The Maid Who Sold Her Mistress as Dripping

In February 1879, Kate Webster was fired from her position as domestic servant to Julia Thomas, a 54-year-old widow in Richmond, Surrey. During a fight that month, Webster threw Thomas down the stairs, strangled her, then dismembered the body with an axe. She boiled the remains in the household laundry copper for days to reduce them to manageable components, then bundled what remained and threw it into the Thames. She kept the fat. According to neighbors and later testimony, Webster went door to door selling what she described as excellent lard and dripping — Victorian cooking fat used for frying and spreading on bread. The *Daily Telegraph* claimed she had attempted to sell jars of it to the landlady of a local pub. A street urchin said she had offered him a bowl as charity. None of this was proven in court, but the stories swept the nation. Webster had meanwhile been telling new acquaintances that she had inherited Mrs. Thomas's house from "a dear aunt," and was negotiating to sell the furniture. She sold her victim's gold bridgework, teeth still attached. She was still wearing Thomas's dress and jewelry when arrested in Ireland two weeks later. The trial lasted six days. The Crown Prince of Sweden, future King Gustaf V, attended in person. Webster was convicted and hanged on July 29, 1879. In 2010, during excavations at a Richmond garden, a skull was unearthed. Low collagen levels, consistent with boiling, confirmed it as Julia Thomas's head.