bloodstains, fatty material behind the copper, and burned finger bones in the
grate. Information was sent to the Royal Irish Constabulary, who identified the
woman as one they had arrested previously. She was apprehended, taken into
custody and brought back to England for trial at Richmond.
There was massive public horror and interest when the matter was referred
to the Old Bailey. Despite attempts to blame a number of others for the crime,
including the innocent publican, an old lover, and her friend in Hammersmith,
as well as attempting to avoid the death sentence by saying she was pregnant,
Webster was found guilty. On 28 July she finally confessed to the murder, and
was hanged the next day at Wandsworth Prison, the executioner using the new
longdrop method (which resulted in death from the breaking of the
condemned person’s neck, rather than slow strangulation) (Plate 10).A
massive crowd waiting outside cheered as the black flag was raised to indicate
that she was dead, and an effigy of her soon went on display at Madame
Tussaud’s.^10
The reasons why the case aroused such public notoriety centred around the
Victorian assumptions about the nature of women and the place of servants.
Servants were supposed to be obedient and to know their place, and women
were thought to be passive and weak. That a woman could carry out these
dreadful acts, apparently without remorse, then take her employer’s place and
to try to implicate innocent people, went against all that society thought
should happen. Of course, she was also Irish, at a time when English society
regarded the Irish as brutish and even subhuman.
Accounts of her physical appearance were seen as indicative, after the
event, of her inherent criminality. She was a strongly built woman, described
as repellent and sinisterlooking with‘obliquely set eyes’, a feature which one
commentator claimed was often found in murderers and should have been
seen as a warning as to her character.
There was much interest at the time in the study of physiognomy–the
study of facial appearance. Some believed that there was a‘criminal face’that
could identify potential wrongdoers. Among these was Sir Francis Galton,
who created composite photographs from police mugshots to try to identify
those features that showed criminal tendencies. An earlier Italian
criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, had made a list of suspicious characteristics,
including pointed heads, heavy jaws, and thin beards. Darwinian theories had
taken hold, among which were the inheritance of physical attributes, and this
was extended to the idea that psychological traits such as criminality could
also be inherited. Webster’s appearance, it was felt, proved this theory. As a
forensic technique, physiognomy (and its cousin, phrenology, which claimed
VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN CRIME