate. Naturally, of course. So, an argument

is about to erupt. They're both in the house together. Obviously, Kate's been knocking them back in the pub. Mrs. Thomas is feeling particularly pious. They have this argument, and at the top of the stairs, Kate attacks Mrs. Thomas and she pushes her down the stairs. So the body is going down...

Well, Mrs. Thomas at this point, she's still alive. It's falling downstairs. At the bottom of the stairs, she's still alive, but only just. Right, so you have set this up. We are at a very pivotal point in the story now. We have Mrs. Thomas has fallen down the stairs. Kate's making her way dastardly towards her.

And one might assume she's going to help, but I know. I know you're about to tell me she's not going to help. She's absolutely not going to help. We actually have Kate's words, her confession of what happens next. I'm going to read that to you in her own words. At first, I thought her a nice old lady that I might be coming. comfortable and happy with, but I soon found her very tiring and that she had many things to annoy me during my work. On the evening of the murder, we had an argument that ripened into a quarrel,

and in the height of my rage at anger, I threw her from the top of the stairs to the ground floor below. She had a heavy fall. I felt that she was seriously injured, and I became excited at what occurred, lost all control over myself, and to prevent her screaming or getting me into trouble, I caught her by the throat, and in the struggle, she was choked and I threw her on the floor. I became entirely lost, and in fear of being discovered, I determined to do away with the body the best I could. I chopped off the head from the body, assisted with the use of a razor. I also used the meat saw and the carving knife to cut up the body. I prepared the copper with water to boil the body, to prevent a little.

identity, and as soon as I had succeeded in cutting it up, I placed it in the copper and boiled it down. I opened the stomach with a carving knife and burned up as much of the parts as I could. When I used to look upon the scene before me and the blood about my feet, the horror and dread I felt was inconceivable. I was bewildered and acted as if I was mad, and I failed several times in strength and determination, but was helped on by the devil in this vile purpose. I remained in the house all night, endeavouring to clean up the place and clean away the traces after the murder.

I burned part of the body after chopping it up and boiling the body and I think one of the feat. Okay. That's a lot. I want to preface this by saying that in no way what I'm about to say is this trying to excuse

what it seems very likely that Kate Webster did. So let's have that as the book. baseline of the next part of this conversation. She did not say those words. She just didn't. A working class Irish woman who has come over in the 1870s, maybe she did and they've flowered it up a little bit. Maybe there is no sense of her in those actual words.

I think we can at the very least say that it's been filtered through several different sources and that the version of her that we get supposedly in her own world. words, is someone who is overtaken by quote unquote madness. She describes being excited for getting herself, kind of becoming almost in a different state. Well, the devil was present, she's saying. Yeah. You know, there's a world in which this is some kind of legal defense, but this is not a working class Irish woman's voice.

And that's not to underestimate what working class Irish women could do in terms of articulation. That's not authentic. It doesn't ring true at all to working class. What is ringing true for me is the description of the psychological state. I can imagine there being a world in which she has almost like an out-of-body experience that she's overtaken by something. But I agree the language being used and this portrayal of her as monstrous. I don't even know about the psychological thing.

I get what you're saying. And there may be a world in which, again, that it's quite useful for a defense to have those things. but it almost seems too coherent. It makes sense of a very grisly action. It tries to join the dots too easily for us, I think. So that's why I'm suspicious about it. Okay, yeah, and I suppose actually also that she is, it almost not excuses the murder,

but it explains it because she's a woman. According to Victorian ideals of femininity, she shouldn't be murdering people, let alone strangling them with a bare hands and chopping them up. It's not very ladylike. And so I think from what you're saying, Like maybe we, yeah, we can, there's a world in which her being sort of separate from her actions and removed and taken over by the devil kind of makes sense of that.

It's like a woman couldn't possibly have done this. So here's the narrative of her being taken over. And then she regained a sense and was like, what have I done? This is terrible. Oh, no. Because the other option, it was maybe premeditated or that she simply had no remorse and just got on with it. I think that's just as likely. Yes, absolutely. I am remembering an older episode here now based on what we're just talking about.

