Young Eliza Barrow liked nothing better than to lighten her dull life with a bit of flirting with the soldiers garrisoned in Derby, where she lived in Agard Street. But this was something calculated to enrage her boy friend, factory worker and local boxer Richard Thorley, 26, who knocked her about unmercifully if she so much as glanced at another man.

In January 1862, he beat her so severely that she told him she never wanted to see him again. But Thorley wasn’t giving up. He stood outside her house beating a drum and calling out, “Come on, let’s have a look at the soldier you’re in bed with tonight.”

When Eliza slammed down her bedroom window in disgust, Thorley went back to his lodgings, fetched a razor, forced his way into her house and cut her throat. Then, covered in blood, he went to the nearest pub and told the barman he had been involved in a fight with an Irish gang. He was convicted of murder and hanged on Friday, April 11th, 1862, outside Derby Prison – the last to be executed in public there.