BRIDES IN THE BATH

George Joseph Smith was an English bigamist (technically, a septgamist, since he had seven wives at once) who plied his craft about 100 years ago. He was also a serial killer famous for his participation in the "Brides in the Bath" murders, where he killed three of his wives by drowning them in bathtubs and making the deaths look like they were from natural causes--i.e. that each victim drowned in the tub while in the throes of an epileptic fit.

Smith's undoing is a prime example of the axiom that "when a pig becomes a hog, it gets slaughtered." Individually, none of the deaths caught the attention of the authorities, and none of them were initially suspected as homicides. It was only when the police discovered that the same man was married to three different women who all died in the tub that they became really suspicious.

However, the Home Office Pathologist Bernard Spilsbury could not find any appreciable markings on the bodies consistent with the struggle which would have resulted from an unwilling drowning victim, nor could he locate any evidence that the victims were drugged prior to their immersion. He did drowning experiments using volunteer female divers but could not immerse the heads of any of them under water without violent resistance which would have left tell-tale bruising. Finally, he suddenly pulled on the ankles of one of the divers, forcing her head underwater. She instantly fell into shock and lost consciousness, and Spilsbury had an apprehensive half-hour trying to resuscitate her before he succeeded.

As a result of Spilsbury's experiments and the testimony of the female diver (who apparently was a good sport about the whole incident), Smith was convicted of the three murders and executed in 1915.

Photo by Yannick Trottier through Wickimedia Commons