A predilection for violence and for sleeping with older women was the preferred lifestyle of Joseph Connor, and it brought him to the gallows outside Newgate on Monday, JUNE 2nd, 1845. Connor, a 20-year-old Irishman, slept regularly with a woman of 60; another woman with whom he habitually had sex was Mary Brothers, a prostitute.

Connor and Mrs. Brothers went to a brothel at 11 George Street, St. Giles, in central London on March 31st, 1845. As soon as Mary took off her bonnet and shawl Connors began hitting her around the head, then stabbed her through the back of the neck, and all over her breasts and back. As she fell dying he left his knife embedded in one of her wounds.

He told the police who arrested him that Mary had given him a venereal disease, but this turned out to be untrue. At his Old Bailey trial he was described as “weak-minded,” and the court was told that he had stabbed to death his mother’s cat and pet bird in one of his periodic outbursts of violence.