“All right, kill me!” shrieked Eliza O’Shea, a 32-year-old soldier’s wife, at her lover, Charles Scott. She had just whacked him on the head with a frying pan, the result of one of their many drunken fights. Now, hands on hips, she defied him mockingly.

Unfortunately for Eliza, Scott, 28, a glassblower of Oxford Road, Windsor, took her at her word. First he stabbed her, and then cut her throat from ear to ear. He told police: “I’ve been walking around all day with two knives and a razor in my pocket, because I thought I might have to kill her.”

He was hanged on Tuesday, November 28th, 1899, at Reading Prison. A contemporary report described him as “maintaining a callous indifference” in the death cell, eating and sleeping well, “and seemingly completely unbothered by his impending doom.”