The Brides In The Bath

In today's episode I visit the Metropolitan Police Museum, where they have artefacts from 150 years of crime. I interview Dr Clare Smith, the museum's curator, about the collection and focus on "The Brides in the Bath" case in 1915, which involved a bigamous serial killer who managed to turn bathtubs into murder weapons. The interview took place in the same room as an exhibition which includes one of the bathtubs (pictured).  

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to the Total Crime Podcast. This is episode eight. Uh and today I have quite something quite special for you. Because last year at the CrimeCon UK convention in London I met Dr. Claire Smith, who is the m Metropolitan Police's museum curator. And I've been meaning for a while to go and visit her and uh I finally got round to doing it and I think it's really interesting. Uh the focus of today's episode is the so-called Brides in the Bath case, which is more than a hundred years old. Um now I'm gonna be publishing or I have published by now an article on uh my totalcrime.substack dot com, which probably goes into more detail than this podcast, but I think th this is worth doing because you get to hear directly from Doctor Claire Smith herself. But first I'll set the scene. It's January nineteen fifteen, we're a few months into the First World War, and the Metropolitan Police receives a letter from Joseph Crossley in Blackpool, who raises concerns about the similarities between a death in a bathtub at his boarding house and another case in London, which he's read about in the News of the World newspaper. Uh, for younger listeners who may not know, the the News of the World was a tabloid published on a Sunday, which was Britain's biggest newspaper for around a hundred years until its closure in disgrace in twenty eleven as a result of the phone hacking scandal. So in this letter, which the Met gets, uh the guy in Blackpool, Mr. Crossley, uh triggers a whole investigation, and Detective Inspector Arthur Neal decides to follow up and see if there is a connection between the deaths of Alice Burnham in Blackpool and Margaret Lloyd in Highgate in London. And spoiler alert, there are in the end three victims, the third being Bessie Mundy in Hearn Bay in Kent. So the interview starts by me asking Dr. Smith about the history of the Mili Metropolitan Police Museums and then we go into detail about the Brides in the Bath case. Uh I want to apologise for the sound quality because there were some workmen working nearby. We got interrupted a couple of times by the sound of their drill. Uh I hope you can hear what Dr. Smith says. And at the end of the interview, I will come back and briefly give you a summary of what happened at the end of the case. I am here at the um Metropolitan Police Museum uh in an undisclosed location somewhere in South East London with Claire Smith, who is the curator of said museum. Um now, do you want to can you tell me a little bit about the history of uh the various museums associated with the Metropolitan Police?

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Absolutely. So we have two main museums that we care for. We have the Crime Museum, which is based at New Scotland Yard, and dates from 1875. This is a closed training collection for police officers and police staff. The collection includes things like the um evidence from Ruth Elliott's case, the uh Crippin investigation, Haig the Atted Bath murderer. The police museum is open to the public and we tell the story of the Met since 1829. So we talk about officers, staff, equipment, medals that have been won, we have historic vehicles, and we really try and share the story of policing in London.

SPEAKER_00 3:36

Yeah, you've got uh an exhibition of 150 years, and can you tell me about some of the things you've put together in this exhibition?

SPEAKER_01 3:43

Yes, the exhibition celebrates the anniversary of the Crime Museum. In 2025, we turned 150, we did have cake. The exhibition shows some things that the public don't often get to see. So we have evidence connected to Rillington Place murders with John Christie, the blackout ripper, Gordon Cummings, a crossbow that was used by one of the Cray's henchmen, and a bath from the Brides in the Bath Murders.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

Okay, and we're I'm gonna focus on that the Brides in the Bath murders, which you said that um you were surprised at how few people on the exhibition who or visitors actually knew that name. I mean, I that sort of rings it it it's familiar of me, but maybe that's because I'm a bit of a true crime nerd. But um the yeah, it's not you know, hasn't gone down in history like uh Christie or Crippin or other cases like that.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

No, I mean obviously we know these things because we look after the collection, but I'm always surprised with which crimes stay in people's memories and which crimes don't. And nobody really has heard of the Brides in the Bath case. So it's been really interesting for us to share the story and to really focus on not the criminal but how well the investigation was run and how well detective work and forensics work can combine to create a good investigation.

SPEAKER_00 4:59

So can you uh just very briefly run me through uh how the case came to the police's attention and then what uh I think it was Inspector Neil who took it up and uh solved it.

