In January 1915 Divisional Detective Inspector Arthur Neil of the Metropolitan Police received a letter from Joseph Crossley, who kept a boarding house in Blackpool. It enclosed two newspaper cuttings. One, from the News of the World at Christmas 1914, reported the death of a new bride, Margaret Elizabeth Lloyd, who had drowned in her bath in a lodging house in Highgate. The other was about a death in Crossley's own house a year earlier: Alice Burnham, a young bride, drowned in her bath in December 1913. Alice's father, Charles Burnham, had also written to the police. The two deaths were identical.
The husband in both was George Joseph Smith. He was born in Bethnal Green on January 11, 1872, the son of an insurance agent, and had a record of theft and fraud from childhood. From 1898 he lived by marrying women of modest independent means under a series of names, George Rose Smith, Oliver Love, Charles Oliver James, Henry Williams, John Lloyd, taking what they had and leaving. He married Caroline Thornhill in 1898 under a false name and never divorced her; only one of his wives, Edith Pegler, whom he married in July 1908, knew him by his real name, and she stayed with him on and off to the end.
Three of the women died. Bessie Constance Mundy, thirty-one, whose uncle administered a trust of 2,500 pounds for her, married him as Henry Williams in 1910. In July 1912, at Herne Bay, he took her to a doctor, told him she had had a fit, and a few days later reported her drowned in the bath; she had made a will in his favor days before. Alice Burnham, twenty-five, was insured shortly before she drowned at Blackpool on December 12, 1913. Margaret Lofty, thirty-eight, a clergyman's daughter, married him as John Lloyd and drowned at Highgate on December 18, 1914, the day after she too had been taken to a doctor. Each time he arranged the money in his favor, reported the death, wept, and insisted on the cheapest possible burial. Each inquest found an accident or a fit.
He was arrested in north London on February 1, 1915 and charged with murder on March 23. Inspector Neil confronted him with his aliases; Smith later denied the confession the inspector said he made. The Home Office pathologist Bernard Spilsbury had the three bodies exhumed and demonstrated how a woman could be drowned in a bath without a struggle or a mark, by a sudden pull on the feet that took her head under the water.
The trial opened at the Old Bailey on June 22, 1915 before Mr. Justice Scrutton, a commercial lawyer recently appointed to the bench. English law allowed Smith to be tried for one death only, and the Crown chose Bessie Mundy. On the second morning the prosecution's leading counsel, Archibald Bodkin, asked, in the jury's absence, to put in evidence the deaths of Alice Burnham and Margaret Lofty as proof of a system. Smith's counsel, Sir Edward Marshall Hall, assigned to him under the Poor Prisoners' Defence Act, argued that the pattern could not be used to prop up a case that could not stand on its own. Scrutton let the evidence in. Smith did not give evidence. The trial lasted nine days, and the jury took about twenty minutes to convict him.
Marshall Hall appealed on the ground that the evidence of system had been wrongly admitted. The Court of Criminal Appeal, presided over by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Reading, dismissed the appeal: it was too improbable that three new wives should drown accidentally in the bath soon after financial arrangements that benefited the husband. The decision, R v Smith (1915) 11 Cr App R 229, became a foundation of the English law on similar-fact evidence. Smith was hanged at Maidstone prison on August 13, 1915 by the executioner John Ellis.