People generally kill for love, jealousy, financial or sexual gain. Not Peter Wade, a 23-year-old labourer. He killed 70-year-old Dublin gardener Patrick Quinn simply because he didn’t like the derogatory way Quinn spoke about a mutual friend.

Wade persuaded another friend to knock on Quinn’s door, determined, as he put it, “to teach the old man a lesson,” and when Quinn came to the door he dragged him into the street and kicked him to death. He was hanged on Tuesday, January 15th, 1884, at Dublin’s Kilmainham Prison.