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Yes, so Inspector Neal uh at Scotland Yard received a letter from the family of somebody called Bessie Mundy. She had sadly drowned in her bath very shortly after she married. And there were two other cases of that had happened to similar cases for women. There were uh one in Herne Bay, which was Bessie, one in Blackpool and one in Hampstead, London. And the groom's name in each of these cases was different, so initially they hadn't been linked. However, Bessie's family saw the story of these two other women and found this a bit suspicious, and they wrote to Inspector Neal and asked him to look into it. Now he did, he did, and that's a really I think it's such a good thing that he opened that letter because he did look into it. And what he found was that yes, it was a different name of the groom in each case, but when he checked into the marriage certificates, the handwriting was the same on each one. So he began to suspect it was the same man using multiple aliases. He found out that the insurance money for the latest victim hadn't yet been collected, and he decided that he would go and stake out the office of the solicitor to see the man approaching. What I find really interesting is that Bessie herself actually helped solve her murder because unbeknownst to her husband, she had sent a photograph of the two of them to her family. So Inspector Neil knew who he was looking for. The real name of the man he was looking for was George Joseph Smith, and I we'd be here for hours if we went through all of his aliases. He had bigamously married multiple women and murdered three of them. When Inspector Neil saw him approach the solicitor's office, he was arrested, but initially only on charges relating to marriage fraud. He denied that any that he'd committed murder. What I find just baffling is that he admits that he's the same groom in each case, but he's just really unlucky that three of his wives are drowned in the same way. And this is where Bernard Spellsbury comes into the case, uh famous pathologist, and it was his job to prove murder. He exhumed the bodies of the women, but no marks were found on them, no bump on the head, no strangulation, no bruises. It might be quite surprising to people that we have a bath in our collection, but the reason is this was a really important piece of evidence, as it's essentially a murder weapon. The investigation really focused on whether somebody could drown in a bath without a mark being left. The bath from Blackpool and from Hamstead was taken to the labs of uh Bernard Spillsbury and he had some women who volunteered, possibly in quotation marks, to be drowned to see how you could do this. Um apparently he got a bit carried away and one of them had to be revived. But he worked it out. If you are stood at the foot of a bath, you can grab the ankles of the person in the bath and pull. You don't need to be very forceful, so you won't leave a bruise. They will slide under the water, and when your legs are elevated, it's really hard to get purchased to get back up. So you can drown somebody without leaving a mark on them.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Don't try this at home, and the police are well onto it, so if you try it, you're gonna get caught and uh banged up.

SPEAKER_01 8:11

And apologies if you never have a relaxing bubble bath again.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Yeah, so yeah, amazingly, that is how he wasn't m sort of holding his brides down in the bath. He was literally sort of yanking them. They suddenly um sort of went unconscious after taking in loads of water and and you know, then drowned sort of naturally.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

Yes. I mean we think that as he pulled the legs, probably what happened is they would open their mouths to scream, which would mean water would rush in more quickly. I never want to admire a criminal, but this is a really clever way of murdering someone.

SPEAKER_00 8:47

Yeah, and and he he could have got away with it for years. Uh he could have had many more victims.

SPEAKER_01 8:52

Yes, I mean I have no proof of this, but I would be really surprised if he had only three victims. He never admitted his guilt, so we never knew exactly why he did this or how many other women. I do think Inspector Neil saved lives because he had a good scheme going and he would have kept going with it.

SPEAKER_00 9:09

Yeah, I mean and this is uh sort of 1914, 1915, that was sort of the era when there was a lot of people emigrating to, you know, America, Canada, he could easily have sort of gone over there and then sort of carried it on, going from state to state, you know.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

Definitely, and he was used to using false names. Um, this wasn't an era where you couldn't Google somebody, you couldn't look them up on social media, you had to believe they were who they said they were.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

Yeah, and like you say, that photograph which I've just seen in the museum here is you know, which uh his um one of his wives, bigamous wives, um, took of them. That was kind of the only way of proving that he was the same George Smith they had.

SPEAKER_01 9:51

And the only way the only way they knew who to look for, because that it wasn't his real name, they didn't know who he was. I find it really comforting that Betty had a hand in bringing him to justice.

SPEAKER_00 10:01

Yeah, yeah, it's great that she did. And what happened to him then?

SPEAKER_01 10:05

Uh so he was um at the time he would only be charged with one murder. It didn't matter how many you committed, you were only charged with one murder was a capital offence. And he pleads not guilty and he always maintains that he's innocent. He's just very, very unlucky. Now the jury have none of this. I think it's 22 minutes that they take to find him guilty, and he is then convicted and executed.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

And in the old days, uh the judge at the old Bailey would put on their black cap.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

The black cap would have come out for him, yes, absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 10:35

And uh I imagine they didn't mess about it, it was probably uh only a few months later that he was.

