Chapter Text
Intro
Candice - September 22, 1846. London police are summoned to a bakehouse on Fleet Street by two sailors, who claim that one of them had witnessed a murder in the barbershop above.
Michelle - What they find there is something out of a nightmare. Four bodies, three men and a woman, all with their throats cut, clutter the greasy, bloody floor of the small room. A horrifying smell coming from the oven leads to the discovery of a fifth body, the charred remains of a second woman. Scratches on the inside of the door and the bloody tips of her scorched fingers indicate she was burned alive.
Candice - A teenage boy, a bloody straight razor at his side, turns the heavy meat grinder and mutters instructions to himself. Three times, the grinder must be turned three times.
Michelle - The police go to arrest the boy, the only living person in the room, with the probable murder weapon right at hand. And on closer inspection of the meat grinder, they find the worst piece of evidence yet.
Candice - In the pile of butchered meat, waiting to be ground up and baked into pies for sale, is a human finger. One that does not belong to any of the bodies in the room.
Music
Michelle - Hello, everyone. If you’re new here, welcome.
Candice - And if you’ve been with us before, welcome back. As always, we are Candice --
Michelle - And Michelle --
Candice - And this is God Forbid Women Do Anything, a podcast about women who do things God tends to forbid.
Michelle - This episode is about the Fleet Street Murders of 1846. And before we get into it, a couple of disclaimers.
Candice - First, as with all of our historical subjects, our evidence is only as good as the investigation at the time. Criminal investigation procedures and techniques changed a lot over the 19th century, so, you know, keep that in mind.
Michelle - Also, our subject for this episode was never actually tried for her role in the crimes, because she died before she could be arrested, so all of this is technically alleged rather than proven fact.
Candice - We’re not going to say that before every fact because that’s just exhausting, so please take this as a blanket ‘allegedly’ for the entire thing.
Michelle - So, with that in mind, let’s get into the case.
Background
Candice - There are a handful of important characters in this story, so we’re going to lay them out to start before we get into the actual crimes. First, the subject of our episode, Elinor Lovett, also known as Nellie.
Michelle - Nellie Lovett was born somewhere between 1795 and 1800, probably in London, and we don’t really know much about her early life. Our Favorite Nerd Andy was able to find a record of a marriage between Albert Lovett and Elinor Lee in 1819, but before that, we have basically nothing.
Candice - There’s no record of the Lovetts having any children. He worked as an accountant or clerk--think Bob Cratchitt in A Christmas Carol, except there’s no evidence he was employed by a man like Scrooge. They also took in lodgers in the house they owned on Fleet Street.
Michelle - She began selling meat pies a few years after they got married, first on a fairly small scale, but ramping up after her husband’s death in 1827 from some sort of unspecified illness. Over the next couple of decades, she mostly focused on her pie shop rather than taking in more lodgers. She did all right until the early 1840s, when there was a sharp decline in the quality of her product, with some people even describing them as the worst pies in London.
Candice - So, by the time we get to 1846, she’s a widow in her late 40s, with no children or other family to rely on, a failing business, rising supply costs, and a lot of debt. Enter the second and third major players in the drama.
Michelle - First, Sweeney Todd. He’s a barber.
Candice - And that’s…pretty much all that we know for sure about him. He turned up in London in April of that year, rented a room in Mrs. Lovett’s house, and opened his tonsorial parlor. Who he was before that, and where he came from, unclear.
Michelle - There are a whole lot of theories about him, mostly connected to the identities of those final victims on September 22, but those are the subject of another person’s podcast.
Candice - Yeah, exactly. And then the final major player is Tobias Ragg. And, look, this is 1846, there is some pretty gross language used when talking about him that we’re not going to repeat here if we can avoid it.
Michelle - He was somewhere between fourteen and eighteen, probably, and seems to have had some kind of intellectual disability.
Candice - Or maybe he was just poor and uneducated and traumatized.
Michelle - Yeah, also possible.
Candice - Tobias had previously been a kind of apprentice and barker for a rival barber and con artist who worked under the name Adolfo Pirelli. After Pirelli disappeared in the spring of 1846, Tobias seems to have been semi-adopted by Mrs. Lovett. He lived with her and worked in her pie shop all that summer.
Michelle - He was also the only one of the three left alive when the police came to the bakehouse in September, and so he was the only one who was tried and punished for his role in the murders.
