Horace Robert Jay

Horace Robert Jay was executed for the murder of Florence Kemp.  At Christmas in 1883. Jay (aka Thorpe) met Florence Kemp, then just sixteen, and they immediately fell in love. They lived together until July 1884 when she left him and went back to live with her parents. On 15 November, at his invitation, they had tea together at his lodgings. He asked her if she would move in with him again and when she answered by saying she had met another man, jealousy got the better of him and in a rage he cut her throat, and then his own. He was tried before Mr Justice Hawkins at the Central Criminal Court on 22 December. His defence that he was insane and drunk failed, and he was hanged by James Berry on the 13th January 1885 at the age of twenty three at Wandsworth Prison.