SPEAKER_01 10:40

Yes, it was a very quick turnaround at the time. Even if you put in an appeal, it did not take a long time to get you to the gallows.

SPEAKER_00 10:47

But he does not sound like he was a victim of any miscarriage of justice.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Definitely not. Um I think to try and claim that it's just bad luck that three of your wives die in exactly the same way, yes, that's that's not a miscarriage of justice. He was a predator. He was targeting women for their money, and he was taking advantage of the fact that often these were women who in their late twenties were viewed by society as being past marriage age. So I I think he sadly took advantage of then their desire for a marriage.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

And uh two just two more questions I wanted to ask you. One is about the offence of bigamy, which I think at the time was quite serious. I mean, I think I'm not sure whether that is that still an offence?

SPEAKER_01 11:27

It is still an offence, yes, and it is serious because in previously it was often tied up with property. You know, if you have multiple wives and multiple husbands, when you come to die, who inherits everything? But it is fraud. It's so it is a serious offence. And as I say, he we don't know either why he sometimes only married these women and stole from them, and then why he chose to murder three. We don't know his thinking as why he didn't either murder all of them or none of them.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Um and the one last thing, the this bathtub uh here in the museum, uh, which is a very old sort of cast iron um bathtub, um which has stood the test of time quite well.

SPEAKER_01 12:06

It has, yes.

SPEAKER_00 12:07

It's still got some initials on it. Can you explain what they are?

SPEAKER_01 12:10

Yes, um, so one of the murders happened in London, and initially the collection assumed that the bath had been donated to us because it was part of the London case. Obviously, with the Met we cover London. When I was researching the exhibition, I found a letter in our archive um that there were some initials scratched on the bath, and they belonged to a police officer from Blackpool who brought the bath down for Spillsbury, and apparently the story is he scratched his initials on it to make sure the Met didn't steal it from Blackpool Police. I'm really sorry, Blackpool Police, we stole it. I'm so sorry, but no, you can't have it back.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

And there is also an interesting story with the other bath from Hearn Bay. What did Smith do with that?

SPEAKER_01 12:49

So um in Hearn Bay, the bath, he actually had bought it from an ironmonger's because the house, the guest house they were staying in didn't have a bath. After the murder of Bessie, he actually took it back for a refund. So on that murder, he was cost negative.

SPEAKER_00 13:03

Yeah, he he really was all about money, wasn't he?

SPEAKER_01 13:06

He was, he was a horror.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

Yeah. Okay, well, thank you very much for joining us.

SPEAKER_01 13:10

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

So that was Dr. Claire Smith explaining the ins and outs of the brides in the bath case. Uh as we stood just yards away from one of the tubs, uh the one from Blackpool itself. And as he was saying, it was a very quick turnaround in those days. They really didn't mess around. So this is the uh chronology from the first letter from Mr. Crossley in Blackpool that arrived in January 1915. By March 1915, George Smith had been charged with Bessie's murder. He went on trial in June, uh, and then the judge, Mr. Justice Scrutton, summed up the case, told the jury of a let twelve men, it was only men in those days, uh, on juries, that it is for the prosecution to satisfy you that it was a designed death. If at the end of it, considering all the evidence, considering the coincidences, you yet are doubtful whether it is not accidental. It is your duty to acquit the prisoner. He is entitled to the benefit of the doubt. Having said that, the jury retired at 2.48 p.m. We're back at 3.10 p.m. guilty, said the foreman of the jury when asked for the jury's verdict. That was on the first of July 1915. Smith was sentenced to death by Mr. Justice Scrutton, putting on the famous uh black cap that they used to uh have to do at executions. And on the 13th of August 1915, Smith was hanged at Maidstone Prison in Kent. Um Vanity Fair magazine recently republished an article online from their archives about the Brides and the Bath case. It was written in 1925, ten years after Smith was hanged, by Edmund Pearson, who was one of the first writers who worked in the true crime genre. He worked on cases like Lizzie Borden in in America. He said Smith invented a new way to commit murder, and one which enabled him to face coroners' juries and come forth triumphant without a stain on his character. I have heard a writer of detective novels, one with a lively fancy, begging for a new kind of murder. Yet this new stodgy Mr. Smith, without the imagination of a green grocer, brackets notoriously a duller profession than any other colour of grocer, brackets, thought out in minute detail a most successful plan for homicide, and only went to ruin because, like so many great artists, he could not resist one more farewell appearance. And with that, I bid you good goodbye. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and will join me again next week on the Total Crime podcast.