On a Sunday evening in late October 1878, Anna Skeeters walked across the churchyard of her small parish in Somerset, Bermuda, and was met with a familiar cruelty. A woman whose sister was expecting Anna’s husband’s child mocked her as she passed. Anna hurried into the church without replying. She had grown used to such taunts about Edward Skeeters, her difficult and unfaithful husband, but they still stung.

She left immediately after the service, avoiding the usual chatter in the churchyard. That night, Anna did not return home. By Monday evening, Edward Skeeters reported his wife missing. He claimed that when he came back from work, she was gone, and this time she had taken clothes and money with her.

Unlike previous occasions when she had briefly left him, he said he had no idea where she had gone. He placed an advertisement in the Royal Gazette offering a reward for information leading to her whereabouts. The couple had been married for about eight years and lived in a cottage at Daniel’s Head, close to the small community of Somerset in the northwest of the island. Anna worked in domestic service for a well-off local family.

She was quiet, hardworking, and well-liked. Edward, a handyman and laborer who could turn his hand to most tasks, was regarded very differently. He was known to be aggressive, unfaithful, and unkind to his wife. Anna had left him before, once even appealing to the local magistrates for help, but they told her there was nothing they could do, and each time she returned.

There was something odd about Edward’s story. On the Monday after Anna vanished, he went to work at the dockyard, where he loaded coal onto a ship. A foreman there said he had seen Anna on the Sunday evening and had asked her to tell Edward to report for two days of work. But if Edward had returned home that evening to an empty cottage, as he claimed, how had he received that message?

Her friends grew worried. The Bermuda police force was only part-time, and they treated the disappearance as they had her previous departures, assuming she would soon return. Eventually, after pressure from Anna’s friends, the magistrate ordered a search. Police and residents combed the coastline, walking through mangrove bushes and looking behind rocks for any place where a body might have been hidden.

Near the end of the search, they found some white cloth in Edward Skeeters’ small fishing boat. There were faint red marks on it that could have been blood, possibly from Anna’s dress, but the cloth could have been many things. The search ended without resolution, and the mystery continued. One week after Anna was last seen leaving the church, fishermen looked out at the choppy sea and noticed a strange spot where the water seemed calmer.

The winds were too strong to investigate that day. Three days later, they sailed out and found the cause: a body tied to a large stone at the bottom of the water. It had few barnacles attached, meaning it had not been there long. The stone was the same kind found on the shore near where the residents kept their boats.

The men brought the body to shore and carried it to Edward Skeeters’ cottage. British naval divers later searched the seabed and found clothing that friends identified as Anna’s. Edward Skeeters was arrested and charged with murder. He was taken to the capital, Hamilton, and placed in a cell.

The community of Somerset wanted justice, and tensions were high. The trial began in Hamilton in April 1879. Edward pleaded not guilty. The prosecution painted him as a violent, short-tempered man who had fathered children outside his marriage.

The defense reminded the jury that all the evidence was circumstantial: no one had seen Edward commit the crime. Many witnesses testified. A neighbor named George Jobson told the court that on the night of October 20, he had noticed the Skeeters’ door open, the blinds drawn, and a light on inside, but he saw and heard nothing unusual. The trial lasted seven days.

On June 2, the jury deliberated. They returned after twenty minutes with a guilty verdict. Edward James Skeeters was sentenced to death. Before his execution, he confessed.

On the night Anna disappeared, he had arrived home after visiting a woman named Hannah Morris. His wife questioned him about where he had been. He threw an oil lamp at her. Worried that she would report him to the magistrates again and show them her injuries, he strangled her.

He then took her body out to sea, weighted it down with a rock, and returned home. Edward Skeeters was hanged at the prison in Hamilton at seven o’clock on the morning of July 2, 1879. He was buried on Burt’s Island in Hamilton. The authorities used the same stone he had used to weigh down his wife’s body as his headstone.

Locals burned down the Skeeters cottage, not wanting to be reminded of what had happened there. Hannah Morris and her baby, fathered by Edward, both died during the birth. A different kind of murder case unfolded in Argentina in 1892, and it would change forensic history. Francisca Rojas de Carabao was born in 1865 in Necochea, a port town on Argentina’s Atlantic coast.

She married a man named Ponciano Carabao, and they had two children: six-year-old Ponciano and four-year-old Felisa. The marriage had difficulties, and there were rumors that Francisca had been seen with another man. Ponciano, hearing from people that his wife was a bad woman, decided to leave her and take the children with him. On the afternoon of June 19, 1892, Ponciano went to the family home just after two o’clock.

