Victorian Unsolved

Victorian Unsolved: The Burton Crescent Mystery

Step back in time to the dangerous streets of 19th-century London, where suspicions fall on a former servant as a woman is brutally murdered in her own home

In our last story, we delved into the Euston Square Mystery, where Hannah Dobbs was suspected of murdering a lodger at the house where she worked. The story enthralled the Victorian press with sensational claims of multiple killings, love affairs, and vile brutality. However, it wasn’t the only mysterious killing in Bloomsbury during the era.

Just a ten-minute walk away, Burton Crescent was, like much of Bloomsbury, transforming from a professional and middle-class area into one where lodging houses were beginning to become prevalent. By the 1870s, the area was potentially dangerous, with brothels popping up and the kind of characters that Whitechapel was far more famous for started to appear in the locality. This change in the atmosphere brought a new level of crime to the area, with the Euston Square victim Matilda’s Hacker vanishing in 1877 and the first Burton Crescent Mystery in 1878. It would be far from the end, with The Harley Street Mystery in 1880 and the Second Burton Crescent Mystery in 1884. All women, all…