When Sir David Attenborough, aged 99, purchased his abode in Richmond, he wasn’t anticipating discovering human relics. Share Article Share Article Facebook X LinkedIn Reddit Bluesky Email Copy Link Link copied Bookmark Comments
Way back in 2009, Sir David Attenborough, the esteemed British broadcaster and natural history expert, acquired a residence in the verdant locale of Richmond, situated in Southwest London. During renovations, on October 22, 2010, construction workers stumbled upon a rather macabre find: a human cranium located in the backyard.
Naturally, a police investigation was launched, which quickly proposed the hypothesis that the skull most likely pertained to Julia Martha Thomas – a widow who had been murdered by her domestic worker in 1879. Following the inquiry, it was verified that this was, in fact, the situation. But what is the narrative behind this killing?
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On January 29, Julia Thomas employed Kate Webster, an Irish immigrant with a record of minor theft, as her maid. Webster initially came to the attention of her prospective employer after substituting for a sick friend as a chairwoman for a Miss Loder in Richmond. Upon meeting Kate, Julia promptly hired her services without questioning her background, suggesting she was seemingly unaware of her maid’s past transgressions.
Within a short time of being hired, the dynamic between the two women started to sour, with Julia firing Kate from her service on February 28. Subsequently, Kate succeeded in persuading her employer to retain her for an additional three days, a choice that would prove disastrous for the widow.
On March 2, Julia arrived at church appearing noticeably “agitated” following a disagreement with her maid, and subsequently returned home, where she confronted Kate about her unsatisfactory work. In her confession to the murder of her employer, Kate detailed the altercation: “She suffered a major fall, and I became alarmed at what had transpired, lost all self-control, and, to prevent her yelling and implicating me in trouble, I seized her by the neck, and during the struggle she was strangled, and I placed her on the floor.”
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Following this, she disposed of the corpse by dismembering it, boiling it in the laundry boiler, and incinerating the bones in the fireplace. She then discarded the remaining remains into the River Thames, and it was initially believed the missing head had been among those remains.
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It has been alleged that Kate provided the fat from the body to the pub, neighbors, and street children as dripping and lard. However, she never admitted to this, and it has never been substantiated.
For the subsequent two weeks following the killing, Kate impersonated her deceased employer before absconding back to Ireland when she was discovered and when body fragments began surfacing on the banks of the Thames. She was then apprehended after investigators tracked down her uncle’s farm in Killanne, near Enniscorthy.
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Kate’s legal proceeding was relatively prominent in both England and Ireland, and even the Crown Prince of Sweden, the future King Gustaf V, attended a day of the proceedings. She eventually confessed to the offenses, although she attempted to evade the death sentence by asserting that she was expectant.
Kate was executed on July 29, to the delight of the throng that had convened outside Wandsworth Prison. While the killing was resolved within weeks, the enigma of what befell Julia Martha Thomas’s head would persist unanswered for 131 years.