Mrs. Alice Bradley was violently sick during the night of March 19th, 1842, and when next day the landlord of her lodgings in Golden Street, Manchester, offered some medical advice, her husband Francis rounded on him. “I’ll jump on the guts of anyone who tells me what I can or can’t do with my wife!” he snarled.

The illness persisted over the next few days and the anxious landlord called in a chemist. Bradley was furious when the chemist, eyeing him suspiciously, told him: “You know, if she dies, her body will be opened and examined.”

A few days later Alice Bradley did indeed die, and her body was duly opened. It was riddled with arsenic.

At Bradley’s trial it was revealed that he had had a girl friend who had become pregnant and they planned to emigrate to America. He was hanged on Saturday, September 3rd, 1842, outside Kirkdale Prison.