Bermondsey Horror

On November 13th, 1849 a crowd of almost thirty thousand men, women, and children gathered in the streets around Horsemonger Lane Gaol in Southwark, England. What was this event that drew everyone into the cold, surely rainy, streets?

An execution. Yes, you heard correctly, thousands of people had come out to watch someone hang. There on the scaffolding, for the first time in over one hundred years, a husband and wife would be hung together while their neighbors watched.

Frederick George Manning was a Railway Guard who married Marie De Roux in Piccadilly in 1847. He had lied to his fiance about his income potential and an inheritance that would never arrive. He knew that Marie had seen and become accustomed to a higher, more comfortable way of living and had turned down a second, wealthy suitor for his sake. His bride, Marie De Roux, was a maid for Lady Palk before her marriage, then took a position in the household of Lady Blantyre in London.

It was a peculiar arrangement, the Mannings Marriage. Marie already had a wealthy lover ( the suitor from before her marriage), a businessman named Patrick O’Connor. The affair was never hidden from her husband, in fact, Patrick and Frederick were said to be friends. The trio spent a lot of time together.

Patrick O’Connor was an Irishman and had come to London for work. He did well for himself and by 1849, he had amassed quite the fortune. He had shares in the new railway business.He was well liked by his peers and had many friends. Patrick O’Connor was already considered elderly, though probably only in his fifties or sixties.

Unknown by O’Connor, Frederick and Marie had already decided that they were entitled to his fortune and were putting their plans into motion. Frederick approached his tenant, John Massey and not so subtly mentioned his friend O’Connor quickly followed by questions that should have seemed strange to Massey, but apparently didn’t raise any red flags. These questions included him asking what the effects of chloroform were, and stranger, what kind of narcotics would make someone want to write checks.

Marie was shopping for a shovel and pistol, then picked up a crowbar. The Mannings pried up the flagstones in their first level kitchen and dug a grave in the foundation of the home. Then Marie offered a dinner invitation to Patrick O’Connor. O’Connor had no reason to suspect that anything was wrong. They often had meals together.

When O’ Connor arrived on the night of August 9th, 1849 Marie welcomed him and then directed him into the kitchen where her husband was waiting. I watched the Murder Maps episode on this case and their portrayal was hilarious. The woman playing Marie was trying to be charming and “act natural.” I assume that because everyone who was interviewed during the investigation said that O’Connor was good friends with the Mannings, he wouldn’t have needed to be convinced to step inside. It makes it much sadder to think that he trusted his killers, though. When they got to the kitchen Marie took the pistol from the folds of her dress and fired a single shot into Patrick O’Connor’s head from behind. O’Connor collapsed, a slug wedged in his skull just behind his eye. Somehow, he survived their first attempt at murder. Frederick panicked, took the crowbar and bludgeoned him to death instead. I wasn’t able to find a solid number from any of the research that I did, but it was agreed on by most sources that Frederick struck his victim more than twenty times. When the surgeon finally performed an autopsy, the skull was shattered.

Then the Mannings buried him in the prepared grave, relaid the flagstones and scrubbed the kitchen clean. Some of the sources claimed that they ate that night's meal, sitting over their victim's corpse. Whether that is the truth or not, The Mannings went on with their life in the house above. Marie was known to be close to O’Connor and easily conned her way into his lodgings where she ransacked it. She took anything she deemed valuable, money, jewelry, and of course, his many railway shares.

Days passed and O'Connor's business partners started to notice his absence. Friends hadn’t seen him on the streets. Some of his friends started to ask around. What happened next is convoluted and from my research, I am unconvinced that Marie ever gave her reason for her next move. Some records say that two of O’Connor’s colleagues knew that he planned to visit Manning's home before he vanished. He had also been seen walking to the home. They went to the home to ask the Manning’s about the dinner. Though they had no suspicions, Marie thought they must be undercover constables and became convinced that they had been caught; others say she didn’t want to share her new wealth with her husband. Either way, she packed her things, including the shares and left while Frederick was out. She took a train to Edinburgh and settled into a boarding house. She immediately started to sell off the shares. The fact that she started to sell things so soon after tells me she was less than brilliant. It was 1849, it’s not like they could double check your identity. I assume that if you could basically go by whatever name you wanted to and nobody could prove that you weren’t that person. Marie also had to have known that women owning shares in the railroad wasn’t really a possibility, obviously, people were going to be suspicious.

After discovering that his wife had clearly left, Frederick realized what was bound to follow. He also left London. He got on a steamboat and went to Jersey.

