On this date in 1903, Edgar Edwards was hanged in Wandsworth Prison for a minor-league* triple murder.
Of course, the killing was anything but trivial to its victims, a Camberwell grocer and his wife along with their infant daughter. The couple put their business up for sale: Edwards answered the ad but had a different transaction in mind. Contriving to separate man and wife in the course of the interview, he bashed Beatrice Darby to death and strangled the infant child. Evidently he had some proficiency wielding a five-pound sash weight. The reader may perceive that this weapon, albeit improvised, is a crueler device than its accessorizing name might suggest.
Having done with the wife, he lured unwitting husband John to his makeshift abattoir and murdered him in the same horrid fashion.
That occurred way back in November, but it wasn’t until Edwards tried the same ploy using the same type of bludgeon** against a London businessman a month later that the earlier homicide unraveled. As the investigation led back to Leyton (thanks in part to Edwards’s foolish possession off John Darby’s business cards) the neighbors all started remembering that he’d been awfully keen about burying something in the garden a few weeks back. Rear Window this ain’t.
The motive for all this was just to take possession of the stock and sell it quietly for ready cash. Edwards had little recourse when captured but to try to draw out a family history of insanity, a ploy could not have impressed jurors much in view off the crime’s calculated ferocity.
* A century and God knows how many murders onward, this crime may be an imperceptible drop in the sea; in its day, however, it earned Edwards wax statuary at Madame Tussaud’s.
** The humble sash weight has its niche in the crime annals; it was also the weapon used by Double Indemnity inspirations Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray.
On this day..
- 1944: Osmund Brønnum
- 1562: Sophie Harmansdochter, "Gele Fye"
- 1882: Dead Shot, Dandy Jim and Skippy, mutinous Apache scouts
- Themed Set: The Ordinary of Newgate
- 1708: Thomas Ellis and Mary Goddard
- 1882: Bob Jones and Billy Miller, murderers on the open road
- 1522: Vicent Peris, of the Revolt of the Brotherhood
- 1676: George Bromham and Dorothy Newman, on the Combe Gibbet
- 1865: Antone Richers, Galveston deserter
- Unspecified Year: Bigger Thomas
- 1955: Gerald Albert Gallego, like father like son
- 1323: Andrew Harclay, too chummy with the Scots
- 1999: Walter LaGrand, a German gassed in America