Known for her "great personal beauty", Mary Manning was a maid who'd worked in grand aristocratic homes and was a very unlikely murderer. Yet she and her husband Frederick had plotted the callous killing of Patrick O'Connor, a well-off man she'd been romantically linked with. The Mannings invited O'Connor over for dinner, bashed his head in, buried him under the kitchen floor, and fled with his money.
When O'Connor's body was found, it had decomposed so badly that he was only identified by the "less perishable features of an extremely prominent chin and false teeth". In an early example of media sensationalism, the case was dubbed the "Bermondsey Horror", but as far as Charles Dickens was concerned the greater horror was the gleeful mass of onlookers cheering the public hangings of the Mannings. He wrote, "A sight so inconceivably awful as the wickedness and levity of the immense crowd collected at that execution this morning could be imagined by no man."