On August 17th, eight days after the murder, police searched the Mannings home. Constables Barnes and Burton came up empty with the first pass. Then they dug up the garden, again finding nothing. They were ready to move on when one of them noticed that the kitchen floor had been scrubbed so many times, the stones were nearly white. Closer inspection revealed new mortar. They used the knives in their pockets to pry the flagstones up. At first, they didn’t see anything, but Barnes noticed a rag and after bringing it to his nose said that it “smelled of death.” The pair kept digging and soon unearthed a human toe. Burton left Barnes alone to keep digging and went to the station for help. I can only imagine they drew straws or something to decide who had to stay behind with the rotting corpse.

Police unearthed a corpse that had been laid naked, face down, with the feet tied tightly to the thighs. I spent an unhealthy amount of time trying to figure out why they would have bothered to strip him naked and tie him up that way. I think the least horrifying reason I came up with is that they didn’t anticipate O’Connor’s height and didn’t have enough room in the grave.

The police also noticed that the crime scene was in full view of the laborers in the saw pit next to the home. None of them could understand how nobody came forward as a witness.

The Mannings hadn’t realized that O’Connor had false teeth and failed to remove them. This led to an easy identification since the dentist who had made the teeth recognized them immediately. The police acted quickly. They used the newly available telegraph to send a telegram to Scottish police after finding witnesses who said Marie had gone to Edinburgh. Edinburgh police arrested her and sent her back to London for her trial. By the time London contacted them, their counterparts in Scotland were already watching her, due to so many reports that this woman was acting strangely. Police retrieved Frederick from Jersey.

Marie and Frederick turned on each other. They were given separate councils despite having a combined trial.

Frederick’s council leaned heavily on the distrust of women and foreigners that was common at the time. Marie was an immigrant with a thick accent and they claimed that the unrelated fact of her swiss birth led to this immorality. Besides, women were friends of the devil in a historical sense. Frederick claimed that he knew nothing of the murder plot but that he found O’Connor dead after Marie killed him and helped, as any dutiful husband would, hide the body.

Marie’s council did the opposite. They played up the common belief that women were helpless and much too emotional to carry out such a bloody act. Marie testified that she loved O’Connor more than anything and that Frederick murdered him out of jealousy.

Both arguments fell short and the men on the jury took less than an hour to declare the Mannings guilty of their crimes. The punishment for murder was death. The sentence seems less severe when you consider that at the time, two hundred and twenty crimes warranted hanging, including being found to spend more than thirty days in the presence of gypsies.

On November 13, between thirty and fifty thousand people surrounded Horsemonger Lane Jail. Children had spent the night before in makeshift camps to guarantee the best view of the gallows. Marie dressed herself in a black satin dress and was led to the prison chapel for a final sacrament alongside her husband. The jailers became impatient and rushed them through it, then marched them up the stairs to the platform where a noose was hanging for each of them.

Marie was stoic as she climbed the steps but Frederick was shaking so badly that they thought they would have to carry him.

The crowd cheered and as the platform fell and Frederick and Marie Manning dropped, snapping their necks. Their bodies hung there for the whole day for onlookers to get their fill. I hope they were killed instantly, if not, strangulation takes up to seven minutes and I can’t imagine a worse death.

In his book covering the Bermondsey Horror called The Woman Who Murdered Black Satin, Albert Borowitz claims that after the very public execution and the sensationalized case led to the steep decline in popularity of black satin soon after. Apparently, women weren’t thrilled about wearing a similar dress to the murderer when they went to dinner parties. Black satin had a resurgence a couple of decades later when Prince Albert was shot and Queen Victoria never wore color again. Borowitz's book is pretty wild if you would like to read it.

Charles Dickens witnessed the execution while renting a room nearby. The case is said to have inspired Bleak House and he wrote a letter to The Times about his experience and disgust towards the fanfare that surrounded it. Dickens wrote, “I believe that 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, and could be presented in no heathen land under the sun.” Dickens had no qualms regarding capital punishment, only public executions. He spent quite a bit of time trying to rid Britain of public hangings. The last public hanging was on May 26th, 1868. Capital Punishment wasn’t abolished in the UK until a hundred years later in 1965.

While doing the research for this story, I very quickly noticed a trend. Frederick eventually admitted to the murder of Patrick O’Connor, though most records mention him as more of an annoying footnote than an equal partner in crime. Marie Manning, in comparison, carries most of the blame, despite Frederick playing a much more violent role in the killing. And while her husband was convicted by a jury of his peers, not a single woman had a hand in her fate.

Marie admitted to her crimes, and certainly deserved punishment for taking a life, but the crowd didn’t gather to watch Frederick die. The fascination was with the death of a woman. And thereafter, women in England adjusted their wardrobe so as not to remind anybody of the feminine similarities to the murderess.

Dickens’ wrote of the day:

“When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, no more pity, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgement, no more restraint in any of the previous obscenities, than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world, and there were no belief among men but that they perished like the beasts.”