On the night of NOVEMBER 17th, 1928, police were called to a house in Loddiges Road, Hackney, where the body of a young woman lay face-down on the kitchen floor. Her feet were tied together with an apron, her hands were bound behind her back, her head was covered with a child’s jersey and a tablecloth, and she was dead.

The owner of the house, Mr. Nathan Markovich, said she was Annie Elizabeth Hatton, his 18-year-old housemaid, and detectives learned she had been seeing a 25-year-old man named Frank Hollington, who had disappeared. They were unable to trace him until November 29th, when they went to an address in Warner Place, Bethnal Green, and he answered their knock on the door.

“Don’t make a noise,” he said. “I don’t want my father to hear. I know what you have come about. It is the girl.”

He had gone to see Annie, he said, and they’d quarrelled about her going out with another man. In his anger he struck her, she lost consciousness, and he panicked, tying her up and ransacking the house to make the crime look like a burglary.

At the Old Bailey in January 1929 his defence counsel sought a manslaughter verdict, but Hollington was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. There was no recommendation to mercy, leave to appeal was refused, and as he awaited execution he told his father, “Yes, dad, I did it, but you must realise I did not do this thing with the intention of harming her in that manner. I just lost my temper and hit her.”

He was hanged on February 20th, 1929.