After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Victorian Love Triangle Murder

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Through the industrial fog of Victorian London, in one of the city's most notorious slums, a murder took place that shocked a nation.The Bermondsey Horror, as it was called at the time, centred around a young woman and her older partner, and a wealthy man who was lured to their home one night.How did the gruesome events unfold? What did Charles Dickens have to say about the public execution? And what was the social impact of this story?Edited by Tom Delargy. Research by Phoebe Joyce. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Please vote for us for Listeners' Choice at the British Podcast Awards! Follow this link, and don’t forget to confirm the email. Thank you!You can now watch After Dark on Youtube! www.youtube.com/@afterdarkhistoryhitSign 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.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hello, everyone. It's us, your hosts Maddie Pelling and Anthony Delaney. But before we begin the show, we want to ask for a few seconds of your time. If you're enjoying After Dark, and we love you, if you are. We would love you just a little bit more. If you could vote for us in the listeners choice category at the British Podcast Awards. So go to the show notes now, click the link, and just then search for After Dark. Fill in your name and your email and don't forget to confirm. They will send you an email. You need to confirm. The whole process probably takes about 30. If you've already voted, we are so, so grateful. If you haven't, stop what you are doing

right now. Vote for us before you enjoy this show. Looking for your perfect place to call home, Lethbridge Land is shaping the future of our city with incredible communities like crossings, riverstone and watermark. Each neighborhood is designed with innovation, passion and responsibility to enrich your life today and strengthen Lethbridge for tomorrow. From vibrant urban hubs to serene, coolie views, there's a community waiting for you. Discover the lifestyle you've been dreaming of in a Lethbridgeland community. Visit lethbridgeland.ca and take the first step towards your new home today. Hello and welcome to After Dark. In today's episode, we're going into the heart of Dickensian

Britain through the smog of London at its industrial peak and into the heart of a dark murder. Here's Anthony to take it away. London 1849. The city groans under the weight of the industrial age. Queen Victoria sits on the throne as Britain tightens its grip on empire, and the Times reports the death toll from yet another wave of cholera tearing through the city. Inside the capital, wealth and poverty live side by side. Gilded parlors overlook alleys where hungry children sleep in the shadow.

The streets of Bermansy are choked with fog, sweat and soot. This is a world of clanging iron and endless hunger. Rats skitter along gutters. Cold dust clings to the skin and secrets are buried in brickwork. And inside a cramped terraced house on Minover Place, something terrible is about to unfold. Frederick and Marie Manning have dressed for dinner. The kitchen is dim, the floor newly scrubbed, though a keen eye might notice the flagstones are uneven.

Upstairs, their lodger stir oblivious. Their guest night is Patrick O'Connor, a man with money in his pockets, and he's passed with Marie firmly on his mind. He arrives at the door with the confidence of someone long welcomed, not knowing that the table has been set not just for supper, but for murder. As the oil lamp flickers and the city's grime clings to the window panes, a plan honed over weeks nears its end.

end. A pistol has been secreted behind a cupboard door. A shovel has been propped against the scullery wall. What happens tonight will spill across the penny broadsheets and draw crowds in their thousands to the gallows. This is a story soaked in the smoke of Dickensian London, where love curdles into greed and the floor beneath your feet might just be hiding a body. This is after dark, and this is the Bermansy horror. Hello, everyone, I'm Maddie, and I'm Maddie. And this is an episode that you guys have been asking for. think since the beginning of the podcast two whole years ago. I am genuinely very excited for this. And whilst I am an 18th centuryist at heart, and we've already established that my long 18th

century continues into the Victorian period. And whilst I do not care for the late Victorian period, this is a sweet spot. We're in the 1840s. This is acceptable. I'm good to go. This is a moment where Queen Victoria has only been on the throne for 12 years, so we're not that far into what it's going to be a very long rain. And there's a backdrop, as we heard at the beginning of this smoggy, factory-packed Dickensian world of soot and grime. It's deliciously disgusting with the distance of history, I suppose. The other thing that I find so interesting about this story is that it takes place on Jacob's Island, which is one of London's most notorious slums in the 19th century. And it's an area that in that moment was packed with tanneries. So you can just

imagine not only the sort of quality of the air in terms of the grind that was in it, but also the smell. This is sensory overload for me. Like, if I had to travel back in time was plonk down here, never mind all the murdering and people being buried under the floor, what's just the sensory overload alone would kill me, I think. Speaking about somebody getting killed, this is history of somebody getting killed. We're talking about the Berman'sy murder in particular, and just give you a little overview of what we're going to be dealing with in this episode. This is set in 1849. It's the murder of Patrick O'Connor by Frederick and Marie Manning.

They are a married couple living in Burmesee in London. And Marie had previously been O'Connor's lover. And she had been plotting to kill O'Connor with her husband, Frederick. Are you confused? It's not that confusing. That's about as confusing as it gets. And the reason they wanted to kill him was for his money. So that's the overview.

And now we're going to go into some of the details and a little bit more depth. Anthony, give me the timeline of this case. Who are the main characters, and when does this story really start to begin? When do we first encounter them? So we press play in the early 1840s, and I suppose our leading lady is Marie de Rue. Although if you're reading some of the contemporary accounts, you will often see her named as Maria, but it's the same person. So it's either Marie, Maria DeRue, but Marie, we're going to call her for the purposes of this episode.

