The Brides in the Bath

The case

Just before Christmas 1914 the News of the World carried a short report on a woman found dead in her bath in Highgate, north London, the day after her wedding. Charles Burnham read it with a jolt. His daughter Alice had died exactly the same way in a Blackpool boarding house a year earlier, in the first weeks of her marriage. Burnham and the Blackpool landlord, Joseph Crossley, sent both cuttings to Scotland Yard.

The husbands had different names, John Lloyd in Highgate and George Smith in Blackpool. Divisional Detective Inspector Arthur Neil, busy with wartime duties, found the Highgate bath too small for a grown woman to drown in easily. He also learned that the bride, Margaret Lofty, had made a will in her husband's favour and withdrawn her savings on the day she died, and that she had been insured for £700. Alice Burnham had been insured for £500 with her husband as beneficiary. Neil watched the solicitor's office handling the Lloyd estate, and on 1 February 1915 the man who came to collect admitted, after first denying it, that he was also George Smith.

His real name was George Joseph Smith, born in Bethnal Green in 1872 and in and out of reformatories and prisons from the age of nine. He had married once legally, in 1898, and then repeatedly under false names, at least seven times bigamously between 1908 and 1914. His usual method was to court a woman with some savings, marry her, take her money and possessions and vanish. Throughout, he kept returning to Edith Pegler in Bristol, whom he had married in 1908 and who believed he was a travelling antiques dealer.

When the newspapers took up the story, the police at Herne Bay in Kent reported a third case. In 1910 Smith, as Henry Williams, had married Bessie Mundy in Weymouth, deserted her, and then met her again by chance at Weston-super-Mare in 1912. He took her to Herne Bay, bought a bath, and brought her to a local doctor complaining that she suffered fits. She made a will in his favour, and on the morning of 13 July 1912 she was found drowned. The inquest blamed epilepsy, and Smith collected the money from her family trust, roughly £2,500.

All three bodies were exhumed. The pathologist Bernard Spilsbury found almost no marks of violence and little sign of a slow drowning. He had the three baths brought to London and studied them alongside each woman's measurements. A real epileptic fit, he concluded, would have pushed a tall woman's head up the sloping end of a five-foot tub, not under the water. His theory was that the husband had lifted her feet suddenly, sliding her head under so fast that she lost consciousness almost at once. Neil tested it on volunteer swimmers of similar build; one had to be revived after he pulled her feet without warning.

Smith was charged with all three murders, but under English law he could be tried for only one, that of Bessie Mundy. At the Old Bailey in June 1915 the judge, Mr Justice Scrutton, allowed the prosecution to put the other two deaths before the jury as evidence of a system, over strong objection from the defence counsel, Edward Marshall Hall. Smith chose not to give evidence and interrupted the proceedings with outbursts. The jury took about twenty minutes to convict him on 1 July.