Case Details
Candice - But we’ll get there. First, jumping back to April 1846, when the murders most likely began.
Michelle - The general consensus, at least as far as our research showed, is that the first Fleet Street victim was Adolfo Pirelli, who disappeared right around the time Sweeney Todd showed up in London. His body was never found, and no one could ever prove he’d been killed, but according to the constables’ notes, Tobias insisted that Pirelli had disappeared in Todd’s parlor. Despite Tobias being a murderer as well, and not considered a very credible witness, the police thought he was telling the truth on this point. Todd had almost certainly killed Pirelli back in April of that year.
Candice - Exactly why is up for debate. The two of them were competitors--Our Favorite Nerd Andy actually found a reference to the two of them staging an impromptu contest after Todd called a hair growth product Pirelli was selling snake oil. Todd won the contest, so it’s possible that Pirelli went to confront him after, with fewer witnesses, since his reputation had taken a hit, and things escalated from there.
Michelle - But now Mr. Todd had a problem. He had a body to dispose of. One that probably no one other than Tobias would report missing, but still. A body. And then--someone in that house had a plan. Thrift, thrift, Horatio. Except with fewer weddings involved.
Candice - There’s no way to know whose idea it was to butcher the body and use it to prop up Mrs. Lovett’s failing business, but I think it was probably hers. Baking was her profession, after all.
Michelle - But, to be fair, we don’t know anything about Mr. Todd’s background. He could have approached her for help, rather than her offering.
Candice - Also true. Either way, it worked. No one came looking for Pirelli, there was no inconvenient body to be found by anyone poking around, and Mrs. Lovett’s business picked up significantly. And probably part of that was advertising--like we mentioned before, she also took Tobias in after Pirelli’s disappearance. And there’s nothing quite like the piercing voice of a teenage boy to cut through the noise on a London street in the 1840s and catch the attention of passers-by.
Michelle - Like newsies, only instead of hawking headlines, hawking dubious hair care and then mystery meat pies.
Candice - Exactly. But by all accounts, the mystery meat pies didn’t actually appear very dubious. Especially considering the previous reputation of Mrs. Lovett’s meat pies.
Michelle - Some descriptions of the pies she made that summer included succulent, with velvety crust, delectable. The fact that customers kept coming in until she ran out of whatever pies she’d prepped ahead of time on any given day supports the notion that they actually tasted good.
Candice - Also, before the shop’s decline over the past couple of years, Mrs. Lovett had generally been considered at least a decent baker, so that initial hype was probably only part of the story. If she and Mr. Todd had continued operating after that summer, her business quite possibly would’ve stabilized into something more like it had been a decade earlier.
Michelle - And the likely change, given what the police found in the bakehouse later that year, was in the supplies she was using to make her pies.
Candice - Ingredients really do matter, I guess.
Michelle - Anyway, Mrs. Lovett and Mr. Todd had successfully gotten away with Pirelli’s murder. And, based on the available evidence--the fact that the pie shop continued booming even after Pirelli was, uh, gone, he was only the first. But even if things were going well on the surface, with both the pie shop and the tonsorial parlor seeing a steady stream of customers, there were indications that something was wrong pretty early on.
Candice - While no one was reported missing, exactly, a few people did note that more men were seen entering than leaving. Of course, no one was keeping super close track of it--and why would they, before there was any reason to investigate? For all anyone knew, the parlor could have had two exits, with one possibly going through the bakeshop. More damning, though, was that the local beadle and the constables got frequent reports of horrible-smelling smoke coming out of the bakehouse chimneys.
Michelle - Unfortunately, most of these complaints came from a local unhoused woman, who was a known figure around the neighborhood, and pretty severely mentally ill. Honestly, even today, she’d probably have a hard time getting anyone to take her seriously, but in the 1840s? Not a chance.
Candice - Other people did eventually start complaining as well, however, which brings us to the night of September 22, 1846.
Sponsor Segment
Michelle - But first, we’d like to take a moment to talk about the sponsor of this episode, Best Cuts.
Candice - Best Cuts is a meat and seafood delivery service, which allows you to either subscribe to one of their standard kits or put together a custom box of high-quality, pasture-raised meats and wild-caught or sustainably-farmed seafood. You can order steaks and roasts, fish and seafood, ground meat and sausage, poultry, even less common meats like quail and bison.