She is a Swiss-born woman. She has moved to England when she's 28, and she starts working as a lady's made for the daughter of the Duchess of Sutherland. So it's, you know, it's a relatively prestigious that's a good gig. Yeah, it is a good gig. And it begs questions, actually, based on some the things we know about her. Let's discover some of those things now. So what we find out very quickly is that she leaves that employment. We're told she leaves. Does she leave? Does she get kicked out? I don't know. It doesn't really make sense because she leaves and ends up living in Burmansie. And some of the sources at the time, and I don't buy this, claim that she left due to her

ambition and her taste for luxury. Now, I think they're writing this with the knowledge that they have a murderess on their hands, because if she had an ambition for taste and luxury, which she might very well have had, she would have stayed with the daughter of the Duchess of Sutherland. She would not be in Bermansy. Yeah, exactly. As we've heard, Bermansy is one of the most horrendous slums in the city at this point. And to have gone, you know, from living, as a lady's made, you're living in a fine house under the protection of that household in a steady job. Some thing has gone wrong there, but it is interesting because I think we come up against this so many times, especially in the 19th century actually, when a woman is at the heart

of a murder and is not the victim, that she is transformed often in the media, often in the press, as a monster, as someone who has inverted her own femininity, who is going against the ideals of the time and is monstrous in all these different kind of ways. She's maybe ambitious, she's greedy, she's sexually manipulative to the men around her. And I suspect that's what we're going to see in the story. And I'm just bearing that in mind and thinking about how we strip those layers back as we go, actually. So I want to keep thinking about that. But either way, we do know that she leaves the employment of the daughter of the Duchess of Sutherland and she ends up in Bermansy. I mean, so far not great, but no crime has been committed. So what

happens next? Well, let's talk about some of the other characters before we go into the what next part, just so that we have them lined up. So we have Marie there. Our next person that we're going to be looking at is our victim, and that is Patrick O'Connor. He is 50 years old. He is an independently wealthy Irishman. He's a customs officer and a money lender. And this is key. I mean, I was looking at some of the research for this. I was like, what are they talking about this man always having money on him? Why do they know he has money on him all the time? It's because he is a customs officer. He also collects rents and because he's a money lender. So he's going around with a lot of cash on him kind of at all times. He also has

valuable railway shares, but they're not necessarily on him. See, that's so interesting, though, because, I mean, the railway at this point is presumably very, very new. It's in its earliest stages. So he's a sort of a man who is tapped into modern 19th century ways of making money, right? He's presumably on the rise and is, obviously, as you say, wealthy as well. So how do their paths cross, or do they cross at this point? They do cross, and there are differing, you know, you're talking about sources and how reliable sources are, We have to remember that we are reading sources from the 19th century here that's all about crime. This is how we know about these people.

There are varying views. One is that they met in the 1840s. We're probably guessing around the mid-1840s when she was in domestic service. That's one of the things. I have read another account that says she met at customs when she was with the daughter of the Duchess of Sutherland, that they were going somewhere and that's how she met him, Patrick O'Connor. I mean, I can't imagine that being like a long interaction. Yeah, I know, like, it's like, well, now we're having an affair.

But somehow, their paths cross, and they form a romantic relationship. And, you know, bear in mind that as you're kind of hinting there, this is a wealthy man, a wealthy self-made Irishman. And that is something that comes into play. Like, often you'll read accounts of him going, oh, he's brutal and actually he's quite boastful. And you know what, he's always drunk. And I was like, there's a lot of Irish stereotypes going on there. Eventually, he's also just a successful businessman who happens to have done quite well for himself.

There is also that going on. There's definitely a feeling of like he doesn't deserve the wealth that he's got, the position that he's got for himself. I also want to just point out that I think the age gap between them is interesting. So Marie is 28 when she comes to England. Yeah. And he is already in his 50s. And I wonder actually, I mean, you mentioned there that they meet potentially when she's in

domestic service. And I just wonder if she's a servant in his household. when they start a relationship and what that power dynamic might look like. It's just an interesting possibility. I don't think so, though, because I think the only domestic service position that she had in England was for the daughter

of the Duchess of Sutherland. She came to do that job. That's why she was there. So in England now, not in Switzerland, not prior in continental Europe, but in England, that's her domestic service record, is just that one. So she won't have been in his household as a servant,

but somehow she still meets him in that. It's really not quite clear. It's a mystery, isn't it? Okay, so we have them having some kind of relationship. We don't know how they meet. Their paths cross. He's wealthy. He's older.

She is in this happy, comfortable position until she's not, for whatever reason, and is out of work and living in a slum. Yeah, and we don't know, and that to me is just really suspicious. There's a story there that we don't have the archival evidence for, but there's something going on there. Yeah, and also because, you know,

Being a ladies' maid is a privileged position. It's a position of intimacy with the woman who employs you. It's a position of trust. It's a position that you could hope to hold for many, many years, potentially a job for life, depending, I suppose, on the age of the woman who you're looking after. Something has gone drastically wrong there, I think. But tell me this, she's now in Burman Z.

