Today’s Scattered Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
On February 2, 1837, a workman found a pair of legs hidden in an osier field in London’s Brixton. This completed the body whose first part, the headless torso, was found at the Pineapple Toll-Gate building development in Edgware Road the previous December. The head emerged in January, blocking a backgate on the canal in Stepney.
The woman was identified as laundress Hannah Brown, who had been expected to marry James Greenacre on Christmas Day. On Christmas Eve, however, Greenacre informed her friends that the wedding was cancelled, as neither he nor Hannah had the money the other expected, and they could not afford to set up house together.
Hannah had not been seen since then. Greenacre’s neighbors in Camberwell observed that he spent the week over Christmas working behind closed shutters, and then he, too, disappeared.
The evil Greenacre was finally discovered in bed in Lambeth with his mistress, Sarah Gale, who was wearing earrings belonging to Miss Brown.
It was shown, however, that Sarah had quietly moved out of the Camberwell house before Miss Brown came to tea on Christmas Eve and could thus only be charged as an accessory after the fact.
Greenacre claimed that a quarrel had taken place when he and Hannah each discovered the other to be penniless; both had believed themselves to be marrying advantageously. He had “accidentally” struck her with a silk-weaving roller, causing her to fall and kill herself by hitting her head. He had then panicked, dismembered the body and dumped the pieces in their far-flung resting places.
The jury did not believe his story and sent the avaricious murderer to be hanged.
Culled from: Chronicle of Crime
Garretdom!
Burned to Death.—On Friday of last week Mr. Daniel Dunn, an old man about 75 years old, living with Garret Joyce of Washington Lake [Minnesota], went into the field to burn some brush and while so doing his clothes caught fire, and although assisted by the daughter of Mr. Joyce, before the fire could be extinguished he was so badly burned that he died in a few minutes after being helped to the house. On arriving at the house he asked for bread and coffee, but before he had tasted them death intervened. [April, 1878]
Culled from Coffee Made Her Insane
More grim olde news can be perused at Garretdom!