The murder of Julia Martha Thomas, dubbed the "Barnes Mystery" or the "Richmond Murder" by the press, was one of the most notorious crimes in the Victorian period of the United Kingdom. Thomas, a widow in her 50s who lived in Richmond, London, was murdered on 2 March 1879 by her maid Kate Webster, a 30-year-old Irishwoman with a history of theft. Webster disposed of the body by dismembering it, boiling the flesh off the bones, and throwing most of the remains into the River Thames. It was alleged, although never proven, that Webster had offered the fat to a publican, neighbours and street children as dripping and lard. Part of Thomas's remains were subsequently recovered from the river. Her severed head remained missing until October 2010, when the skull was found during building works being carried out for Sir David Attenborough. After the murder, Webster posed as Thomas for two weeks but was exposed and fled back to Ireland at her uncle's home at Killanne near Enniscorthy, County Wexford. She was arrested there on 29 March and was returned to London, where she stood trial at the Old Bailey in July 1879. At the end of a six-day trial, Webster was convicted and sentenced to death after a jury of matrons rejected her last-minute attempt to avoid the death penalty by pleading pregnancy. She finally confessed to the murder the night before she was hanged, on 29 July at Wandsworth Prison. The case attracted huge public interest and was widely covered by the press in both Britain and Ireland. Webster's behaviour after the crime and during the trial further increased the notoriety of the murder.
Background
Julia Martha Thomas was a former schoolteacher who had been widowed twice. Since the death of her second husband in 1873, she had lived on her own at 2 Mayfield Cottages (also known as 2 Vine Cottages) in Park Road in Richmond, London. The house was a two-storey semi-detached villa built in grey stone with a garden at the front and back. The area was not heavily populated at the time, although her house was close to a public house called The Hole in the Wall. Thomas was described by her doctor George Henry Rudd as "a small, well-dressed lady" who was about 54 years old. Elliot O'Donnell, summing up contemporary accounts in his introduction to a transcript of Webster's trial, said that Thomas had an "excitable temperament" and was regarded by her neighbours as eccentric. She frequently travelled, leaving her friends and relatives unaware of her whereabouts for weeks or months at a time. Thomas was a member of the lower middle class and as such was not wealthy, but she habitually dressed up and wore jewellery to give the impression of prosperity. Her desire to employ a live-in domestic servant probably had as much to do with status as with practicality. However, she had a reputation for being a harsh employer and her irregular habits meant that she had difficulty finding and retaining servants. Before 1879, Thomas had been able to keep only one maid for any length of time. On 29 January 1879, Thomas took on Kate Webster as her servant. Webster had been born as Kate Lawler in Killanne, County Wexford, near Enniscorthy, in about 1849. She was later described by The Daily Telegraph as "a tall, strongly-made woman of about 5 feet 5 inches (165 cm) in height with sallow and much freckled complexion and large and prominent teeth". The details of Webster's early life are unclear, as many of her later autobiographical statements proved unreliable, but she claimed to have been married to a sea captain called Webster by whom she had four children. According to Webster's account, all the children died, as did her husband, within a short time of each other. She was imprisoned for larceny in Wexford in December 1864, when she was only about 15 years old, and came to England in 1867. In February 1868, she was sentenced to four years of penal servitude for committing larceny in Liverpool. Webster was released from jail in January 1872 and, by 1873, she had moved to Rose Gardens in Hammersmith, West London, where she became friends with a neighbouring family named Porter. On 18 April 1874, she gave birth to a son whom she named John W. Webster in Kingston upon Thames. The identity of the father is unclear, as she named three different men at various times. One, a man named Strong, was her accomplice in further robberies and thefts. She later claimed to have been forced into crime, as she had been "forsaken by him, and committed crimes for the purpose of supporting myself and child". Webster moved frequently around West London using various aliases, including Webb, Webster, Gibbs, Gibbons, and Lawler. While living in Teddington, she was arrested and convicted in May 1875 of 36 charges of larceny. She was sentenced to eighteen months in Wandsworth Prison. Not long after leaving prison, Webster was arrested again for larceny and was sentenced to another twelve months' imprisonment in February 1877. Her young son was cared for in her absence by Sarah Crease, a friend who worked as a charwoman for a Miss Loder in Richmond. In January 1879, Crease fell ill and Webster stood in for her as a temporary replacement at Loder's house. Loder knew Thomas as a friend and was aware of her wish to find a domestic servant. She recommended Webster on the basis of the latter's temporary work for her. When Thomas met Webster, she engaged her on the spot, though she did not appear to have made any inquiries about Webster's character or past. After Webster was taken on by Thomas, the relationship between the two women appears to have deteriorated rapidly. Thomas disliked the quality of Webster's work and frequently criticised it. Webster later said:
At first I thought her a nice old lady ... but I found her very trying, and she used to do many things to annoy me during my work. When I had finished my work in my rooms, she used to go over it again after me, and point out places where she said I did not clean, showing evidence of a nasty spirit towards me.
Webster in turn became increasingly resentful of Thomas, to the point that Thomas attempted to persuade friends to stay with her as she did not like to be alone with Webster. It was arranged that Webster would leave Thomas's service on 28 February. Thomas recorded her decision in her last diary entry: "Gave Katherine warning to leave".
Murder and the disposal of the body
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