She's having some kind of relationship, maybe on and off. We don't really know. They're certainly not living together. That's the impression I get. But we know from your opening there that she is eventually. married to someone else. So who is this person and how do they meet? So we're not sure how they meet, but it's Frederick George Manning. He is 37 at the time when they get married. We think that they met around the 1846 mark, just based on the sequence of events. Now, why does she marry him,

who is working class, doesn't have the financial prospects of Patrick O'Connor? It's a question we don't necessarily know the answer to, but some sources will tell you that it's because Patrick O'Connor would not marry Marie de Roe. So he was not willing to take her as an official wife. So that's interesting as well. So there's something going on here where Marie might be attractive for sexual purposes or whatever, but for some reason for Patrick, she's not fitting the criteria of wife. Couple that with the idea that she's been dismissed from the Duchess of Sutherland's daughter's house.

Something's going on here. We don't have the archival evidence. It would all just be speculation, but it is interesting. nonetheless. It is interesting, especially because Patrick O'Connor himself being in his 50s and a respectable man who's got all these investments and, you know, a steady job and a reasonable amount of money to his name for the time and his position in society, surely he would, to paraphrase Jane Austen, be in want of a wife. Yeah, not Marie though. So yeah, yeah, that's exactly the point, right? It's like, hmm, okay, there's something there. Yeah, so, okay, tell me this,

because I think this is one of the most interesting things in this case. And it's something that we see again and again. I'm trying to think back to the case that we did, I think in the 1920s with a sort of thruple situation where one of them was murdered by the married pair, but they were all kind of living together. And we have photos of them in the garden and stuff. I'm thinking here that there are some blurred lines

in terms of the relationships that are going on because you already have this kind of strange relationship with O'Connor where Marie is not his wife. She's not living with him, but there is some kind of maybe sexual relationships still ongoing. And then she's marrying Frederick Manning. But the relationship with O'Connor doesn't necessarily end, does it? No, I mean, I have to really admit that as a historian, details in this case don't make sense to me. It's what's in the primary source material, but they don't really make sense to me.

And here's why. Because we know that Frederick and Marie are married, and there are. living in a house in Berman Z. They're renting that house, but they also have rented out rooms to lodgers. Bear in mind this idea of relatively comfortable people renting out rooms. It's a sign of comfortability. And I think if you want to say that Marie is trying to propagate that image, then that having lodgers, I mean, obviously there's going to be a financial need. It just covers some of the need that they have financially. But there's also something about respectability there. I'm a landlady, that kind of a thing.

So they're living in Burmansie, in Terbil area, but they have lodgers. They are also involved somehow with Patrick still. So Patrick is very much still on the scene. We don't know what Patrick knew as to what his dynamic was, but we also don't necessarily know what Frederick and Marie knew about the dynamic. So sometimes I wonder, even it seems like such a basic point and fact in all the reporting on this case. Sometimes I even wonder

if Patrick and Marie were involved romantically. I was just going to say exactly the same thing, right? This does kind of smack of the misogynistic press at the time in the 19th century and the kind of sensationalism, right?

We so often find this and true crime of these marital boundaries being blurred and sort of sexual ideals of the time, sexual morals of the time being blurred, and people become obsessed with it. It's not necessarily, in some ways, I think it takes over the gruesomeness of the crimes themselves.

that people are like, oh, you know, you can peer through the keyhole of someone else's life. You don't know if your next door neighbour is sleeping with your postman, three doors down. It's just, it's that that interests people so much. I think there's insight into ordinary lives and actually how not standard they are and how people are just sort of getting on with all these complicated things in the shadows until a light has shone on them. And I think that's what we have here to a certain extent. But I do wonder if, I suppose there has to be some connection between the three people.

There has to be something. But is there necessarily a sexual relationship? Here's a potential connection that I find a little bit more compelling. You know, again, I will caveat this. All the sources tell us that she was involved with Patrick. So this is there to be said. So I'm going against the evidence. But just I'm also aware of, you know, we need to question the sources

and we need to question what the motivation of those sources are. Anyway, so Frederick, the husband in this, used to work on the railways. So he has a connection to railway work. and obviously Patrick has a link to railway with his investments. So I don't know, I can't say for certain, but it's something that was, it just strikes me there's something a little bit off about this, the idea of this thruple thing. And here's the thing, it's a trope more than anything else in some of these murders, as you're saying, like this idea that there are two men fighting jostling over a woman and

she's in the middle and maybe she's manipulating both of them because she's so wanted. Yeah, she's pulling the strings. Yeah, exactly. Whereas, you know, realistically what we have is that we know O'Connor is wealthy. We know he has an awful lot of money on him at all times because of the nature of his job and they see an opportunity there. That's what we definitely know, right? So whatever about the relationship dynamics, that's a different question, I think.

