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asked her whether she had not some toast in her pocket that was left at breakfast, she said yes; I then said, you can sit down and eat it, and I will take a nap until the coach comes up. We sat down together, and she began to eat; at this moment the horrid thought of destroying her came into my head, and I grasped my hands around her throat, pressed her windpipe with the thumbs, and exclaimed, ‘Now I’ll be the death of you’, and held her so for about five minutes.
    At this point Thomas demonstrated how he had positioned himself as he had strangled Mary, who had apparently only managed to utter ‘Oh, Lord!’ The confession continued:
    I afterwards took one of her garters off, tied it round her neck, put her into a drain, threw some grass over her, then left her. I intended reaching Edmonton on the Friday night, and on Saturday morning going to the clerk to have the banns published between myself and Maria Woodward.
    When he took the stand Thomas stated that he had been disgusted with the conduct of his wife, who had not only tricked him into marriage but had picked his pocket of 35s and had been to Fenstanton with another man. He began to say that he knew it would be a sin to marry while his wife lived, but at this point in his testimony he became too agitated to continue.
    The jury retired but took only five minutes before they returned the guilty verdict. The date of the execution was set for two days later, Friday 6 August, with the judge agreeing that, after pronouncement of death, the condemned man’s body should be dissected and anatomised.
    A few minutes after 12 p.m. on the appointed day, on gallows erected over the gateway of the county gaol, the execution was watched by large crowds. The body was then left to hang for an hour before being taken by the sheriff’s officers and constables in a cart to the chemical lecture room in the botanical gardens. At about 1.30 p.m. Professor Cumming 3 began to apply electrical charges to the face and body. The audience consisted of Cambridge’s medical community as well as members of the university and several respected Cambridge residents. One report of the event stated that ‘The galvanic stimulus was applied to the supra-orbitary nerve (beneath the eye-brow) and the heel, when the most extraordinary grimaces were exhibited every time that the electric discharges were made – every muscle in his face was simultaneously thrown into fearful action: rage, horror, despair, anguish and ghostly smiles united their hideous expressions in the murderer’s face.’
    On the following day there was a public viewing of the body, and the crowd that gathered at the entrance was so large that it had to be controlled by the police.
    The exact burial spot of Thomas Weems remains unknown but Mary’s body was displayed in the White Hart in Godmanchester before being laid to rest in the church of St Mary the Virgin, Godmanchester. Her grave was originally just marked with a small stone carved with the initials M.A.W., but later a second memorial stone was erected behind it with the words, ‘To the memory of Mary Ann Weems who was murdered in the 21st year of her age’ on the front and an epitaph engraved on the back.
    Notes
    1 A chaise is a light-weight, two-wheeled horsedrawn carriage.
    2 In the Cambridge Chronicle the date of Mary Ann Weems’s murder was reported as having taken place on 8 May, but her epitaph refers to 7 May. Other accounts refer to her as being killed on a Friday, tying in with the date of 7 May. This date therefore has been used in this account.
    3 James Cumming (1777–1861) was a chemist whose research-led teaching was exemplary, in a period when laboratories were being developed and discussed. The university provided no apparatus of its own, so by his own skill he built or adapted many of the sensitive instruments required for research and lecture demonstrations.
    4 Weems’s execution took place on