Isabella Mueller (crime writer)
One of the most spectacular crimes of the Victorian era was the murder of 55-year-old widow Julia Martha Thomas, whose skull was not found until 132 years later. On March 22, 1879, after returning from church, she was killed and brutally dismembered by her own maid, Kate Webster. But why? Kate Webster was from Ireland. She was a robust, fun-loving woman who enjoyed having a few too many drinks with her friends at the pub “The Hole in the Wall.” For two months, she had been working for the wealthy widow Thomas on Park Road in Richmond, who wanted to fire her because of Kate’s casual manner. When Kate found out, she lost her temper. Without a moment’s hesitation, Kate pushed her employer down the stairs. Since Thomas wasn’t dead yet, Kate strangled her with her bare hands before bashing Thomas’s skull off her body. Amid a cloud of blood, Kate dismembered the rest of the body with a knife, a meat saw, and a carving knife. She then boiled Thomas’s body parts in a wash kettle and dumped the remaining remains into the Thames. She poured the fat that had leaked out during cooking into containers and gave them to the neighborhood children, telling them it was the finest lard. Kate packed the skull into a black linen bag. With it, she set off to join her drinking buddies, who were already waiting for her at the pub. On her way home, Kate made a detour over Hammersmith Bridge; afterward, she no longer had the linen bag with her. After murdering her employer, she stole her valuables and fled with her son to her native Ireland. Shortly thereafter, Kate was arrested; during interrogation, she immediately confessed to the murder of Julia Martha Thomas, for which she was hanged on July 29, 1879, at Wadsworth Gaol. Julia Martha Thomas’s skull was not discovered until October 2010, when it was found by chance by workers conducting excavations in the garden of London-based nature filmmaker David Attenborough. After months of investigation, forensic pathologists were able to identify it in July 2011 as the skull of Julia Martha Thomas, which Kate Webster had buried there.