I agree. I agree completely. So take me to some of the more concrete information that we do have, which is the night of the killing itself. Walk me through what actually happens and how we know about it. Okay. So August 9th, 1849, this is the night of the murder. We have a lot of newspaper reports that come out after the fact. We have the trial record and we have a testimony of a lodger that was in the house, not the night of the murder, but that was in the house in and around that kind of time. Afterwards, we have the Times and the illustrated London news saying that Marie had asked O'Connor to come to their house. And this was one of the other things that went, what, that doesn't make any sense to me. And to bring his valuables, to dinner. And there's an explanation potentially that this is under the guise of investing them for him or entrusting her with them for its safekeeping. That does not add up to me. It doesn't make any sense. The only thing that makes sense is they know he's collecting rents, they know he's

collecting debts. That means he will finish his workday with a load of money in his pockets. Let's look at it practically. Like, why would they be handing over money to Marie and Frederick? No, he's smarter than that. It doesn't. Anyway, it's a small detail, but it just, It's annoying, I think. But I think that's huge. Yeah, when I was reading the notes this episode, I was like, what? That doesn't make any sense. Because if you're a wealthy person, you're carrying a lot of cash, why would you then be like,

oh, at the end of my day, carrying all this money, I'm going to go to the poorest slum in London to some dodgy, you know, rented rooms run by these people who I have some kind of vague connection. I mean, I'm wondering, actually, there is some kind of corrupt connection between the two men, right? You mentioned that they have the railways in common. Why would O'Connor be going to the Manning's house at all unless they were doing some kind of business? Because, I mean, he's not going to be like, I'm going to deposit all my worldly goods. No. That's not happening.

Dodgy house. That's just not happening. Where there's loads of lodgers, no. That's just not happening. Also, like, they don't have a concrete enough connection because what if they stole that money? He can't go to court and be like, well, I was sleeping with this married woman and then she stole all my money. people aren't going to care or help him. You know, it's just, oh, there's so many an answer questions.

This is fascinating. There's so much that we won't know. No, see, this is the thing, and that's why I'm finding it frustrating. It's because we will not know the answer to these questions. That's the problem. But you know, you said at the start of this, like, what do we know? So we know that when he went inside very quickly, so he did go to Minerva Place to their house, and we know that once he did go in there, he was very quickly, probably immediately,

shot in the back of the head by Marie specifically and then did not die and was bludgeoned maybe up to 17 times by Frederick with a crowbar so quite a bloody and violent intervention from Frederick but Marie was the one who shot the gun oh Marie I mean if you shoot someone in the head at close quarters

just try and get it right how is he not dead that's grim and brutal and very sad I wonder in that moment Frederick bludgeoning him, if that's something they planned. Obviously, we'll hear what they do next to the body. That's definitely premeditated and very much planned. But I wonder if there's panic in that moment when Frederick is like, oh, right, okay, quick, let's just bash his head in, essentially. You know, it's definitely planned without a shadow of a doubt because the gun is secreted behind the door, the crowbar is left just up against the wall, but 17 times

sounds like a bit of chaos, you know what I mean, that they've panicked, or Frederick's panicked or whatever in that moment and just gone a little bit feral in the scene, which, you know, you've just killed someone, so. Yeah, I know, I also think, this is a minor point really, but I do think it's interesting, the site of the murder itself. We've talked about this a little bit with Hallie Reubenhold, and we did a story of a murder, her new book, we did an interview with her about the Cripping case. And about 19th century, and in that case, early 20th century, quote unquote respectable homes,

whatever they are. And in this case, you know, very much in working class homes. in a slum, but still, but to be murdered in the kitchen, which is, I suppose, you know, a space of domesticity, traditionally female, coded in this moment, there's, it sort of goes against what are going to become, or already, and what are increasingly 19th century ideals of the home of womanhood, of what it means to be a wife and how you run your household. And Marie's not exactly living up to the ideal housewife by shooting someone in the head in her kitchen. Despite the fact that the papers claim that that's what she was kind of aiming for.

I mean, one of the most gruesome things to me is we're talking about this domestic setting. And it's really key to this because after he's being killed, his body is then stripped and buried under the kitchen flagstones. So where is one of the most busy rooms in Annie House, the kitchen? They are going to have to pass back and forth over the grave of their murder victim every single day for the rest of their lives that they live in that house. And they had pre-dug this grave for him. So when he arrived, he arrived into that kitchen, seeing his own grave, having been dug for him, they'd filled it with Quick Lime.

So this is definitely, you know, you've said it already, a premeditated attack. And we know from the trial later on that the shopkeeper confirms the fact that this has been purchased, that the Quick Lime has been purchased. So we're talking about some of those details we're seeing in more and more of these 19th century cases

where there is somewhat quasi-detective work going on where they're putting these details together in a sequence. Yeah, no, that's interesting. I mean, it's interesting about You say that that is one of the busiest and most traversed rooms of the household, and I think that's absolutely true. I'm thinking about, of course, I assume that this house no longer exists, so we won't really know much about its architecture.

But I'm assuming in a poor part of London that this may have had rough wooden boards in the rest of the rooms, and that the kitchen might have been the only thing with a stone flag floor. So it might have been the only suitable place, or maybe it's brick. Do we know what the flooring is? Yeah. It is flagstones. Okay. So, you know, that's interesting. And also thinking about the lodgers, who, by the way, must have been out this night. They were. They were. Okay. So I suppose they are going to spend time maybe in a front room, a parlor, if that exists in this house, and also their own rooms that they're renting. They're not necessarily going to go into the kitchen. Because Marie would be responsible for going in there and cooking any meals that they took in that household. Yeah, we shouldn't think of it as a modern house share in that everybody would be in the fridge with their things labeled. No, that's not the situation.