Michelle - Mr. Michelle and I vary our orders, but the one thing we never skip is the Alaskan salmon, which is at least three tiers better than any we can find in our local grocery store. And having our freezer stocked with the salmon and other quality proteins so we can meal prep and plan in advance is super convenient.
Candice - So if you’d like to get your freezer fully stocked for the month ahead, visit best cuts dot com, and use the code CandM25 for 25% off your first order of premium, ethically-sourced meat and seafood.
Michelle - And now, back to the extremely unethically-sourced meat that could be found in Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop.
Candice - Believe it or not, it only took us three tries to get through that sponsor segment with a straight face.
Michelle - Yeah, uh. Maybe multiply that a couple of times.
Back to the Case
Michelle - The local beadle, a man named Barnaby Bamford for that perfectly pleasing and priceless piece of additional alliteration--
Candice - --are you proud of yourself?
Michelle - Yes. Yes, I am. Anyway, Beadle Bamford came to visit Mrs. Lovett to investigate the complaints.
Candice - A beadle, incidentally, kind of was and was not a police officer. In medieval times, they functioned as sort of undersherriffs on manors, and in London in this period, they served a similar role in terms of helping keep order for a neighborhood or magistrate. They didn’t have arrest powers, but they did some of this kind of inspecting and investigating around the neighborhood. There are still beadles in London, in fact, but their roles now are mostly ceremonial, assisting aldermen or with administrative tasks for livery companies.
Michelle - So, acting in his official capacity, Bamford finally paid attention to the complaints, and visited Mrs. Lovett to inspect her bakehouse on the afternoon of September 22. The exact sequence of events from that point on isn’t clear, but he never left the house alive.
Candice - One likely scenario is that Mrs. Lovett stalled him for a while, and persuaded him to go up to Mr. Todd’s parlor before visiting the bakehouse. Have a little spa day. Based on the sailors’ reports, and what police found when they inspected the parlor, there was a trapdoor in the floor, next to the barber’s chair. It opened into the bakehouse below. Based on where Bamford’s body was found, it’s plausible that he was killed in the parlor and then his body dumped into the bakehouse through that chute.
Michelle - It is also possible that Mrs. Lovett took him more or less directly to the bakehouse, once it was late enough in the day, and either she or Tobias or, most likely, Mr. Todd slit his throat there. There are problems with both of these theories, however.
Candice - The problem with the parlor story is that it relies on Bamford deciding to go get cleaned up, shaved, all of that, before going into the bakehouse. Which, even if it was up to the standards of the day, was probably pretty gross. And since he was there to investigate weird smells, the chances of things not being up to par were pretty high.
Michelle - And the problem with the bakehouse story is where the body was found--under the trapdoor, rather than right by the entrance or right by the grinder, where he might have been distracted with his inspection and given whoever slit his throat a window to strike.
Candice - But however he ended up there, exactly, Beadle Bamford became the first of the five bodies that would be found that night, and things only get murkier from here.
Michelle - The sailor, the one who summoned the police, witnessed the murder of the old woman. She was definitely killed inside the parlor. According to the sailor’s report, he was waiting in the parlor for his friend, and heard some kind of suspicious noise on the stairs outside. He hid in a trunk and watched as the old woman came into the room and started wandering around, until she was interrupted by Mr. Todd. The two of them had some kind of confrontation, though the sailor claimed he couldn’t quite make out what they were saying, before the barber slit her throat.
Candice - She was most likely the old woman who had been trying to get the authorities to investigate Mrs. Lovett’s bakehouse for months. Maybe she went into the parlor to confront him, or to get him to help her bring Mrs. Lovett to justice. We have no real way of knowing, since the sailor either didn’t know or didn’t want to share what he heard the two of them talking about before she died.
Michelle - Interesting side note, some accounts identify her as Lucy Barker, a woman who had previously rented the room Mr. Todd was now occupying, before her husband was arrested and transported to Australia. Our Favorite Nerd Andy couldn’t find out what exactly her husband had been charged with, or verify that the dead woman was, in fact, Lucy Barker, but that’s the only real name we have for her. The sources who don’t use that name mostly refer to her as a ‘crazy hag,’ or worse.
Candice - If she was Lucy Barker, though, that would give her a connection to Beadle Bamford, who was involved in the investigation that led to her husband’s arrest, as well as to the third victim of the night, a local judge named William Turpin. He was the judge who had sentenced her husband to be transported for life.
