[London?: 1879?]

This broadside illustrates the very last moment before the execution of Kate Webster: she is already hooded and standing on the trap door with the rope around her neck. Webster was hanged in the ‘execution shed’, a building separate from the main prison at Wandsworth in London in 1879. The scene is drawn in a way reminiscent of a stage set, with clergyman and prison warder in their characteristic dress. Kate Webster’s case had attracted notoriety from its horror: she murdered her elderly employer with an axe and then dismembered and boiled the body. The head was found only as recently as 2010, during excavations in the garden of what had been a nearby stable.

Broadsides.A.87.3