Their marriage had failed and they were living apart – but for Catherine Moore that wasn’t enough. She wanted vengeance on her husband Patrick. With honeyed words, the promise of a good bottle of Irish whisky, and a sharp knife concealed in her blouse, she lured him to a stretch of lonely bogland and murdered him.

Patrick Moore’s body was found a month later, by which time his wife had fled to England. But when the police arrested her mother and sister and charged them with the murder, Catherine returned to Ireland to face the rap.

She and her mother, Mrs. Bridget Thompson, were brought to trial in March 1850, when Catherine pleaded guilty to murder and her mother was given a life sentence for being an accessory after the fact.

Catherine told the court that her husband had made her life a living hell, because he was always drunk and violent. The evidence suggested that the murder was carefully premeditated. She had plied him with whisky to get him drunk, then stabbed him, and finally strangled him. She was hanged on Thursday, April 11th, 1850, outside Maryborough Prison. The town of Maryborough was renamed Portlaoise after partition in 1922.