George Joseph Smith

This article is about the British bigamist George Joseph Smith. For the US Congressman, see George J. Smith .

George Joseph Smith

George Joseph Smith (born January 11, 1872 in London , † August 13, 1915 in Maidstone ) was a British bigamist who killed three women.

Life

Example

George Joseph Smith was born in Bethnal Green, London, to an insurance agent . At the age of nine he was sent to a reformatory in Gravesend and later served prison terms for fraud and theft. In 1896 he was imprisoned for twelve months for inciting a woman to steal from her employers. With the booty he opened a bakery in Leicester . Probably this was his last touch with honest work.

In 1898 he married Caroline Beatrice Thornhill (under the nickname Oliver George Love) in Leicester; this was his only legal marriage (in 1899 he married another woman in a bigamistic marriage). The couple moved to London, where she worked as a maid for a number of employers and stole them for her husband. She was finally caught in Worthing and sentenced to twelve months. When she was released, she incriminated her husband, and he was imprisoned for two years in January 1901. Upon his release, Mrs. Love fled to Canada.

Smith then went back to his other wife, withdrew her savings, and left her. It is not known how many women he dealt with in the following years.

It is known, however, that Smith married Florence Wilson, a widow from Worthing, in June 1908. On July 3, he left her, not without withdrawing £ 30 from her savings account and selling her possessions in the shared apartment in Camden. On July 30th, he married Edith Peglar, who responded to a job advertisement as a housekeeper. He used to go missing for months, saying that he went about his business in another town, supposedly selling antiques. Between his other marriages, Smith always came back to Edith and brought money with him.

In October 1909 he married Sarah Freeman under the name George Rose Smith. As with Florence Wilson, after withdrawing her savings and selling her war bonds, he left her with a loot of £ 400. He then married Bessie Munday, and then Alice Burnham. Between Alice Burnham and Margaret Lofty, he married Alice Reid in September 1914 under the pseudonym Charles Oliver James. Between 1908 and 1914, Smith entered into a total of seven bigamistic marriages, and in most of these cases Smith was content to pillage his wives' property before disappearing.

Two deaths

One evening in January 1915, Division Detective Inspector Arthur Neil received a letter from Joseph Crossley who owned a guest house in Blackpool . There were two newspaper clippings with the letter: One from The News of the World , dated before Christmas 1914, about the tragic death of Margaret Elizabeth Lloyd b. Lofty, 38 years old, who died in her apartment at 14 Bismarck Road in Highgate . She had been found in her bathtub by her husband John Lloyd and her landlady.

The other excerpt contained the report of a forensic investigation on December 13, 1913 in Blackpool. It was a woman named Alice Smith b. Burnham, who died suddenly in her bathtub in a boarding house in this town. She had been found by her husband, George Smith.

The letter, dated January 3, had been written by Crossley, the Smiths' pensioner, on behalf of his wife and a certain Charles Burnham. Both expressed that they found the striking similarity of the two incidents suspicious and asked the police to investigate the matter.

Investigation against Smith

Inspector Neil went to 14 Bismarck Road, where Mr. and Mrs. Lloyd rented on December 17th. The landlady found it odd that before Mr. Smith took the room, he should have seen the bathroom. The bathtub was 50 inches (127 cm) long at the bottom and 66 inches (168 cm) at the top. Neil found it hard to believe that an adult like Mrs. Lloyd should have drowned in such a small bathtub, especially since the tub was three-quarters full when Mrs. Lloyd was found. He then went to the coroner, a Dr. Bates, who had issued the death certificate, asked carefully about any signs of violence against the woman. There were none, except for a small hematoma above the left elbow. What was striking about the whole thing, however, was that Mr. Lloyd had shown no mourning and had ordered the cheapest coffin for his late wife.

Upon further investigation, Neil learned that a will had been made on the 18th , three hours before Margaret Lloyd died, that the sole heir was none other than Mr Lloyd, and that he had given the will to an attorney "for settlement." Besides, Mr. Lloyd had withdrawn all of her savings that day.

On January 12th, Dr. Bates. He had received a request from the Yorkshire Insurance Company regarding the death of Margaret Lloyd. Three days before their wedding, she had taken out £ 700 life insurance with her husband, John Lloyd, as the sole beneficiary. Neil promptly asked the doctor to delay his answer. He immediately asked the Blackpool police for more information on the Smith case. Mrs. Smith had also taken out life insurance, made a will in her husband's favor, and only moved into the Blackpool apartment after Mr. Smith had seen the bathtub.

Neil was now convinced he was dealing with the same man and asked the coroner to send a favorable report to the insurance company. He expected the man to contact his lawyer and kept the office under surveillance day and night. Finally, on February 1, a man appeared who fitted Lloyd / Smith's description. Inspector Neil introduced himself and asked if he was John Lloyd. "Yes," replied the man. Then Neil asked him if he was also George Smith. The man vehemently denied that. Inspector Neil, who was already certain that John Lloyd and George Smith were the same man, informed him that he was taking him for bigamy interrogation. The man eventually admitted that he was really George Smith.

Neil guessed that Smith admitted this because he would rather admit bigamy than murder. Anyway, Smith was now in custody.

Autopsies by Bernard Spilsbury

When Smith was arrested on charges of bigamy and murder, renowned pathologist Bernard Spilsbury was asked to find out how the women had died. Although he was the Ministry of Interior's pathologist and mainly advisory, he was also available to provide direct assistance to the police.

