Here’s who it belonged to
Sir David Attenborough at Keele University (Image: Keele University )
National treasure, Sir David Attenborough, bought a beautiful home in 2009 – but renovators found a grim discovery a year later. On October 22 2010, builders found a human skull at the 99-year-old’s property in Richmond, Southwest London.
As expected, a police enquiry went ahead and the outcome determined that the skull likely belonged to widow Julia Martha Thomas, who was murdered by her maid in 1879. But here’s the story behind the killing.
The widower hired an Irish immigrant, Kate Webster, as her maid on January 29 after she had stood in for a sick friend as a chairwoman for a Miss Loder in Richmond. Unbeknownst to Julia, Kate had a history of petty theft, but her background wasn’t questioned by Julia before she was employed.
Within one month, Julia dismissed Kate on February 28 due to a breakdown in their relationship. The maid convinced the widow to keep her on for three more days – but this became a fateful mistake.
On March 2, Julia arrived at church seeming very “agitated” after a row with her maid, and later returned home, where she confronted Kate for her subpar service. Confessing to the murder of her employer, Kate described the altercation: “She had a heavy fall, and I became agitated at what had occurred, lost all control of myself, and, to prevent her screaming and getting me into trouble, I caught her by the throat, and in the struggle she was choked, and I threw her on the floor.”
Following this, she disposed of the body by dismembering it, boiling it in the laundry copper and burning the bones in the hearth. She then threw the rest of the remains into the River Thames, and it was originally thought the missing head had been among those remains.
It has been claimed that Kate offered the fat from the body to the pub, neighbours and street children as dripping and lard. However, she never confessed to this, and it has never been proven.
For the two weeks following the murder, Kate posed as her late employer before fleeing back to Ireland when she was exposed and when body parts began washing up on the banks of the Thames. She was subsequently arrested after investigators traced her uncle’s farm at Killanne, near Enniscorthy.
Kate’s trial was rather high-profile in both England and Ireland, and even the Crown Prince of Sweden, the future King Gustaf V, attended a day of the proceedings. She ultimately confessed to the crimes, although she attempted to avoid the death penalty by claiming she was pregnant.
Kate was executed on July 29, to the cheers of the crowd that had gathered outside Wandsworth Prison. While the murder was solved within weeks, the mystery of what happened to Julia Martha Thomas’s head would remain unanswered for 131 years.
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