Wearing her best Sunday clothes and carrying two Bibles, Mary Ann Hall, 23, was on her way home from church when she saw the stalker. He was George Gilbert, 30, and he had been following her for several days “making indecent suggestions as to improper intercourse.”

Mary quickened her pace, but the stalker was fired up with lust. As she reached a stile near her father’s farm, Gilbert caught her. He dragged her 100 yards into a field, ripped off her clothes and, having tried but failed to rape her, pushed her head down into a stream, drowning her.

Gilbert, a convicted rapist, burglar, and highway robber, claimed that he had found the body, but witnesses remembered seeing him following Mary from the church. He confessed at the Hampshire Summer Assizes, and was hanged on Monday, August 4th, 1862, outside Winchester Prison.