Early in 1879 a murder was committed at Richmond which for callousness and savagery has few parallels. The affair became known as ‘the Barnes Mystery,’ because of the discovery at Barnes of a box containing human remains.
Prior to March, 1879, Kate Webster, save to the very few, was utterly unknown; then suddenly the public learned that living in their midst was the grimmest of grim personalities, a character so uniquely sinister and barbaric as to be hardly human.