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6 unusual facts about Murder of Julia Martha Thomas


Murder of Julia Martha Thomas

After the murder, Webster posed as Thomas for two weeks, but was exposed and fled back to Ireland and her uncle's home at Killanne near Enniscorthy, County Wexford.

Elliott O'Donnell, writing in his introduction to the trial transcript, described Webster as "not merely savage, savage and shocking... but the grimmest of grim personalities, a character so uniquely sinister and barbaric as to be hardly human".

The head constable of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in Wexford realised that the woman being sought by Scotland Yard was the same person whom his force had arrested 14 years previously for larceny.

H. Such, a printer and publisher in Southwark, issued a ballad entitled "Murder and Mutilation of an Old Lady near Barnes" shortly after Kate Webster had been arrested, set to the tune of "Just Before the Battle, Mother", a popular song of the American Civil War.

A few days before Webster was due to be executed an appeal was submitted on her behalf to the Home Secretary, R. A. Cross.

William Marwood

Kate Webster, an Irish servant woman who murdered her employer; hanged at Wandsworth Prison, London, on 29 July 1879.



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