Margaret Lloyd's body was exhumed, and Spilbury's first job was to determine whether drowning was the cause of death, and if so, whether by accident or by external agents .

He confirmed the previously mentioned hematoma on the elbow and found two microscopic signs. The signs of drowning were also not very pronounced. There was no evidence of heart or circulatory disease, but the finding indicated an almost instantaneous death like a heart attack or a brain attack. Poison also seemed possible, and Spilsbury ordered tests to be carried out. Finally, he suggested that Neil try some experiments on the same bathtub that Margaret had died in. Neil had them set up in the police station.

Although the exhumation had been carried out as discreetly as possible, the press got wind of it and articles about the "brides in the bathroom" began to appear. On February 8, the Herne Bay police chief had read the articles and sent Neil a report of another death that was startlingly similar to the other two.

A third victim

A year before Alice Burnham's death in Blackpool, a certain Henry Williams had rented a house on 80 High Street with no bathroom for himself and his wife Beatrice "Bessie" Munday, whom he married in Weymouth in 1910. Seven weeks later he rented a bathtub. He then took his wife to a local doctor, Frank French, for an alleged epileptic seizure - but Mrs. Williams only complained of headaches for which the doctor prescribed medication. On July 12, 1912, Mr. Williams woke Dr. French and said his wife had another seizure. He visited her and promised to come back the following afternoon. However, he was surprised when he was informed by Mr. Williams the following morning that his wife had drowned. The doctor found Bessie Williams in her bathtub, her head under the water, her legs straight out and her feet sticking out of the water. There was no sign of violence, so Dr. French drowned in an epileptic seizure. The inquest jury, apparently convinced, awarded Mr. Williams the amount of £ 2,579, 13 shillings, 7 pence, as stated in Mrs. Williams' will, made five days before her death.

Neil now sent photographs of Smith to Herne Bay for possible identification and drove to Blackpool, where Spilsbury performed Alice Smith's autopsy. The result was the same as for Margaret Lloyd: no sign of violence, everything pointed to sudden death, and little sign of drowning. Also, like Margaret Lloyd, there was no trace of poison. At a loss, Spilsbury took routine measurements of the corpse and had the bathtub taken to London.

When Neil got back to London, he had received confirmation from Herne Bay. "Henry Williams" was identical to "John Lloyd" and "George Smith". This time, when Spilsbury examined Bessie Williams, he found a supposedly sure sign of drowning: goosebumps . As with the other two deaths, the bathtub in which Mrs. Williams died was sent to London.

Education and trial

For weeks Spilsbury thought about the bathtubs and the size of the victims. Suppose, he thought, Bessie Williams did indeed have an epileptic seizure. Its first stage consists of stiffening and stretching the whole body. Given its size (five feet seven inches = 170 cm) and the length of the bathtub (five feet = 152 cm), the upper body should have been pushed up at the sloping head end of the bathtub, well above the water level. The second stage consists of violent spasms of the limbs that are pulled towards the body and then thrown outward. So no one of her size could get underwater in this way, not even when the muscles relaxed again in the third stage: the tub was just too small.

Suddenly a possible solution occurred to him. Based on Dr. French's description of how he found Bessie Williams in the bathtub, Spilsbury suspected that Smith must have grabbed Bessie's feet under the pretext of teasing among lovers and suddenly pulled her towards him, causing the upper body to go under water. The sudden entry of water into your nose and throat could cause shock and sudden loss of consciousness. This would explain the lack of injuries and the low signs of drowning.

To test Spilsbury's theory, Neil hired several experienced divers of the same size and build as the victims. He tried to force her under the water, but in the process there were inevitable signs of struggle. Finally, Neil did what Spilsbury had suggested: he suddenly pulled on one of the divers' feet and her head slipped under the water before she knew what was happening to her. Neil was startled when he suddenly noticed that the woman was no longer moving. He quickly pulled her out of the tub, but it took him and the doctor half an hour to resuscitate her. When she came to, she said the only thing she remembered before she passed out was the sudden surge of water; this despite the fact that she had expected an attack and was an experienced diver. So Spilsbury's theory was confirmed.

George Joseph Smith was charged with the murders of Bessie Williams, Alice Smith, and Margaret Lloyd on March 23, 1915. His trial began on June 22nd outside the Old Bailey . Although under English law he could only be tried for the murder of Bessie Williams, the prosecutor used the other two deaths to explain Smith's modus operandi ; this was permitted by Presiding Judge Scrutton despite protests from Smith's defense attorney, Sir Edward Marshall Hall .

There is an often-told fairy tale that Smith's method of murder was demonstrated in the courtroom and caused visible shudders down the spine of those in the courtroom, not least the jury. However, the record of the trial makes it clear that no such demonstration took place in court, and one of the prosecutors Travers Humphreys wrote that it never took place.

It took the jury about 20 minutes to find Smith guilty on July 1, and he was sentenced to death. Smith's conviction and judgment were dismissed and Smith was hanged on August 13 by John Ellis in Maidstone Prison.

literature

• Colin Evans: The Father of Forensics: The Groundbreaking Cases of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, and the Beginnings of Modern CSI , Berkley Publishing Group, 2006, ISBN 0425210073 (English)
• Jürgen Thorwald : The merciless hunt , novel of criminalistics. Droemer, Munich 1973, ISBN 3-85886-025-5 .

Web links

• Brides in the bath murders (English)
• Trial report (English), based on Notable British Trials