And it's when Professor David Wilson said to as the criminologist that people might be familiar with, if not go back and listen to the episode that he's on. But he's like, stop looking for the answers to why. Because the whole thing in these cases is that we can never understand the why. It's not there for us. Whereas the why is very much there in that. It's given to us. So I'm suspicious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I think I think that's legit. We do know, though, she did do these things. and that this all took place in the kitchen, which again kind of feeds into, it's an inversion of this narrative of domesticity, of the servant's place being maybe in the kitchen,

where you should be preparing food and lovingly caring for the family that employ you, not dismembering them. She puts at least part of the body into what is called the copper. This is a big metal pot that's used for laundry, usually sort of bricked in at the corner of a room with a fire lit underneath. The smell of this, as you can imagine, was so hard. offensive and it went on for all day and all night as she was working on this corpse that the neighbours did notice. They didn't do much about it, but they did notice that something strange was

going on. She burns some of the bones. She's taking out the intestines. Some of them she puts into a box. She can't fit one of the feet in. She talks, we heard in her words there, if they are her words, that one of them does go into the copper, but there is a foot that she can't fit in, or, again, I think there is at least a sense of, like, disorderly thinking. She's not, this isn't a very professionally executed dismemberment. You know, this is chaos. She's just, she's boiling stuff. She's setting fire stuff in the grate, you know, she's chopping it up. She puts some in a wooden box, and she takes the head in a black bag to maybe take it out into the world and hide it somewhere else.

And we know eventually it does end up in the ground and we'll get to where exactly that is. David Edinburgh's house. I mean, you're wrong, but wait and see. Wait and see. Be patient, have patience. Whose head is that then? Oh my God.

It's the same head. Sorry, go, go, go. Wow. There is a story, a myth, if you're like, associated with this moment, this horror. Whether or not it's true, it's hard to tell. The story goes like this. When she was boiling everything in the copper,

fat was rising to the top. Uh-huh. She skims this off. She then goes to the pub next door, the hole in the wall, and she sells it to local children as lard or dripping for them to eat. Children in the pub. I guess they... It's the 19th century, mate.

Now, come here, two things. If that dripping thing is true, if that, again, is not the person who gave that description of what she did. Because it's not in there. It's not in that description. It's not in there, but also they're just not the same person. So this story, we supposedly now know that the landlady of the pub herself, once the crimes had been outed and reported in the press, that she put this story about. Whether or not she's the original source of it, we don't know, but certainly it would have helped to do this.

So we have to take it with a pinch of salt. Like a spread of fat. Yeah. But horrific to think about. And again, it comes down, you know, a woman feeding another woman to children. This is so, as you said, dripping. Dripping is the fat from animals. And people eat it, just on its own.

Sure. I think it's quite an old-fashioned thing now. All right. Yeah. I don't know. That sounds disgusting. Yeah, not the best. I think it's quite tasty on toast, but you don't want to eat a person made of dripping.

No, no, no, no. I don't. Do not recommend. I put that on the record now. So she's done the killing. She's semi-disposed of the body, chaotically, in different ways. You can imagine the kitchen is in a bit of a state. at this point.

You wouldn't want to be making your beans on toast in there. But of course, now what? She's killed her mistress. Her mistress has, she's not only dead, she's disappeared. So what's she going to do?

She's going to impersonate her. Oh, good. That seems like a great plan. Just going to go really well, of course. And this is why she was in those fine clothes. Yeah. So she puts on the clothing of Mrs. Thomas, silk gowns, a gold watch jewelry.

Yeah, she was wearing jewelry in that picture. Yeah, she's dressed in the finery of a lower middle class. home. She then goes to a family called the Porter family in Hammersmith. They've not seen her for a few years. And she turns up and she says, oh, my name's Mrs. Thomas now. I've got married. I'm a widow. I've inherited a house. Could you possibly help advise me on how to sell all of my furniture and belongings in it? Thank you very much. And they're like, this doesn't seem suspicious. Yeah. Sure. Okay. And they introduce her to a pub landlord called Mr. Church. Now,

pub landlords in the 18th and 19th century were very often auctioneers as well and auctions would take place in pubs. The porters take her to meet Mr. Church, the landlord and the auctioneer, and they go to the house where she takes them through and she's like, these paintings are people on the walls. They're my ancestors. They're my family. She's like, that piano, I can play that. And they're like, cool.

