From John Sadden’s Portsmouth Book of Days (via):

Elizabeth Rowland, of Prince Albert Street, Eastney, Portsmouth, received this letter [on January 19, 1901] from 22-year-old George Hill [George Parker], whom she had been seeing while her soldier husband was serving in India.

Hill was a marine at Eastney Barracks until he was convicted of stealing there.

He was later arrested for murdering a man on a train during an armed robbery.

Dearest Lizzie,

It makes my heart bleed, as I am writing these few lines, to think I shall never see you again, and that you will be alone and miserable now … I always loved you dearly … I am truly sorry and penitent for having, in an evil moment, allowed myself to be carried away into committing murder.

I went and purchased a revolver so that when I came down to Portsmouth I could end both our lives if I had not been successful in obtaining money from my father.

I know you were not happy at home, nor I either, for I have been very unhappy of late, mostly on account of the false charges brought against me at the barracks.

I shall get hung now. I believe I was mad; I know I was drunk.

God help me!

My days are numbered, but I will bear it unflinchingly.

Your broken-hearted sweetheart,

Geo H Hill

Hill was hanged at Wandsworth Prison on March 19, 1901

On this day..

• 1653: Anne Bodenham, "A pox on thee, turn me off"
• 1819: John Van Alstine
• 1824: David Howe, bitter debtor
• 1875: Jesse Fouks, for murdering the Herndon family
• 2015: Four more in Pakistan, but not Shafqat Hussain
• 1330: Edmund of Woodstock, family man
• 1866: John Dunn, teenage bushranger
• 1875: Tiburcio Vasquez, California bandido
• 1906: Pyotr Schmidt, Sevastopol uprising leader
• 1945: Friedrich Fromm, Claus von Stauffenberg's executioner
• 1938: A pig, experimentally
• 1600: Linköping Bloodbath, the dawn of Sweden's glory