Few Victorians could have been more ungracious than Frederick Andrews, 45. He didnt work, but sent his live-in lover, Mrs. Frances Short, a widow 10 years his senior, out selling fruit and vegetables from a market stall to support him. When she got back to their Kensington home at the end of the day he regularly beat her up.
One day in March 1899 he went further still, cutting her throat and stabbing her more than 40 times with his pen-knife. As she lay in a pool of blood on their kitchen floor he collected her clothes and went out to pawn them.
Andrews was convicted at the Old Bailey and hanged on Wednesday, May 3rd, 1899, at Wandsworth Prison.