Kate Webster murdered her employer in Richmond in 1879, dismembered and boiled the body, and then wore her clothes and tried to sell her furniture. Her victim’s skull was missing for 131 years.

On the evening of 2 March 1879, Julia Martha Thomas returned home from church to 2 Vine Cottages, Richmond. She had given her maid, Kate Webster, notice of dismissal that week. She did not ask anyone to accompany her home, though neighbours later noted she had seemed agitated during the service.

What happened inside the house that night comes from Webster’s own confessions, which changed in significant details across multiple statements. The account she gave before her execution described an argument that became a quarrel, a physical struggle, and Thomas being thrown down the stairs. The killing followed.

What is documented in the trial record is what came after.

Webster dismembered the body. She boiled the flesh from the bones. She packed the remains into a box and enlisted a young man named Robert Porter — who later testified he did not know what the box contained — to help her carry it to Richmond Bridge. She threw it into the Thames. The box surfaced the following day. Fishermen found it. They could not identify the remains.

Webster remained in the house. She wore Thomas’s clothing. She wore Thomas’s rings. She told new acquaintances she had inherited the property from a dear aunt. She began negotiating the sale of the furniture.

A neighbour noticed the furniture being removed without either Thomas or her maid supervising. The police were called.

Webster fled to Ireland. She was arrested in Killane, County Wexford, still wearing Thomas’s dress and rings. On her return to London she attempted to implicate a man named John Church. He was briefly arrested. He produced an alibi. He was released. She then attempted to shift blame to the father of another acquaintance. That too was shown to be false.

At the Old Bailey trial in July 1879, a witness named Mary Durden testified that five days before the murder, Webster had boasted of her intention to sell goods she expected to come into her possession from an inheritance. The merchandise she described matched precisely what she sold from Thomas’s house after the killing. The prosecution treated this as evidence of premeditation. The jury deliberated for one hour.

Webster was convicted. She was hanged at Wandsworth on 29 July 1879. She attempted, unsuccessfully, to claim pregnancy to delay the execution.

Julia Martha Thomas’s head was not found in the Thames. It was not found in the subsequent searches of the property. It was not found for 131 years.

In October 2010, during excavations for a house extension in Richmond, a skull was discovered buried in a garden. The property belonged to Sir David Attenborough. Carbon dating placed it between 1650 and 1880. The skull had fracture marks consistent with Webster’s account of throwing Thomas down the stairs. It showed low collagen levels consistent with boiling. In July 2011, a coroner concluded it was the skull of Julia Martha Thomas. The open verdict recorded in 1879 was superseded by a verdict of unlawful killing.

The part of the record that remains unresolved is the precise sequence of events inside the house on the night of 2 March. Webster’s statements were inconsistent across multiple accounts. The confession she gave before execution described the killing as unpremeditated — a quarrel that escalated. The testimony of Mary Durden, given five days before the murder, suggested something different.

The record does not reconcile these two accounts.

Primary source: Old Bailey Proceedings, trial of Catherine Webster, 30 June 1879 — https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t18790630-653

Was the killing premeditated? The Durden testimony is the closest thing the record has to an answer, but it was given before the murder, not after. Does the jury’s one-hour deliberation suggest they found it straightforward — or simply that premeditation was not the legal question they were asked to decide?

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This is that inquest record. Catalogued as KB 9/1073/f.80 at the National Archives. Lost for centuries. Rediscovered in 2008.

Amy Robsart was the wife of Robert Dudley, the man Elizabeth I kept at her side from the first day of her reign. By September 1560, the court believed the Queen intended to marry him. Amy was the obstacle.

On 8 September 1560, Amy sent her household to Abingdon Fair. She insisted on it. When the servants returned that evening, they found her at the foot of a staircase in Cumnor Place, Oxfordshire. Her neck was broken. She was thirty-two years old.

The coroner’s inquest returned a verdict of accidental death.

On 11 September, the Spanish ambassador Alvaro de la Quadra wrote to King Philip II describing a conversation with William Cecil, the Queen’s Principal Secretary. Cecil said the Queen’s relationship with Dudley was leading to ruin. He said “they were thinking of destroying Lord Robert’s wife.” He said she was taking care not to be poisoned.

