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most bizarre incidents in the history of forensic detection, she lifted the now seriously decomposed head from the jar by its hair and kissed it passionately on the lips. She then asked for a lock of her dead husband’s hair. The constable refused, telling her the head was bloody and that she already had enough blood on her hands. Perhaps realizing that her dramatic display had not fooled anyone, Catherine then passed out.
    Thomas Wood proved to be the weak link in the group. When questioned he quickly broke and confessed that he and Thomas Billings had both been Catherine’s lovers. Tired of her husband’s “mean spirits,” Catherine had persuaded the two men to murder him. They got him drunk on six pints of wine so that he fell asleep, at which point Billings hit him over the head with a pickaxe. Wood was then handed the hatchet and told to finish the job, thus ensuring that he was fully involved in the murder. He struck John Hayes across the head several times, until they were sure he was dead. They then put his head above a bucket and sawed it from his shoulders using a sharp carving knife. Catherine wanted to boil the head in order to destroy its features, but this was deemed a step too far by Wood and Billings and they refused to do it. Instead they took it away in a bucket and threw it onto the foreshore of the River Thames. They then returned home and dismembered the rest of the body before throwing the bits into a pond in Marylebone. When the pond was dredged, the rest of the body was indeed discovered.
    Catherine Hayes was not to be charged with murder but rather “petty treason”—her husband was supposed to be her lord and master, and she had rebelled against him. The penalty for this was not hanging but the far worse fate of being burnt at the stake. On learning this, Catherine finally confessed her part in events while trying to pin the crime on Wood and Billings. However, this made little difference and she was condemned to be burnt.
    While being held in prison, Catherine attempted to poison herself, no doubt hoping for a less painful end. The attempt, however, failed, and on May 9, 1726, she was duly burnt alive at Tyburn, where the Marble Arch now stands. It was normalpractice to strangle the condemned before the flames reached them, an act of mercy, but in Catherine’s case the executioner burnt his hands while throttling her and so was unable to complete the work. She survived the flames for longer than anyone could have imagined. It was said that her screams could be heard all over London. She was the last woman in England to be burnt alive for petty treason (although the bodies of women were burnt after execution until 1790).
    As for the amorous, murderous lodgers: Thomas Billings was hanged in chains in Marylebone Fields, close to the pond where he had dumped John Hayes’s body. Thomas Wood avoided the gallows by dying of fever in prison.
    In this case the correct identity of the victim was established serendipitously by a few people who knew him seeing the severed head while it was on display. However, we can well imagine that without this good luck, the culprits might have escaped punishment for their crime. Equally, if the head had been boiled as Catherine Hayes had wished, then even those who knew him well would almost certainly not have been able to make an identification. Better methods were needed, though their development would take more than a hundred years.
    One of the major problems that continued to confront the police was the issue of how to identify habitual thieves. A man arrested in, say, Nottingham, might already be wanted for crimes in London, Liverpool, or Norwich but would escape punishment for them because the authorities had no way of making this connection. Advances in transport infrastructure, such as the growing railway system, only exacerbated the situation: criminals were now able to move quickly around the countryto commit crimes in