A Dastardly Deed
While desperately searching for items to populate On This Day on our main website, I came across a story which really deserves the TV blockbuster treatment. It has murder, detective work, courtroom drama, a twist and – not entirely inevitably – an execution.
It involves the violent murder by his servant’s hand of the Whig politician Lord William Russell on 5 May 1840. It took place at the peer’s London residence. Members of Russell’s personal staff – Francois Courvoisier (valet) and Sarah Mercer (housemaid) – discovered what appeared to be a burglary and their master’s body the following morning. But the authorities smelled a rat, suspecting an inside job. Courvoisier in particular was in the frame although during his trial he continued to profess his innocence and point the finger at Mercer.
While the evidence was relatively scant, he stood a chance. But when new evidence came to light, he privately confessed to the crime to his barrister while continuing to protest innocence in open court. To no avail. Courvoisier was eventually found guilty and hanged outside Newgate Prison on 6 July 1840.
So what was the motive? It turns out that during his private confession, Courvoisier revealed that Russell had sacked him for theft and his solution to the predicament was this rather ham-fisted staged burglary and murder.
A bit more detail here.
Good story but, for London murder mysteries, *nothing* compares to the killing of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey in 1678. I’d blog separately about it here but the tale is so horrendously intricate and utterly bizarre that it would take me days to try to assemble a half-decent narrative.
The attempt to do so on Wikipedia seems to get numerous important details wrong, from my understanding.
Instead, I’ll cop out and lay down a challenge to you, Mike. Investigate and tell the story here sometime, if you can find the time to unravel enough of the confusion!
If it’ll take you days, Russ, probably take me weeks. Let me look into it. Best thing to do is probably write a full treatment version and publish it on the main web site with a stub and link from here and the monthly newsletter. Thanks for the tip.