So Marie is very much going to be, expected to be in control of this space, yeah. Okay, so they've killed him in this horrible way. It was pre-planned, but it's become chaotic. They've stripped his body of the clothes that he's wearing, and presumably, the cash, etc., in his pockets. Yes, but they were a little, and this is kind of interesting as well, they were disappointed to find how little he had on him. So they had an expectation of what they would find,

and it didn't really match up to what they thought. But key to this is that they also took the key to his house. house. And then Marie, so this does suggest that, well, actually, the newspapers say Marie, we don't know. One of the two of them went to his lodgings and then stole more valuables from his lodgings, including his railway shares, by the way. But there was no sign of the big windfall of cash money that they thought they were going to get having done there. So it was a disappointing kill in the end. It wasn't quite worth that. And it also says to me, you know, there's another question mark, if Marie had spent time as a lover in his house and was properly monitoring what

was going on there, potentially she would have been, they would have been a little bit more successful in what they were able to garner from this or would have known exactly how much money. And it also speaks to the fact that Patrick's no fool that actually his money is sequestered away somewhere where it's supposed to be in a bank probably and it's taken care of for reasons exactly like this. Yeah. No, it's interesting that the media reports that it's Marie that goes to the house because I think that can tell us one of two things. Either, you know, she's worked as a domestic servant before. So is she simply able to pass herself off as a servant? Because presumably O'Connor, he has money. He has a respectable position. Presumably he has

at least one servant in his household, right? He must have a cook, a housekeeper. At least a come and go one. Yeah, someone's going to be there. Maybe a child woman coming in. There will be someone. I would bet, given his status and the wealth that he does have, that it's a living servant, at least one. So, Marie either goes to the house under the guise of being another servant and is admitted. I know she has a key, but like, if there's a living servant, they're there all day, every day. So what does that interaction look like? And does that tell us that actually she is a regular in that household?

Yes. That her presence isn't questioned. Yeah, that's one of the things that would act in potential favour. If it is her, that goes. But if it's not, why are they admitting Frederick as well, just to. rummage around the house. The fact that anybody has the opportunity to even take that much time to rummage, because yeah, as you say, it's most likely he has a living servant, but where's that servant during any of this time? Surely they would then be later able to testify, which

we know they don't. There is no domestic servant of O'Connor's that testifies during the trial. So, yeah, that's an interesting missing piece of the puzzle, but yet another, because it's missing, it means invention comes into it, right? Yeah, exactly. Because I just, I don't buy that he doesn't have a servant. He's a single man living alone. He's not cooking his own meals. Yeah, yeah. I agree with you. Even so, someone's doing the dusting. Someone's lighting the fires. Like, he's not doing that stuff. So that is another question mark in this case that really interests me. So we have them going to the house. There's not much that they can take. They are disappointed. They don't find the treasures. They were thinking of finding. And then in the

meantime, they have a dead body mouldering away under the kitchen floor. Sure. People are going to start to smell that soon. That is one of the grimmest things for me of this. And there's plenty of grim stuff. But, like, just, I can't imagine passing over those flagstones every day. It would take your appetite away, wouldn't it? I just couldn't. But that's why I'm not a murderer, I suppose.

So good on me. That's the only reason you're not a murder. I'm like, oh, my God, the guilt. Yes, you're absolutely right. The lodger or lodgers, again, another question mark, We don't know exactly how many lodgers. There may only be one, but there may be more than one. Sources vary.

The press is not reliable during their telling of this case. So a lodger or lodgers become suspicious of the strange smells, but they are told, oh, it's cleaning. You don't need to worry about that. That's fine. We've just been cleaning certain things. You know, it gets dismissed, basically, because of certain substances that they're using during the cleaning. But one of the things that happens is that it's really well documented, that now that O'Connor is

missing, people that work with him are going, where's Patrick O'Connor? What's he doing here? And it was really well known on the 9th, the night that he went to their house, that he was going to their house. So again, it cements the relationship between them somehow that it was not unusual for him to tell his work colleagues, oh, I'm going to the Manning's house for dinner this evening. But also, if he was having an affair with Marie, why would he publicise that? Yeah. I responded with my face there and realised we're doing a podcast. And I was like, no, you're going to have to say something, Anthony. We will be doing the rest of this in silence.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So his co-workers all knew. And there is a report that one of his co-workers, another Irishman, Pierce Walsh, potentially even went to the Mannings and said, here, have you seen Patrick? He said he was coming here. And the story goes in this telling that Marie said to him, yeah, he was supposed to come, but he never arrived.

So they are already know that they're under, potentially. under suspicion. So both of them go, they're like, do you know what? I'm not sticking around here. This is only going to be a problem. This is chaos. For a couple who have clearly planned this and have thought through the mode of the murder, how exactly are they going to kill this person, and then what they're going to do with the body, up to the detail of getting the quick line, right? Even if there's been chaos in the moment of the killing itself, like this is a premeditated planned thing that's been thought about calmly beforehand. And I suppose they haven't got the money, from O'Connor that they wanted.

