It’s not unknown that the Victorian era was a lot more brutal than our current one.

Sweeney Todd is just a fictional character who murders the customers in his barbers shop and sells their flesh as animal meat. The sisters were convicted and executed in 1884. In Victorian Convicts: 100 Criminal Lives, a collection of one hundred individual cases are presented.These are cases which highlight the difficult living conditions and hard times surrounding those living through this period.

She swiped the weapon at Mrs. Thomas’ head, pushed her down the stairs, and then strangled her, just to certain. • Abdullah Shah: killed at least twenty travelers on the road from Kabul to Jalalabad serving under Zardad Khan; also killed his wife; executed on 20 April 2004.


The last executions in this country were in 1964.

The records, launched online by family history website ancestry-co.uk, document trials and sentences for crimes ranging from the use of bad language and scrumping (stealing fruit from orchards) to mass murder. Capital crime: The 1812 murder of the Prime Minister Spencer Perceval. But the family was eventually exposed as serial killers.

He just must be.

He was caught after his last round of killings, when he claimed the lives of his final four victims. A fragile peace was established. The pair were forced to marry by her wealthy father, but Cream abandoned his new bride the day after the wedding and hopped aboard a ship bound for England. One day Mary Eleanor Wheeler Pearcey moved in with her lover Frank Hogg, but the two of them kept an unorthodox relationship: Both kept on seeing other lovers, too. He is thought to have killed dozens of his own patients by use of poison until he was eventually put on trial. All these factors contributed to an extremely harsh society for those without power or high status. Born Catherine Lawler in 1849 to a poor but respectable family in Killanne, County Wexford, Ireland, Kate’s greedy side was first exposed when she was caught stealing at the age of 15. But most historians agree that there really was a barber who murdered his customers while giving them a close shave. Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England by Lucia Zedner (Clarendon Press, 1991) Places to visit The London Dungeons - 28-34 Tooley Street, London, Tel: 020 7403 0606.

An oil painting of St Thomas’ Hospital in Southwark, London. Assuming she was all clear, Webster stole her landlady’s identity and started selling off her personal belongings.

The former Union Workhouse (poorhouse) in Weymouth, Dorset is today converted into apartments.

Cream performed an abortion — an operation that poor Flora almost did not survive. He was also accused of several other murders but no more were ever proven. Like many Victorian serial killers, he didn’t receive any serious criminal penalties as there was little evidence connecting him to his victims deaths. After which the house fell morbidly silent.

4 Disturbing Victorian Murderers You Might Not Have Heard Of.

Kate Webster, the killer of Julia Martha Thomas. A few months later, the woman faced the same end as her own father, who had also been executed for murder.

The collection documents 900,000 sentences of imprisonment, 97,000 transportations and 10,300 executions, including a boy of 14. They are thought to have killed at least 4 people by use of arsenic solely for their personal financial gain. Various tales can be found of 19th century medical practitioners who turned out to be killers rather than healers. He was, however, serving time for murder when most of Jack the Ripper’s crimes took place.

Interestingly, Palmer had taken out a life insurance policy just a few weeks before his wife’s death. Back in 1857, the life of 90-year-old Priscilla Guppy was coming to an end. Charles Dickens once called this man “the greatest villain that ever stood in the Old Bailey”.

Guppy’s grisly misdemeanor took place while she was working in a brothel, some 65 years previously, in 1792. On the list of his suspected victims are a family friend who visited Palmer’s home and was probably poisoned shortly after; four of his own children who all died in their early infancy; and Ann Thornton herself, who was found dead at the age of only 27.