This is quite weird. But, you know, they don't take enough notice of the oddity to stop what they're doing. And they start taking the furniture out of the house. And the neighbours come out and are like, what are you doing with Mrs. Thomas's things? And they're like, oh, we're selling it. And suspicion is mounting. She's not caught at this point, Kate. The neighbours don't suspect enough.

They haven't added up this horrible smells with the furniture going. But they're like, this is definitely weird. She asks Mr. Porter's son, Robert, who's about around the age of 20, to help move the box that has part of the body in. She says, can you help me carry this to the River Thames to a bridge, Richmond Bridge? This is at night, it's dark at this point. And this 20-year-old Robb is like, sure, yeah, that's fine. And when they get to the bridge, she's like, you can go now.

I'm just going to wait for my friend who's going to come meet me. And he's like, okay. Do you want help with the box? She's like, no, no, leave it there. It's fine. As he's walking off, he hears an almighty splash. Turns around Kate's gardener. He's like, weird.

I don't know what that was. Of course, a few days later, news hits London that a box has been found on the shore of the River Thames and inside our body parts. Now, I think this is really interesting. Mr. Church, the auctioneer, does put two and two together. And he's like, was that your box? And Kate says, no, no, no, that's just the trash media. She's really bad at this. She's winging it.

like she's absolutely winging it. But she's like, that's just, that's those trashy penny dreadfuls. That's all it is. They're just making it up. It's fine. What I think it's really interesting because we've seen this before is that when the box with the body parts is initially discovered, people are like, oh, it's medical students playing a trick.

It's a joke, which we've seen in the Thames torso murders. Another episode, go back and listen. And I'm sorry, how badly behaved were medical students in the 19th century that the first thought when you find a dismembered bodies, you're like, it's hilarious. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that happens again here. But when they start to look at the body parts, they're like, oh, someone has hacked this. This isn't been done with medical instruments.

There's no skill involved here. This is butchering. And so the news does break that there has been a murder. Kate, meanwhile, still hasn't been caught, but she's like, maybe it is time to go back to Ireland. I think it might be time to leave town. So she pops off back to Killen, Killane, question mark. Killen? Killen.

She's been doing the Killen. God, I'm so sorry. Nominative determinists. She just rocks up her uncle's farm and she's like, I live here with you now. And he's like, how was your time in London? It was grand. It's fine. I'm home. Everything's normal. Definitely didn't kill a woman. Definitely didn't boil her and feed her dripping to children in a pub. Nope. I'll tell you what I didn't do. Yeah. And then, of course, like, cool. The police now make the connection back in London between the body parts. They go to the house, which of course is empty of its furniture.

And inevitably, they're going to the kitchen. There are bloodstains. She has clearly. cleaned up a little bit, but there's fat still smeared down the back of the copper where the body's been boiled. There are the remains of bones in the fireplace. She started doing a great job of covering it up. It's grim, right? It means really grim. This is a human being who's been utterly dismantled. It's not great. They are able to tell that this has happened without modern forensics.

The evidence is that immediate. That clear, yeah. They obviously go to Ireland to get Kate. They know where she's going. gone. They know it was her. She's arrested and she's brought back to England for trial. And inevitably, the media circus begins. Yeah. This is very, it's got all the ingredients for a 19th century media trial. We have an immigrant. We have an Irish person. We have, and you know, we're on the cusp now of land wars in Ireland. The Irish question is long-raging. The famine, I mean, Kate's born just at the

end of the famine. And the idea that the Irish can come into your good British homes and threaten you from your domestic safe space, it's so insidious and the media latch on. And she's a woman. And so therefore it's even more. So, you know, these female killers, I mean, the Victorians had real, not just the Victorians, we do too, have this real fixation on female killers. So it's like because it still feels unnatural to us. More so because we're obviously used to numb against male violence. So when a woman does something similar, we find that shocking because it seems unusual to us. And, you know, that's a whole other conversation. But the language in the press that's used to describe her is absolutely in line with what you're saying. So she's described

as an awful butcher, singularly fiendish. And interestingly, she's described as a savage. So there's two things there, right? And we don't need to dwell on it too much. But like, savage was used to describe Irish people in the 19th century. So there's something derogatory going on there, but at the same time, her actions were a savage. You know, that that butchering is quite savage. They're brutal. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think as well, that's a word that's being knocked around in the 19th century British Empire as well and, you know, has colonial overtones, not only in Ireland, but across the British Empire. I want to talk a little bit about the media then and also the media in our own moment, because of course, we have the story of the body being chopped up,