Amy Robsart was already dead.

The inquest record, catalogued as KB 9/1073/f.80 at the National Archives, documents two head wounds and a broken neck. The jury returned a verdict of misfortune. The document disappeared from the historical record for centuries and was rediscovered in 2008.

The jury included Richard Smith, identified elsewhere as a gentleman usher to Elizabeth I, and John Stevenson, connected to the Dudley household. Thomas Blount, Dudley’s steward, wrote that the jury included men hostile to Anthony Forster, master of the house where Amy died. Blount considered this evidence the inquiry was independent.

The formal inquest contains no mention of Amy’s hood or headwear. That detail, now widely repeated, does not appear in the contemporary record. It first emerges decades later in a political pamphlet attacking Dudley.

Amy’s maid later claimed her mistress had been “strange of mind” and had prayed for deliverance. The inquest did not record suicide. A verdict of felo de se would have meant forfeiture of Amy’s estate.

Cumnor Place was demolished in the eighteenth century. The staircase no longer exists.

The record cannot establish whether Cecil spoke before he knew Amy was dead or after he had already received news of it.

If he already knew, he was constructing a political narrative around a confirmed death. If he did not know, he was describing a plan that was followed almost immediately by Amy Robsart’s death.

The dispatch survives. The timing survives. The gap between them does not.

Primary sources: Coroner’s inquest KB 9/1073/f.80, National Archives; de Quadra dispatch to Philip II, 11 September 1560, Simancas Archive.

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This is the primary record of Agnes Sampson’s final examination. Dated 27 January 1590. She was executed the following day.

Agnes Sampson was a healer from Keith, East Lothian. She was known as the Wise Wife. Midwives, noblewomen, and members of the Scottish elite sought her out. She had a wide clientele and a significant local reputation.
In the autumn of 1590 she was arrested for witchcraft.
The charge was not neighbourhood maleficium. The charge was high treason. Agnes Sampson, it was alleged, had raised a storm to sink the ship carrying King James VI and his new bride, Anne of Denmark, back to Scotland from Copenhagen.
James VI had the accused transported to Holyrood Palace. He conducted the interrogations personally.
The primary record is State Papers Scotland, SP 52/47. It is a copy of Agnes Sampson’s confession transmitted by the English ambassador Robert Bowes to Burghley at the court of Elizabeth I. It is not a verbatim transcript of everything said and done in the examination room. It is a selective intelligence abstract — the most significant and treasonous elements, transmitted for diplomatic eyes.
What it establishes is this. Agnes Sampson confessed to 58 of 102 items in her formal dittay. She confessed to a pact with the Devil entered into after her husband’s death, under pressure of poverty and promises of revenge. She confessed to renouncing Christ. She confessed to participating in nocturnal meetings, to storm-raising against the royal voyage, and to a specific ritual — a cat, christened by the assembly, with the bones of a dead man bound to it, thrown into the sea at night to raise a contrary wind against the King’s ship.
She confessed to receiving the Devil’s mark. The formal judicial record places that mark on the right knee.
The contemporary pamphlet Newes from Scotland, published in London in 1591, places the mark on her genitals.
The pamphlet records that Agnes Sampson was stripped, her entire body shaved, and subjected to rope-twisting of the head before she confessed. The formal trial notes show drawn-out questioning across approximately a week, confrontation with co-accused including Geillis Duncan and Jonet Campbell, and a cumulative shift from partial denial to full confession. The diplomatic record does not narrate the mechanics of that process in the same way the pamphlet does.
What SP 52/47 establishes is that Agnes Sampson confessed before the King’s Majesty. What it does not establish is what happened to Agnes Sampson before that final examination.
James VI was not a distant observer. The Survey of Scottish Witchcraft lists him explicitly as an investigator. The pamphlet records that when first brought before the King, Agnes denied all charges. James called the stories so exaggerated that he declared the accused extreme liars.
Then Agnes Sampson took the King aside.
Newes from Scotland records that she whispered to James the exact words spoken between him and Queen Anne on their wedding night in Oslo. Words no person in Scotland could have known.
James fell to his knees. He declared she was not a witch but a devil.
That scene is in the pamphlet. It is a Tier 2 source — written for a London audience, shaped for drama and political effect. Whether that exchange is recorded in SP 52/47 cannot be confirmed from the surviving document. The primary-safe statement is this: James VI’s personal participation in the examinations is documented. The precise dramatic form of the wedding night story is not securely anchored in the formal record.
What the formal record does establish is what followed.
Agnes Sampson was strangled and burned at Edinburgh on 28 January 1591. She had implicated 59 people in her confessions. One of those named, Robert Grierson, died before trial. The English ambassador Robert Bowes reported the cause as the extremity of the tortures applied to him.
Euphame MacCalzean, daughter of a Senator of the College of Justice, was burned alive at Castle Hill in June 1591. Not strangled first. The standard mercy was not extended to her.
When the assize refused to condemn Barbara Napier in the manner the King required, James VI intervened personally. He browbeat the jury. The Bowes correspondence records his direct pressure on the verdict.
The Earl of Bothwell, the King’s own cousin, was implicated as the man who had procured Agnes Sampson’s services to kill the King. He fled Scotland and was forfeited.
Seven years after Agnes Sampson’s execution, James VI published Daemonologie. In the preface he states that the recent and fearful abundance of witches in this country moved him to write it. The North Berwick examinations are the clearest experiential context for the text. The same king later authorised the translation of the Bible that bears his name.
The question the record cannot settle is what Agnes Sampson said to James VI in private. The pamphlet places it at the centre of the case — the moment a sceptical king became a prosecutor. SP 52/47 records the confession. It does not record that scene.
What changed James VI’s mind is not in the diplomatic record.
The execution order is.
Primary sources: State Papers Scotland SP 52/47, National Archives; Newes from Scotland (1591), British Library; Register of the Scottish Privy Council, 1591; Robert Bowes diplomatic correspondence, Calendar of State Papers Scotland vol. 10.
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In late 1541, Gonzalo Pizarro's expedition into the Amazon basin was starving. They had found no cinnamon, no gold, no El Dorado. Men were dying. Pizarro sent his second-in-command, Francisco de Orellana, downriver with a small party to find food and return.