Michelle - And Turpin was…a real piece of work. Exactly what happened to Lucy after her husband was transported isn’t totally clear, because she more or less disappears not long after that. We do know that something happened to her, because the couple had a daughter, Johanna, who was maybe a year or two old when she lost her parents. Turpin took her in as his ward.
Candice - And, in late April of 1846, when Johanna would’ve been about seventeen, and had lived with him since she was a literal toddler, he applied for a marriage licence. She refused to go through with marrying him, and he had her committed to an asylum.
Michelle - Look. We don’t condone murder. But it’s really hard to feel any kind of sympathy for this particular victim.
Candice - Exactly what Turpin was doing in Todd’s parlor is unclear. Maybe he was looking for Bamford, who worked with him. Or maybe he was looking for Johanna, who, earlier that night, had disappeared from the asylum he’d placed her in, accompanied by a young wigmaker.
Michelle - But whatever the reason was, he ended up in the bakehouse with his throat cut, near the bodies of the beadle and the old woman.
Candice - So everything that happened up to that point is mostly conjecture, based on when Bamford and Turpin were last seen, the bare-bones report of the sailor’s testimony, and where the bodies were found. What we know of what happened next comes mostly from Tobias’s account, which was not especially clear or coherent. As we said earlier, he was possibly dealing with some kind of intellectual disability or developmental delay.
Michelle - And even if he wasn’t, what he witnessed in that bakehouse would have traumatized most people, I think. First the three bodies dropping in - plop, plop, plop. And then Mrs. Lovett, who had taken him in after his previous employer Signor Pirelli had vanished, comes into the bakehouse to handle the disposal of the three bodies.
Candice - According to Tobias, who had hidden himself under the sewer drain grate while all of this was happening, he’d been in the bakehouse for a while, since probably around when Bamford came to inspect the premises. Tobias had come to Mrs. Lovett that afternoon to talk about Mr. Todd. He told her Todd was evil, that he couldn’t be trusted, that something terrible was going on in his parlor. That maybe Todd had had something to do with Pirelli’s disappearance months before. After hearing him out, Mrs. Lovett told him he was a good boy, a smart and loyal boy, ready for more responsibility. She had finally decided to show him where the pies were made, and teach him how to use the grinder. Three times. That was the secret. Everything had to be passed through three times.
Michelle - You have to imagine what it must have been like for Tobias, who had found someone he thought was safe, and kind, who looked after him and treated him well, only to lock him in a room with a meat grinder full of human body parts. To have three fresh bodies join him, one by one by one. And then to have Nellie Lovett, the person he thought he could depend on, come in and prove that she was just as much a part of the horror as Sweeney Todd was.
Candice - According to Tobias, Mrs. Lovett cried out when she was examining the three bodies--maybe to make sure they were all the way dead, maybe for some other reason. Mr. Todd came running in, and asked her what was going on.
Michelle - The two of them argued, over the old woman, Tobias thought, but the words were garbled, between the distance and the horror and the noise of the sewer underneath him. Then he heard the oven door open. And then he heard a horrible scream, and the oven door slammed shut. The room was filled with the stench of burning meat and hair. And then silence.
Candice - After a few minutes, Tobias crawled up out of the sewer. He found Mr. Todd, kneeling among the bodies, the bloody razor at his side. He picked it up, and slit Todd’s throat, before going back to the grinder and turning it, three times, just like Mrs. Lovett had told him.
Michelle - And that was what the police found, when they followed the sailors into the bakehouse. The bodies of Beadle Bamford, Judge Turpin, an old beggar woman, and the barber Sweeney Todd. Mrs. Lovett’s charred body in the oven. And Tobias, bloody razor at his side, turning the meat grinder over and over and over again.
Candice - Tobias confessed to killing Todd, and gave his somewhat garbled account of what happened to Mrs. Lovett. He didn’t say much about the other victims, other than Mr. Todd must have hurt them. The judge who sentenced him determined he was sane enough, and in early December of 1846, he was hanged, bringing the gory saga of the Fleet Street murders to an official end.
Analysis/Discussion
Michelle - The full extent of what happened that summer isn’t totally clear. But based on all the available evidence, it seems likely that Sweeney Todd killed some number of his customers, and Nellie Lovett helped him dispose of the bodies by using the meat for her pies.