The door was stuck, which was strange. Concerned for his children, he asked a neighbor, Ramón Velázquez, for help. The two men managed to squeeze through an opening. Inside, they found Francisca lying near the door, bleeding from a cut on her neck.

In the bedroom, they found the children. Both were dead, their heads nearly severed from their bodies. Francisca was hysterical and could not be examined in detail by a doctor. When the police were able to speak with her, Francisca claimed that Ramón Velázquez had attacked her, hitting her with a spade, and had killed her children.

But Velázquez was the neighbor who had helped Ponciano get into the house, and the door had been locked from the inside. Witnesses came forward confirming that Velázquez was with them when the crime had occurred. His alibi held. The police began to wonder whether someone else was responsible.

A more experienced police team was sent from La Plata, led by Inspector Eduardo Álvarez. He visited the crime scene and read through the statements. Something did not fit. Francisca’s injuries were very minor, and the door had been locked and wedged from the inside.

In his statement, Velázquez mentioned hearing Francisca say that her lover would not marry her because she had young children. The inspector began to consider that perhaps the mother herself had committed the murders. Back at the house, Álvarez carefully inspected every room. On the door of the children’s bedroom, he noticed a dried bloodstain that looked like a fingerprint.

He ordered his men to remove that part of the door, believing it could be important evidence. At the time, fingerprints were not used to solve crimes. Sir William Herschel had demonstrated their permanence in the 1850s while working in India, and Dr. Henry Faulds had proposed their forensic potential in 1880.

Sir Francis Galton had shown that no two fingerprints were alike. Inspector Álvarez had a friend in La Plata, Juan Vucetich, a Croatian-born anthropologist who had recently opened Argentina’s first fingerprint bureau. Álvarez sent him ink fingerprints taken from both Francisca and Ramón Velázquez. The result shocked everyone: the fingerprint on the door matched Francisca’s.

When confronted, Francisca confessed. Her husband had told her he was leaving, and she was so distressed that she decided it would be best if they all died rather than live apart. She killed her children but found herself unable to take her own life. She had then tried to frame her neighbor with false accusations.

Francisca was charged with murder. Women were exempt from capital punishment in Argentina at the time, so she was instead examined by doctors, who determined she was insane. In September 1894, she was taken to the Dolores Penitentiary, where she remained until her death many years later. Francisca Rojas de Carabao was the first person ever convicted through fingerprint analysis, and the Vucetich method of fingerprint classification was soon adopted by police departments around the world.

A very different kind of assassination took place in revolutionary France. Charlotte Corday was born on July 27, 1768, in Normandy, the daughter of a provincial noble family. After her mother died when Charlotte was young, she and her sister were sent to a boarding school, where she read Voltaire and Rousseau and began to support the movement for political change. She became a supporter of the Girondins, a moderate faction who wanted to end the monarchy through peaceful means.

She strongly disagreed with the Montagnards, a more radical group who favored violence. One of their leaders was Jean-Paul Marat, a political theorist and journalist who used his newspaper to call for aggressive action and was widely blamed for the September Massacres of 1792, when mobs killed as many as 1,400 prisoners across Paris. By the summer of 1793, the Girondins had lost influence, and Charlotte feared France was descending into civil war. On July 9, she traveled to Paris.

She bought a six-inch kitchen knife and wrote a manifesto explaining her intended actions. Her original plan was to kill Marat in front of the National Convention, but she learned he was ill with a skin disorder and spent much of his time at home in his bath. On July 13, she went to his house. After being turned away once, she returned that evening and was admitted.

Marat was soaking in his bathtub, where he received visitors. Charlotte gave him the names of Girondin leaders, and he wrote them down. As he put down the paper, she pulled out the concealed knife and plunged it into his chest. He called for help and died.

Charlotte was apprehended immediately. She was interrogated and put on trial. She did not deny the killing and insisted she had acted alone. In court, she said that she had killed one man to save a thousand.

She was found guilty and sentenced to death. On July 17, 1793, wearing the red blouse that marked her as an assassin, she was taken to the guillotine in a calm and resolute manner. After her beheading, a man in the crowd lifted her head from the basket and slapped it, an act that amused the onlookers but offended the officials; he spent three months in prison for it. Her act did not have the effect she had hoped.

Marat became a martyr, with streets and squares renamed in his honor, and the Reign of Terror continued. Many women avoided being associated with her, fearing it would hurt the emerging feminist movement. But a year later, in August 1795, a new constitution was approved by a convention now dominated by the surviving Girondins, marking the beginning of a more moderate phase in the revolution.

Charlotte Corday was not recognized as a heroine in 1793, but time has been kinder to her memory.