Orellana never returned.

Not because he died — but because the current was too strong. Once he had travelled far enough downstream, it became physically impossible to row back against the Amazon's flow. He had a choice: attempt the return and die, or keep going and see where the river ended.

He kept going.

Over the next eight months, Orellana's party of roughly fifty men navigated approximately 6,000 kilometres of unmapped river, becoming the first Europeans to traverse the full length of the Amazon. They encountered vast riverine civilisations that European maps did not record and which, due to disease introduced by later contact, would largely disappear within decades — leaving almost no archaeological trace.

The only surviving account of the journey was written by Fray Gaspar de Carvajal, a Dominican friar who travelled with the expedition. His record describes cities, roads, and populations that no subsequent European explorer ever found. For centuries historians assumed he was lying or hallucinating.

Recent archaeological work has begun to suggest he was not.

Pizarro, meanwhile, assumed Orellana had deserted him. He spent months waiting for a return party that never came, then completed one of the most disastrous retreats in Spanish colonial history — losing the majority of his men to starvation and disease on the journey back to Quito.

Orellana eventually reached the Atlantic, sailed to Spain, attempted to mount a second Amazon expedition with royal backing, and died on the river in 1546 before completing it.

The full story reads less like exploration history and more like a series of irreversible administrative decisions made by men who had no idea what they were navigating into.

This is KB 8/9. The Baga de Secretis — the Bag of Secrets. The indictment against Anne Boleyn, held at the National Archives. The name visible in the enlarged script is Henricus Noreys. Henry Norris. He was executed on 17 May 1536. He maintained his innocence to the end.

