Murder Most Foul
On 16 April 1765, Mr James House Knight returning to his home in Walham Green from a trip to London was robbed and murdered on the Fulham Road near Little Chelsea. A reward of fifty pounds was offered for the conviction of his murderers.

On 7 July, two Chelsea pensioners were charged with the murder on the evidence of their accomplice, another Chelsea pensioner. The accused were found guilty, hanged and gibbeted (tarred and hung in chains) - one in Walnut Tree Walk, now Redcliffe Gardens.

The bodies of the felons remained gibbeted for some years. They were eventually removed when, late one night, two drunk clergyman hung their cabdriver (who they felt had been driving too slowly), up next to the gibbetted corpse. The next morning, his screams for help had a predictable effect on passers-by

Murder in the Finborough Road
Finborough Road itself has seen two murders in modern times.

The 1948 Murder
In 1948, in the first floor flat at 17 Finborough Road, George Epson, a 41 year old recently widowed engineer, killed Winifred Mulholland, a prostitute he had picked up in Piccadilly Circus. According to his subsequent statement to the police, she stole nine pounds from him. They fought, and he hit her with such force that she staggered back, hitting her head on the mantelpiece so hard it killed her. He kept the body in the bedroom for a couple of days, and then, on the night of 5 May 1948, threw it over the balcony into the basement area where it was found next morning. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to death, but was reprieved as Parliament had imposed a year ban on capital punishment as part of a debate on its future.

Ruby Young Should Be Hung
At the turn of the century, one of the upstairs rooms at 13 Finborough Road was the home and business premises of upper class prostitute Ruby Young. In 1907, she was the star witness for the prosecution at the trial of her former lover, Robert Wood, for the murder of Emily Dimmock, also known as Phyllis, also a prostitute, in Camden Town. To the great delight of everyone who had not bothered to read the evidence, Wood was acquitted, mainly through the efforts of the legendary barrister Sir Edward Marshall Hall. The case was the first in British legal history where a defendant had spoken for himself in the witness box and been acquitted. There was great ill feeling towards Ruby Young and her testimony, and she had to be smuggled from the Old Bailey in the clothes of one of the courts charwomen, as a mob screamed "Ruby Young/Should be hung". She decided not to return to 13 Finborough Road, and fled to the country. The murder of Phyllis Dimmock, which remained unsolved, was later the subject for a play Somebody Knows by John van Druten.

The Pantry Boy and the Toff
In 1922, in the basement flat of the same house, 13a Finborough Road, one of the most infamous murders of the interwar period was committed by Ronald True - the murder of Gertrude Yates, a prostitute who worked under the name Olive Young,

Ronald True was born in 1892, the illegitimate son of a sixteen year old spinster and a youth of seventeen. His mother eventually married well, and True was educated at public school. He was employed in a string of disastrous short term jobs in New Zealand, Canada, Mexico and China (where he became a morphia addict), as a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps, from which he was invalided out in 1916 after crashing three aeroplanes; as a test pilot and flying instructor in the United States; and as the assistant manager of a mine in Ghana. As his drug addiction and mental illness became worse, he became a con artist, using his good manners and public school accent to swindle his way around the country.

Gertrude Yates (who used the business name of Olive Young) was a 25 year old former shop girl in a West End fur store who worked as a prostitute (although she preferred to use the term, "a lady with male friends") from her basement flat in the Finborough Road. She had made enough money, not only to pay the 43 shillings a week rent on her flat, but to furnish it with "sateen weeping Pierrot dolls, shiny pot reminders of daytrips to seaside resorts, and sequinned greetings cards that were too pretty to throw away" and employ a daily maid, Emily Steel, who also lived in Finborough Road.

True had first spent the night with Olive on Saturday, 18 February 1922. She found her new client rather peculiar and frightening and, after discovering five pounds missing from her handbag after his departure, decided that she wanted nothing more to do with him.

During the next twelve days, True made many attempts to arrange another meeting with Olive, but she avoided his calls and phone calls.

At the same time, the True family, realising that he was by now dangerously insane, were trying to trace him in an attempt to get him into long-term treatment for his mental illness.

Late at night on Sunday, 5 March 1922, True turned up unannounced at 13a Finborough Road. Olive Young had been out on a trip to Piccadilly Circus and had just got the tube home to Earl's Court, arriving home around 11pm.

It is impossible to explain what made her change her mind and let him in. But she did, and let him stay the night.

The next morning, Olive Young's maid let herself in to the flat as normal, and met True on his way out. He murmured "Don't disturb Miss Young. We were late last night, and she is in a deep sleep", and left.

Some time later, the maid opened the bathroom door and found the body of her mistress. She had been battered to death with a rolling pin. Most of her jewellery and trinkets were missing, and even a pile of shillings to feed the gas meter and a half-crown and some pennies to pay the milkman had been stolen.

Later that night, True was arrested in a box at the Hammersmith Palace in King Street where he was watching a music hall show.

His subsequent trial at the Old Bailey lasted five days, and he was sentenced to death.

The crime would probably have faded into oblivion, but for the fact that five days before True's trial, Henry Jacoby, an 18 year old pantry boy in Spencer's Hotel in Portman Square, had also been sentenced to death for the murder of one of the hotels guests, the 65 year old Lady White.

Whilst finding Jacoby guilty, the jury made a strong recommendation for mercy, and the day before his sentence was due to be carried out, a petition for his reprieve signed by several hundred people including two members of the jury that convicted him, was handed in at the Home Office. Edward Shortt, the Liberal Home Secretary, refused his appeal, and Jacoby was executed.

The next day, after examination by medical experts declared that Ronald True was insane, the Home Secretary reprieved True from his death sentence and committed him to Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

There was a massive public outcry, fanned by the popular press. The popular perception was that there was one law for the middle class True, saved from the scaffold for the death of a prostitute; and another for the working class killer of a titled lady. Whilst not entirely borne out by the facts, the scandal was exacerbated by the fact that, whilst not insane or mentally deficient, Jacoby was undoubtedly an immature simpleton. The scandal led to a parliamentary committee to examine the law relating to insanity which, however, left the the M'Naghten Rules of 1843 unchanged. The M'Naghten Rules state that every accused person is presumed sane until the contrary is proved to the jurys satisfaction, and that it must be shown that the accused must be "labouring under such a defect of reason from disease of the mind as to not to know the nature and quality of his act, or, if he did know it, that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong."

Even the hangman, John Ellis, was profoundly affected by Jacoby's sentence. Ellis himself committed suicide ten years later, and it has been argued frequently that the execution of Henry Jacoby had a permanent effect on Ellis mind. In an interview, he said "I saw t'poor lad the day before his death. He was nobbut a child. It was t'most harrowing sight I ever saw in my life. And I had to kill him the next day."

Ronald True died in Broadmoor in 1951, aged 60. In Broadmoor, he was a major figure in organising entertainment for the inmates, alongside the conductor of the hospital band, Richard Prince, the killer of actor William Terriss at the Adelphi Theatre Stage Door in 1897.

A new play on the True and Prince cases, Lullabies of Broadmoor, specially commissioned for the Finborough Theatre was performed in January 2004.