Candice - And possibly the rendered fat, in place of pig lard, for the crust. Most small meat pies, like the ones she sold, use hot water crust pastry, which means lard.
Michelle - The exact number of victims is unknown. Not all of Mr. Todd’s customers were murdered, obviously, or they would’ve been caught much sooner. And customers would’ve stopped coming.
Candice - So, I did some quick math. Most of the victims, probably all of the victims up until the old woman and Mrs. Lovett, would have been adult men. The average man in the 1840s generally weighed between 140 and 160 pounds. We’ll go with 150, because that’s a nice round number. To use a pig for comparison, since pigs are usually pretty comparable to a human in terms of composition--or at least that’s why my high school biology teacher told us we used them for our dissection lab--we can estimate that about 55% - 65% of the pre-slaughter weight is usable meat. We’ll go with 60%, again for round numbers. That gives us 90 pounds of usable meat per victim. Most of the recipes for meat pies I could find said one pound of ground meat makes about six to eight servings, which gives us an average of 540 - 720 servings of pie per dead man.
Michelle - Based on that, and the level of business the shop did that summer, and how long the meat could be kept fresh, and the fact that all butchering had to be done in-house for obvious reasons, our best guess is that there was a minimum of roughly one victim per week. From mid-April to September 22, that would be at least twenty to twenty-five victims, not counting the last three. And if we count the people who became unwitting cannibals, we’re talking hundreds if not thousands of people who were harmed by Mr. Todd and Mrs. Lovett’s crimes.
Candice - Based on the available evidence, Mrs. Lovett probably didn’t commit any of the murders herself. But she definitely profited from them, and was fully involved in the scheme. Her business was failing, she had debts to clear…and, like, plenty of businesses fail. Especially restaurants. I think the current statistic is something like 20% fail in their first year of operation? But most struggling restaurateurs don’t partner with a serial killer for cheap supplies.
Michelle - Which is the real question, isn’t it. Why she decided to do that. I mean, don’t get me wrong, she definitely belongs on this podcast because, whatever the reason, she baked human people into pies. And fed those pies to other human people. And charged them money for it. But was the profit motive really all of it?
Candice - What are you thinking?
Michelle - She could’ve been afraid of him. Maybe she witnessed whatever happened to Pirelli, and did some quick mental math--how do I keep this murderer from slitting my throat to keep me from informing on him? And then, well, like you said. She had money problems, and I guess when life gives you lemons--
Candice - You make Soylent Green?
Michelle - Okay, when you put it like that.
Candice - But okay, sure, you may have a point. She might have been under some level of duress, or a compliant victim, rather than just exploiting the situation without any kind of emotional trigger.
Michelle - Or maybe she was weirdly in love with Sweeney Todd. Wouldn’t be the first woman we’ve covered who got into crime by falling in love with the wrong person.
Candice - True. And, you know, I will say this for her. By all accounts, she didn’t start murdering people on her own. Not until Sweeney Todd came into her life. There’s no indication that she, like, poisoned her husband for life insurance money, or committed any other kind of typical profit-motive murder. If she’d never met Mr. Todd, she probably would’ve had an ordinary, kind of sad life, like thousands of other London women in the mid 19th century.
Michelle - That’s right, yeah. But then she met this barber who, for whatever reason, created a situation that allowed her to act on her worst instincts.
Candice - And make soylent lemonade.
Michelle - That’s gonna be a thing now, isn’t it.
Candice - Maybe the next time we talk about something involving cannibalism.
Outro
Michelle - So that is the story of Nellie Lovett and the Fleet Street Murders of 1846. What do you think? Was Mrs. Lovett a fully complicit partner in this? Or was her participation, on some level, coerced by Sweeney Todd?
Candice - Send us a message, let us know your thoughts--about her complicity, about who actually killed the beadle, about my terrible meat pie math, all of it.
Michelle - Make sure to check out Best Cuts, with our code CandM25 for 25% off your first order of fresh meat and seafood that, unlike Mrs. Lovett’s Meat Pies, is 100% ethically sourced.
Candice - And thank you for listening. If you want to help support us and hear more stories like this one, please like and subscribe, share with a friend, check out our Patreon, all of those things. As always, we are Candice --
Michelle - -- and Michelle, and we’ll see you next time on God Forbid Women Do Anything, a podcast about women who do things God tends to forbid.