But to then just leave your life. I mean, I suppose it's not like they're living a particularly extravagant life. They can walk away from a lodging house in Bermondsey and start somewhere else. But this just seems like such a strange and chaotic decision to have done this in the first place. This just seems utterly bizarre to me.

And you can sort of imagine the second Irishman that you mentioned coming to the door and asking about Patrick O'Connor and Frederick, you know, maybe sort of reaching for the crowbar while they're having the conversation thinking, shit, am I going to have to club a you to death as well? So it just feels like things are falling apart now. But tell me this, when they go on the run, where are they going to go, first of all? And are they going together or separately? Because given everything that we know about everything that we've been hinting at about their relationship and the question

marks around how solid that marriage is, how it works, what the boundaries are of it, I'm not convinced that they're a great team. Your lack of trust in them is well-placed. They go separately. They flee separately. And it's just as well they do because Patrick O'Connor is officially reported missing by his friend John Holmes.

And this then means that the police become involved in looking into his disappearance. Obviously, they're not necessarily looking into the murder just yet, but they know something suspicious is going on here. Side note, the someone with a surname Holmes in a 19th century murder case. Hello, Sherlock. So they're now officially reported missing.

The police have been informed. They go to the lodging house. The mannings are not there, but the lodgers say, actually, do you know what? There's been this weird smell in the house, and they were being a bit weird, and now they're suddenly gone. So something's not actually adding up here.

So if you're a police officer, you go, I need to look into this a little bit more closely. And so they do two police officers go in, and they have a knife on them, and they notice that the flagstones are looking a little uneven in a certain place. See, that's sloppy. Put them back properly. If you're going to bury a body, do it properly. If you're going to do it, they have kind of penknife things on them, and one of them bends down and sticks the knife in between the flagstones, and they don't, they shouldn't give. There should be no give there, but it does. The knife sinks into the ground. And then they notice that there are damp patches on the corner of some of those flagstones, which would indicate that it's been removed recently and some damp has gotten either in underneath or has come up from underneath. So they're like, right, well, these flagstones need to come up. And on the 17th of August, they lead a search in the house where the flagstones come up and they discover O'Connor's decomposing body under the kitchen flagstones. And the body has started to composed, but the reason they eventually find out that it is O'Connor is because they go to

his dentist, and we've seen this before, and his dentist is able to confirm through his teeth that it is him, and through his dentures, actually, that it is him. So it's, again, this burgeoning idea of forensic science is coming into this case as well. Yeah, and really quite early in the 19-1840s. Yeah, yeah, really interesting. Okay, so the police now have a body that's pretty clear who the murderers are because they've legged it and the body was discovered under the floor of their kitchen. But how are they going to trace them? Because this is the 1840s. There's no CCTV. There's no phone signal pinging off satellites. What are they going to do? How does this work? So they know there has been a fleeing. They know the two are got the mannings are gone. So what they start by doing is approaching local cab drivers in and around the area who might have taken them somewhere. And eventually they happen upon the person who took Marie to London Bridge Station, where they then discover she left her luggage under the name Mrs. Smith and then went on to Houston Station and bought herself a first class ticket to Edinburgh.

So she is trying to cover her tracks here. I think when we try to look at the mastermind behind this, I don't think it's Frederick. I think it is Marie who is going, yeah, you take me to London Bridge and then you're going to. I'm going to go over to Houston. That's where I'm going to go from, even though the luggage is at London Bridge. And in that luggage, by the way, when they search it because they still have it there, it contains 11 petticoats, not unusual. 20 stockings, not unusual. And the bloodstained clothes of Patrick O'Connor. Right. Okay, I have lots of things to say that. First of all, obviously, for listeners, when we say the police were talking to cab drivers, we're talking like the Hackney carriage drivers with a horse, not the London black cabs that we have today. I think you can tell that she, has a little bit more brawn about her than Frederick just by the murder weapons that they choose, right? That she has a pistol, and obviously she shoots him in the head

even though it doesn't work. And then Frederick's more of a blunt instrument that he's like, oh, just clobbering with a crowbar. And here again, yeah, you see her attempting to kind of cover her tracks. She's using a fake name. The luggage is weird. One, why is it left behind?

I suppose she's trying to get rid of the bloodstained clothes, but why is she also getting rid of 11 petticoats and 20 stockings? Because she's not rich. 11 petticoats. I mean, first of all, would anyone of her social class have owned 11 petticoats? That seems like a lot. You have just actually tied two parts of this case together in my mind. They belong to the daughter of the Duchess of Sutherland. I have no proof of that, but I bet you that's why she was kicked out. No proof. I'm risking my entire reputation. And that would be evidence of the crime. So she's getting rid of it with the evidence of the crime. Oh my God. It has to be that. It has to be that.

We have solved a crime that we didn't even know existed. It was bound to happen. We are now a detective agency, right in with your historical requests. We will be solving unsolved cold cases. Oh, my God. As you were talking there, I was like, oh, my God, she's stolen these as well. Who did she steal the pedicodes from? Why would she not take them with her?

