Wax Museum: statues of notorious criminals unknown and their horrific crime stories

In addition to famous criminals, the hall also contains statues of a number of murderers, whose names may not mean anything today, and no one knows them.

But as many creators of true-crime TV series and movies, old and new, have recently realized, well-known crime stories starring some of the most famous serial killers aren’t necessarily the most horrific and intriguing.

So who were the murderers chosen by Madame Tussauds, but about whom the world today knows almost nothing? What terrible crimes did they commit?

In November 1876, two brothers were put on trial for the shooting death of policeman Nicholas Cook during a botched robbery in Manchester. One of them was convicted, and sentenced to death, William Habron, who was 19 years old.

But the real killer was a professional thief named Charles Pace, who had committed a series of robberies, and was then a resident of Sheffield.

According to the statements of some of those who attended the trial, Bess was the real killer, sitting among them witnessing the conviction of another person for his crime.

The day after the young man’s conviction, Pace shot dead a former neighbor of his in Sheffield, Arthur Dyson. The reason is that Bess was in love with his neighbor’s wife.

This time, there were no doubts about the identity of the perpetrator, allowing Bess to escape punishment, so he fled and disappeared from sight, becoming the first wanted person for justice in England.

Pace appeared after a while in London, but impersonating another Thompson, and continued his criminal activity. In October 1878 he was arrested after shooting a police officer during a robbery. He was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison.

But Pace’s mistress, for some reason, decided to tell the police his real name, and after revealing his identity, Pace was sent to Sheffield to stand trial for the murder of his former neighbor.

While Pace was on the train heading north to Sheffield, he climbed to the roof of the train through one of the windows in an attempt to escape, but one of the guards grabbed him from the ankle at the last moment, while another account says that he was found unconscious next to the railway line after he succeeded in throwing himself from the train.

Pace was sentenced to death for the murder of his neighbour, and while awaiting execution in Armley Prison in Leeds in 1879, confessed to having killed Constable Cook.

Fortunately for William Habron, his death sentence had been reduced to life imprisonment, and the young man was released.

As the dawn of the first day of 1911 dawned, until the body of 48-year-old real estate owner Leon Byron was found in the Clapham Coman neighborhood in south London, and it was clear that he had been stabbed several times, brutally beaten, and carved on one side of his face the shape of a letter (S). ).

Steeney Morrison has been charged with the murder, and the prosecution said the 29-year-old lured Byron into a taxi and killed him after stealing what he had with him.

But the defendant’s lawyers argued at the time that the killing was carried out by a group of Russians, and that the mark engraved on Peron’s face referred to the word “spy”.

But Morrison, who was found in possession of the dead man’s golden watch, was eventually found guilty and sentenced to death.

Then Home Secretary Winston Churchill amended the sentence to life imprisonment, and Morrison died in prison after 10 years due to his hunger strike.

On 24 October 1890, Mary Eleanor Percy, who was using the surname of her former partner John Charles Percy, invited her friend Phoebe Hogg to her lodgings in north London.

Later that day, Hogg was found dead, lying on a sidewalk in a street in Hampstead, north London, and her skull had been brutally smashed from her neck.

Mary Eleanor, then 24, was having a secret affair with Phoebe’s husband.

The next day, the body of the victim’s daughter, an 18-month-old girl, was found dumped in a field about 1.6 km from her mother’s body. It was evident that she had been strangled.

The girl’s stroller was also found heavily stained with blood in a street in the area. Eyewitnesses said that they saw Mary Eleanor pushing the cart through the streets, and it was said that she had transported Phoebe’s body with the cart, and under it was the body of her child, after she had thrown a blanket over them.

When the police broke into Mary Eleanor’s house to search her, she was playing the piano and singing. When they asked her about the blood splattered about the room, and the bloody knife and stove stirrer, she is said to have answered, singing aloud, “Mice-kill! Mice-kill! Mice-kill!”

