“I cannot plead not guilty,” 28-year-old Thomas Bone told the judge at Glasgow’s High Court. “I have a higher power to face than you, my lord, and for that I am prepared to plead guilty.”

He was charged with the murder of his wife Agnes, 21, found with her throat cut on a lonely road near Glenbuck, Ayrshire, on APRIL 2nd, 1908.

The judge, Lord Ardwell, told the court that as far as he knew it was unprecedented for a man to plead guilty to murder in a Scottish court, and Bone’s plea would therefore be ignored.

The court was then told that Bone had been extremely jealous, and would follow his wife to her work. He had already served a prison sentence for creating disturbances at her various places of employment, but this hadn’t stopped him from following her to work yet again, this time slitting her throat.

Convicted of murder, Bone was sentenced to be hanged at Ayr Prison on May 29th. Twelve hours before he was due to go to the scaffold, he was reprieved and his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

He committed suicide in prison 11 years later…by cutting his throat.