She has to get rid of crime stuff. Crime stuff. To use technical jargon. So, yeah, so this is, you know, it's really, really obvious at this point that they know who they're looking for. And so they know that they need to go to Edinburgh because that's where they know Marie has gone now. Okay, so we know that Marie's gone to Edinburgh. Yeah. And in a minute, tell me where Frederick's gone.

But is Frederick happy with this situation? No. She's betrayed him, yeah. Okay, she's, right. Okay, so she's thoroughly betrayed him. And presumably she's taken what little money they got off. Yes, he gets money. He has none.

According to newspaper reports, and we don't believe. them in all aspects. So we have to be careful about believing them in this aspect, too. But according to newspaper reports, no, he has nothing. He just flees. She flees with everything. Answer me this. If you had just been implicated in a crime and you were in central London, what station would you go to and what city in Britain would you run to? Oh, God. Or would you try and get on a plane? I'd just try and go to Ireland, wouldn't I? I'd just be like, that's so predictable. No, I was here. Yeah, well, see, that'd be, I'd be such a shit criminal. I really would. Touching down in Dublin, like, wait, the police are just waiting if you're like, mate.

What's the first place you might go home? Yeah. That just goes to show how bad. I couldn't. I couldn't. I just couldn't. Well, thankfully I couldn't. Like, this is giving me anxiety to even talk about it.

This, I think I need to turn my fan on. I'm getting quite warm. You'd just hand yourself in immediately. You'd be like, I can't be doomed this too much tension. No, no, no. This is, I don't have room in my thing for this. No, thanks. But by now, the press are already portraying her.

So this is breaking to the press already. Frederick, by the way, you asked where is he? He's in Jersey. Okay. Maybe that's a better place to go. I would go to an island, not Ireland, but an island, somewhere off the coast of Britain. Maybe not the Channel Islands, right? But like, I'd go to like a Scottish island.

I'd go as far away as possible, yeah, and unexpected. So this is where they have kind of split up, because I will say I don't know how they know he's in Jersey, but they do. They obviously track him in the same way. But the newspapers are more concerned with letting us know how they crack the Marie side of the case rather than the Frederick side of the case, which is understandable in terms of the sensationalism that we're experiencing here. Either way, he is captured in Jersey in October 1848. He was trying to get to Australia, so he was really going for it. Because if he'd gotten there, that would have been it. He would never have been returned.

And Marie is recognized in Edinburgh, so she's actually turned in. She was recognized by a pawnbroker who she's trying to sell some of O'Connor's possessions and the police come and arrest her. So it's all very straightforward. Once it starts unraveling, it's very straightforward. It's very like, come on, lads. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they are.

Now, that speaks to the. widespread power and reach of visual and print media in this moment. This is 1848 at this point. Even in the 18th century, I'm always amazed. I'm looking at a crime at the moment for my next book. And I've been kind of so impressed by it when this person goes to trial. The trial is reported almost the next day across the country. And that blows my mind that even in that period, there's such quick circulation. And but this feels, feels early to me, 1848, that an image of Frederick and Marie, and question mark over what that image is based on, is that just people's descriptions? I mean, they're not, they're not going

to have photographs. Well, definitely not photographs. No, but they're not going to have an artwork made of them. There won't be like a portrait hanging on their wall or anything. So I'm kind of a little bit confused by that, but the fact that that has been circulated to Edinburgh and that she is recognised from that, so it's a good enough quality image that she's recognized. That is amazing. I wonder if it is, and we don't know, actually, let me just caveat this, but I wonder if it is that, or if it's the fact that they're, whatever has appeared in the newspapers before they're caught is they may have these possessions that they're trying to rid themselves of. And so when we come into a poem broker, it's like, oh, well, hold on, I read something about a watch and I read something

about this. I don't know what the items were, but, you know, you can imagine that they might be that. Right. So what we do get then is they're brought back to London and we have a trial at the old Bailey, of course, that runs from the 25th to the 26th of October 1848. I'll make it short, but you can read the trial transcript, which I did yesterday online. It's just there. It's free. It is a little bit boring at times because it's so dense. And you might be surprised at how quickly it goes by because it's not very like our trials today. All the details are in there that we've discussed in this. episode, and they are both found guilty, and they are both sentenced to death. So we've seen in other cases, haven't we, in the 19th century, particularly in the later 19th century, where the man will be sentenced to death, but the woman won't be. But in this case, they're both sentenced to death. Yes, and that is pretty unusual. And I think speaks to the perception, whether that's kind of media created or, you know, it's just kind of seeped into the public imagination and obviously the imagination of the court as well, that Marie is monstrous in some way

that she's kind of, I suppose she's transgressed feminine ideals for the time, also class ideals to a certain extent. You know, she's betrayed, possibly betrayed the daughter of a duchess and transgressed in her position. We're just deciding she had. You know, but if that is the case, if she's left under any kind of suspicion that she's transgressed those boundaries between a lady's maid and a lady, and that's incredibly problematic. And also she's transgressed the boundaries of marriage and has had a relationship. with someone who is of a slightly higher social class than her in terms of Patrick O'Connor, even though he's an Irish immigrant. His money alone stands him apart from the kind of life that Marie and Frederick are living. And she's an immigrant too. So they're kind of on, you know what I mean?

