Everything Mary Terry was accused of by her husband was false. He complained that she had been sleeping with other men, he even complained that she had given him a sexually transmitted disease. Finally her husband of 10 years, Benjamin Terry, 29, a miner, called his children to him one night in December 1886, and said: Go and fetch the police and tell them Ive just killed your mother.
When the police arrived at their home in Old Basford, Nottingham, they found that Mary, 26, had been beaten to death with a poker and strangled.
Terry told the police that he had been intending to kill Mary for some time, but he was always too drunk. He was sentenced to death on February 5th and hanged on Tuesday, February 22nd, 1887, at Nottingham Prison.