would hear the preparations for his execution going on, so she was removed to Holloway Gaol till it was over, passing, as she left the prison, along the courtyard with Neill's grave at her feet; when she was brought back her own was ready, but mercifully she saw neither of them. It may be of interest to pass in review the cases of some of the most notorious criminals who have been associated with Newgate. We will begin with the story of Catherine Hayes, the authoress of one of the most revolting murders ever perpetrated, and herself one of the latest victims of the law of petty treason. This woman was married to an industrious workingman, whose life' she made miserable by her violent and quarrelsome temper; after one of her out bursts she determined to take Hayes's life. There were two lodgers in the house, one, Billings who was either her lover or her illegitimate son; the other, Wood, who was with great difficulty persuaded to take part in the crime. The plot was simple enough; the husband was made drunk, if not drugged, and as he lay on his bed in a stupor, Billings fractured his skull with a hatchet while Wood finished the murder by a few extra blows. There remained the question how the corpse was to be got rid of. The first thing was to decapitate it; this Wood effected with a pocket knife, then Catherine Hayes sug gested that it should be boiled, but this ghastly proposal was not adopted, and ulti mately the head was thrown, by Billings and Wood, into the Thames. That noble, if somewhat dirty river, declined, however, to be the means of concealing what had been done. The head of the murdered man kept floating near the shore, was picked up by a watchman, handed over to the parish officers, and stuck on the top of a pole in the church yard of St. Margaret's, Westminster. Mean while, the murderers, all unconscious of the evidence against them with which the Thames had just supplied the authorities, dismem bered the trunk, packed the pieces in a box
and conveyed it to Marylebone; where they threw the parts one by one into a pond. The head, however, was soon identified, and the police were set on Catherine Hayes's track. The conflicting versions of her hus band's absence which she gave to different people led to her arrest. When she was brought into the presence of her murdered husband's head, her conduct, says Major Griffiths in his admirable " Chronicles of Newgate" (p. 103), passes belief. "Taking the glass in which it had been preserved into her arms, she cried, ' It is my dear husband's head! ' and shed tears as she embraced it. The surgeon having taken the head out of the case, she kissed it rapturously, and begged to be indulged with a lock of his hair." The dis covery of the body, which quickly followed, however, with the confessions of Billings and Wood, who were subsequently arrested, speedily reduced all posturings of this descrip tion to their true proportions, and all three prisoners were convicted and sentenced to death. By the law then in force ( 1726 ) burn ing alive was the punishment for the crime of petty treason, which consisted in the murder of a person to whom the murderer owed special obedience, as when a servant killed his master, a wife her husband, or an ecclesi astic his superior. Mrs. Hayes was actually burnt alive, as the fire reached the hands of the hangman and compelled him to let go the rope by which it was usual to strangle the victim in such cases before burning her. Petty treasons were put on the same footing as other felonies by 30 Geo. III. c. 48 and 9 Geo. IV. c. 31. Another fiend in female shape was Sarah Malcolm, a laundress in the Temple, who murdered an aged lady named Duncombe, to whose rooms she had access as char woman, and two servants who lived with Mrs. Duncombe, for the sake of obtaining posses sion of her property. She was committed to Newgate but executed at Tyburn. When accused felons stood mute of malice they suffered what was called the peine forte