what's left to it being discovered. We know, by the way, that the head, let's just talk about the head for a second, is carried around in this black bag for quite a while. She even goes to the, I think it's to the porters and takes tea with them and the head's just in a bag under the table

and nobody knows. She's literally carrying it around with it, which is, again, I think speaks to her mental state as well. She does, of course, have to get rid of it at some point presumably it's going to start to smell and cause problems. So she goes to the hole in the wall pub and she buries it in the pub, or at least hides it in the pub,

because cut to 2010, when the work is going on, the head is discovered next to, on top of, Victorian tiles in the ground. So that's how it's dated. There is a coroner's report done, and they conclude that it is most likely the head of Mrs. Thomas. Okay, so you're talking about how the press covered the murders, in the 19th century. It'd be interesting to see how they covered the discovery in the 21st century.

Yeah. So what's so interesting is that so much of the myth or the rumor around Kate that was in circulation in the 19th century, so feeding the dripping to the children, that language of her being brutal, of being savage, is absolutely just carried through to the headlines of the 21st century. The Daily Mail headline when this discovery is made and it is linked to the Kate Webster murder reads, cut up and boiled to feed street children, horrific fate of Victorian murder victim

whose skull was found in David Atomber's garden. The Telegraph goes with Callous Kate Webster and the BBC, the Daily Mail and the telegraph all report the drippings story as fact, which is really interesting. And, you know, it is hard to verify. It's hard to disprove. There's a source, isn't there?

Like, you almost don't need to prove it because there's a source from the time that says it happened. So you can just report it in that sense. But it's taken at face value. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So it is really interesting. The skull itself has fractures on it.

And so it's understood that they possibly occurred when Mrs. Thomas fell down the stairs. And that's kind of how it's identified as being hers potentially. But yeah, it's not a light story. But I think it does tell us so much about the experience of immigrants, the experience of women, the dangers of the hierarchical structure of the home, the tension between domestic servants and their masters and mistresses and how that could turn sour so easily. Yes, an interesting one.

Do you know what I love about these stories? Love is probably a strong word. But do you know what interests me about this? One of the things that fascinates me most about all types of history, big, small, working class elite, whatever it is, is that I am really interested in what happens when people close the front door, when they go

into their own spaces, their privacy, what's happening. And we have this very vivid picture that's being painted because of these crimes and so often crime is a way to discover these things of this house in London where the door is closed, there's two women living together,

not particularly unusual, and the tensions between them, the domestic rivalry, between them. It's odd to me that Mrs Thomas kept Kate around if she was such a nuisance. Like, just get rid of her or paying her, like, kick her out. There are plenty of other young Irish women in London who will work. So it's interesting like to think of those tensions if they were there as described in the in the documentation. That house transforms itself from this workaday, lower middle class London house into a gruesome murder scene. It's the same house.

And it's the, those things existing side by side for me are the creepiest, creepiest things. You know when you talk about like Rillington Place or when you talk about the Crippin murders, it's the house and it's what's so, it's meant to be a place of safety. And it becomes a house of horror. Yeah. And I think for me, it's the, it's the immediacy of this. It's the fact that until this moment with David Attenborough, people didn't know where her head had gone. And it was, you know, a story that was going to be lost to history and that it was accepted that would never be found and that this murder victim would never be, you know, properly put to rest. And yet, here we are. And it's a reminder, especially in a city like London, where there are so

many layers of history, one on top of the other, how visceral that is beneath our feet. And that beneath the ground is evidence of all manner of human life, good and bad, waiting to be discovered. Yeah. No, it's a really, really interesting case. Thank you for sharing it. We have, if you've enjoyed this episode, we have others, of course. We have Amelia Dyer and Maddie, You're going to have to help me with some of these. We have Jack the Ripper. I'm thinking of other 19th century crimes. What else do we have?

The Thames Torso Murder is my, I don't want to say favorite, but it's a really bleak but important history. And we have Palmer the Poisoner. So we've got other murder Victoriana going on in the background, if that's what is interesting to you. So you can go and check those episodes out. If you have enjoyed this episode, please leave us a five-star review wherever you get your podcasts

or a thumbs up on this video if you're watching on YouTube. Until next time, happy listening.