Mary Eleanor insisted that she was innocent throughout her trial, but she was found guilty of murder, sentenced to death by hanging, and executed in Newgate Prison on December 23, 1890.

News of Mary Eleanor Percy’s horrific crime spread, and her name became known to all in London.

It was reported that on the day set for the unveiling of her wax statue at Madame Tussauds, three days after her execution, a crowd of more than 30,000 people gathered and blocked Marylebone Road, where the museum is located, and were scrambling to have a chance. Watch the statue of the famous killer.

George Joseph Smith, convicted of killing three women, was executed by hanging in Maidstone Prison on 13 August 1915.

The three victims, Bessie Mundy, Alice Burnham and Margaret Lofty, were killed by drowning in bathtubs, shortly after their marriage to Smith, who at one point had two wives together.

Smith married several women in different cities of Britain over a period of several years, and in some cases he would take out insurance policies in his wives’ names, or get them to add his name to their wills.

The police were initially baffled by the death of the three women by drowning in relatively small bathtubs, without traces of any struggle or attempt to save oneself, until Bernard Spilsbury, a forensic specialist at the Home Office, received the cases.

Spilsbury tested the bathtubs with professional female scuba divers in an attempt to solve the mystery. But when one of them raised her ankles during the tests, she passed out almost instantly, demonstrating the precise method Smith used to kill his victims.

melted corpses with acid

Between 1944 and 1949 John Hay murdered six people in London by beating them to death for financial gain. The dead were: William McSwan and his parents Donald and Amy McSwan, Archibald Henderson and his wife Rosalie, and Olive Durand Deacon.

In order to get rid of the bodies and evidence, John Hay threw the bodies of all his victims into a large barrel filled with sulfuric acid, which has the property of dissolving organic matter.

Hay was eventually caught by the police, and he confessed to the murders, but pleaded insanity, claiming to have drunk a cup of his victims’ blood.

He apparently believed that he could not be found guilty of murder because the bodies of his victims had not been found.

The jury in Hay’s trial only took minutes to decide that he was guilty, and sentenced him to death by hanging, and the sentence was carried out in Wandsworth Prison in London.

John Hay had bequeathed his suit and shoes to Madame Tussauds, and seemed certain that she would include him in her collection of serial killers.

Artists working with Madame Tussauds around the time Mary Eleanor Percy’s murder took place would go to the courts, attend trials, paint portraits of those accused of horrific crimes, get their wax figures ready in time, with the aim of making the most of the public’s morbid passion for murder stories. .

In a way, newspapers have always capitalized on this kind of crime interest, historian and archivist Zoe Luca Richards explains.

The idea of ​​the “room of horrors” originated in a hall called the “Cave of the Chief Thieves”, created by Philip Curtius in Paris in 1783, says Luca Richards.

And she adds, “Curtius was basically the teacher supervising Marie Tussauds (Madame Tussauds), and it was he who taught her to make wax statues … and the Cave of the Great Thieves was doing exactly what the Chamber of Horrors did later, which is making statues of the major criminals in French society in the late eighteenth century.” , to be displayed in a hall adjacent to the hall in which his other statues depicting famous people are displayed.

Tussauds inherited the gallery of wax figures from Curtius. In 1802, Tussauds took her works on a tour around Britain, and then decided to establish a permanent center for her in London, which is the Wax Museum or Madame Tussauds Museum.

The museum includes statues that are difficult to differentiate from the original of the most famous personalities in the world in the fields of history, politics, science, literature and art of all kinds. Madame Tussauds has allocated an area dedicated to displaying the most evil and intriguing statues of criminals.

“It is clear that when Marie Tussaud started working, she was very interested in the sensational news covered by the press,” says Luca Richards.

And she adds, “The high demand that we see today for watching documentaries about real crimes and things like that has always existed.” It is the result of people’s passion for the strange and shocking, even if the way the stories are presented or presented differs.

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