So she had requested that the jury in her case was made up of foreigners of immigrants because it wasn't thought that British people could give immigrants foreigners a fair trial. They had to have other immigrants on the jury. But because she was married to a British citizen, they didn't grant her that. So she was tried by a jury of British men. And then we can come to the hanging, which is the 13th of November 1849, horsemongers lane jail. And we have the notorious William Calcraft. Actually, we should do an episode on him because he's the executioner on the day. And apparently, Marie turns to him and says, again, we can never fully know. There's so much invention in this trial. But apparently she turned to him and said, do murderers go to heaven?

Babe, I think you know the answer to that. Yeah. Well, actually, if she's Catholic, which there's a good chance that she is, then it's a case of going, well, yeah, all you have to do is be genuinely sorry. They're publicly hanged together at the jail, as I said, in Southark. And there is a death mask made of Marie specifically, shortly after she'd been cut down. And we know that this then goes on to be used as a kind of a phonological thing and, you know, the head shapes and all that kind of thing.

And a huge crowd, obviously, as you can imagine, 30 to 50,000 people are thought to have attended. So this was a real spectacle. And Marie, it was thought, even influences fashion because it was said that Marie wore black satin on the day of the execution. And that because of this, because of the association of black satin with her, that's why black satin went out of fashion. Whether or not that's true, we, you know, it's questionable. But it said that she did. Where was she getting a black satin dress from? She probably stole it from your one. Well, maybe, yeah. It's got to be the answer to everything from now on. I don't buy that. I don't think she was wearing black satin. But it's a little bit convenient.

It's interesting that they're hanged together on an intimate human level, because obviously Marie has betrayed Frederick, if not in terms of having the relationship with O'Connor, certainly in terms of ditching him and going to Edinburgh by herself with the little money that they did manage to get off of Conner. So there's that and they kind of, I guess, brought face to face in this last moment and have to kind of reconcile or at least be faced with each other. But also a husband and wife being executed together, I think I'm right in saying that that hadn't happened since about 1700. It's an unusual spectacle and you can see why it draw such a crowd to kind of, even with this historical hindsight, you know, there's still so

many question marks over their relationship and the nature of it and who was in charge of what happened and who plotted it and who went along with it. And I think people at the time would certainly have felt that, particularly given the depiction of Marie in the press as this manipulative woman. You can see why people would want to go and kind of analyze them as a pair. Well, you're absolutely right because we have data to say that they were really interested in this because broadsides that focused on Marie specifically sold about 2.5 million copies at this time. That's wild. Without a shadow of a doubt, they are eating this up at the time.

She gets into Madam Two Sods. She's there until the 1970s. And, you know, as I said, the death mask is studied for all kinds of criminal intent there. Now, I will say this. This is an interesting case in terms of public executions because it marks the beginning of the end in many ways. But I want to just kind of outline some of the moral outrage and then just talk very briefly by that as a way to kind of round out this episode. Dickens attends the execution in 1849, November 1849. And of course he has a lot to say.

So he says, I believe that a sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning, could be imagined by no man. I do not believe that any community can prosper where such a scene of horror and demoralization as was enacted this morning outside horsemonger lane jail. Now, reformers are arguing against stopping public executions. They're thinking it's kind of not very polite and it doesn't fit into Victorian moral society.

Nonetheless, despite the fact that Dickens is writing this, I will point out he's going to an awful lot of public executions for somebody who is so against them. He likes to be outraged, I think. and he's complaining an over a lot and yes he's campaigning so you know you can't take that away but we know he is at a lot of public executions

because he writes about them and it's just like all right Charles we get it like stop going to them then just keep writing about them if you want to but you don't have to keep going to every one of them yeah yeah that was interesting I thought yeah very very interesting and this kind of marks a real shift doesn't it and I think

so often we come across these cases particularly murder cases where there's some kind of intimate domestic drama that's played out it's gone horribly wrong maybe there's a couple involved, there's this question of sort of sexual scandal around them. And often they're the same. They go to trial.

The trial is sensational. They're executed. There's a huge crowd. But I think with this case, it really does push the public conversation around public hanging forward. And actually, we're not that far off the Capital Punishment Amendment Act,

are we, which I think happens a couple of decades later, where executions of criminals are made private and carried out behind the prison walls so that only officials can work. witness them. It seems to me, from everything you said, that this is one of those cases that does contribute towards that. Yeah, absolutely. And it's nearly a 20-year gap. So yes, it's definitely contributing to the conversation. So it does take a little bit of time. I hadn't really heard of it, whereas you hear of an awful lot of other 19th century crimes of this type. But I think one of

the reasons why it maybe hasn't endured in the public imagination in the same way as some of the other crimes is that there are so many questions, so many narrative plot holes, so many issues around some of the details. Yes, we know the murder happened. We have those details and they are, you know, they're vital and they're interesting and they tell us an awful lot about crime, about the recording of crime, about gender expectations, all of those things. But there is so much more to this case that I wish we could find out, but that we will never ever know. But that in itself means that this is just as captivating some of the better known stories. And with that, Maddie Pelling, say goodbye to the people.

Goodbye to the people. Thank you.