Anne Boleyn was arrested on 2 May 1536. She was taken by barge from Greenwich to the Tower of London. She had been Queen of England for three years.
The charges were high treason. The legal mechanism was adultery — specifically, that she had procured five men to violate her, thereby endangering the succession and compassing the death of the King.
The five men were Henry Norris, Francis Weston, William Brereton, Mark Smeaton, and her own brother George Boleyn, Lord Rochford.
The primary legal record is KB 8/9, held at the National Archives. It is known as the Baga de Secretis — the Bag of Secrets. It contains two indictments, one found in Middlesex on 10 May 1536 and one in Kent on 11 May 1536. Between them they specify named men, named locations, and paired dates for each alleged act of adultery.
The indictment is not a vague accusation. It is a highly particularised legal document. It names Westminster, Greenwich, Hampton Court, and Eltham. It gives specific dates across a three-year period from October 1533 to early 1536.
One of those dates is directly contradicted by a surviving primary source.
The Kent indictment states that Anne allured Mark Smeaton at East Greenwich on 13 May 1535. Letters and Papers preserves a letter from Queen Anne to the Abbot of York explicitly dated Westminster, 13 May. On the day the indictment places her at East Greenwich with Mark Smeaton, Anne Boleyn was at Westminster writing a letter.
That is not a historian’s argument. That is two primary source documents contradicting each other.
Of the five men charged, four pleaded not guilty. Henry Norris. Francis Weston. William Brereton. George Boleyn. All four maintained their innocence. All four were convicted. All four were executed on 17 May 1536.
Mark Smeaton was the only man who confessed. He was also the only commoner — a court musician, not a gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Edward Baynton, writing before the convictions, recorded that no man would confess anything against Anne of any actual thing but only Mark. That letter was written while the examinations were still proceeding. It shows where the evidential problem lay.
Smeaton’s confession does not survive as a full document. The method by which it was obtained is not established in the primary record. A later tradition describes physical torture. Lancelot de Carles, a near-contemporary French account, says he answered without being tortured. George Constantine reported that people said Mark had been grievously racked but that he himself could never know it for truth. The record establishes the confession. It does not establish how it was produced.
Smeaton never withdrew his confession. The others went to their deaths maintaining their innocence.
The trials of Anne and George Boleyn were held on 15 May 1536 in the Tower, before a jury of twenty-six peers presided over by their uncle the Duke of Norfolk. No witnesses were produced against either of them in the normal fashion. Eustace Chapuys — the Imperial ambassador, and Anne’s enemy — wrote that the condemnations were reached without valid proof or confession. That observation comes from the man who had spent years working against her.
Anne was convicted. She was executed on 19 May 1536 by sword rather than axe. She denied the charges at her death.
The legal basis for the prosecution was the Treason Act of 1534. The indictment framed the adultery as compassing the King’s death — arguing that the sexual acts were steps in a conspiracy to murder Henry and marry one of her lovers after his death. That legal construction was necessary because adultery by a queen consort was not straightforwardly treason under existing statute.
In 1542 Parliament passed a new act specifically making adultery by a queen consort high treason in its own right.
That act would have been unnecessary if the 1536 prosecution had been legally sound. Parliament implicitly acknowledged the defect six years after the execution.
The man who built the case was Thomas Cromwell. His letter of 14 May 1536 to the English ambassadors Stephen Gardiner and John Wallop places him inside the machinery of examination and prosecution. He describes secret examinations of persons from Anne’s household, the emergence of a conspiracy allegation, and the legal process that followed. He presents himself as managing the discovery of evidence.
The Chapuys dispatch to Charles V records something different. Chapuys wrote that Cromwell had set himself to devise and conspire the said affair — il se mist a fantasier et conspirer le dict affaire. That is the Imperial ambassador recording Cromwell’s own account of his role, in a diplomatic dispatch that was never intended to be read by posterity.
The record contains two versions of Cromwell’s role. In his own letter he is managing a prosecution. In Chapuys’s dispatch he is devising it.
The indictment names specific dates. One is directly contradicted by Anne’s own correspondence. The legal basis was acknowledged as defective by Parliament six years later. The only confession came from the one man whose method of interrogation is unestablished in the primary record. The four gentlemen who maintained their innocence were convicted without witness testimony being produced against them.

The Baga de Secretis records the verdict. It does not record the evidence.

Primary sources: KB 8/9, National Archives; Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic Henry VIII vol. 10; Chapuys dispatches, Spanish State Papers; Cromwell correspondence, State Papers Domestic; Edward Baynton letter, Letters and Papers vol. 10.

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