Sarah Malcolm: The Dark, Twisted Truth Behind London’s Most Notorious Georgian Murder

The fog crept through London’s Temple precinct like a living thing.

It coiled along the cobblestones, slid into narrow courts, and pressed its cold fingers through the cracks of the lawyers’ chambers. Lanterns flickered, throwing nervous light across stone and timber. Somewhere, a horse’s hooves clattered on Fleet Street and faded into the night.

In that shifting half‑dark, a small figure moved with the quiet certainty of someone who knew every turn of the maze.

Sarah Malcolm, twenty‑three, carried a bundle of linen against her chest. Her hands were roughened by lye and cold water; her eyes were not. They were sharp, measuring, catching details others discarded.

By day, Sarah was a servant—one of many who scrubbed away the candle grease, beat the dust from rugs, laid fires that never seemed to warm the chambers of the Inner and Middle Temple. She emptied chamber pots for men who argued about justice, and swept floors outside rooms where fortunes were decided with ink and quills.

By night, she took inventory.

Which doors stuck in damp weather. Which locks were poorly made. Where purses hung carelessly on chair backs. Which widows grew careless once their trust in the precinct’s order felt secure.

Her world was small: a few buildings in Tanfield Court, some narrow staircases, the cramped attic room she rented above a shop nearby. Yet in that confined space, her mind ranged endlessly, mapping patterns, habits, weaknesses.

Sarah had little. No family to fall back on, no dowry, no protection beyond her wits. Wages vanished into rent and bread. Cold crept into her bones every winter. She had been a laundress, a maid, a drudge since childhood.

She’d learned early that diligence alone did not keep you from hunger.

Knowledge might.

By February of 1733, her attention had settled on three women in Tanfield Court: Mrs. Lydia Duncan, a widowed laundress of some means; her elderly cousin, Mrs. Elizabeth Robinson; and their maid, Anne Price. They shared chambers in the Temple, did small washing jobs for the lawyers, and kept a modest hoard of money and plate in their rooms.

They were also predictable.

Sarah knew when they rose, when they went to bed, when they prayed, when they counted their coins. She knew where Mrs. Duncan kept the small silver tankard marked with her name and the little strongbox tucked under the bed.

She knew, too, that they trusted her.

Sarah had helped with their linen when times were bad. She had warmed her hands at their fire. They had given her tea once, when she’d come shivering in from the yard.

It made what came next both easier and harder.

On the night of 3 February, fog thickened over the city. The Temple’s corridors emptied, barristers and clerks withdrawing into their rooms, candles snuffed one by one. Somewhere a bell marked the hour.

Sarah climbed the narrow stair to Tanfield Court with her bundle of laundry and a mind humming like a taut string.

She had thought about this for weeks. She had watched, and waited, and rehearsed in the theatre of her imagination.

What if I took it? she had asked herself, folding linens in the Duncan chambers. What if I lifted the box and walked away? What if I stopped watching other people’s lives and finally changed my own?

Poverty, she knew, was a slow‑moving noose. It tightened a little more each winter. A handful of guineas could loosen it. For a while.

She had told herself, at first, that she might only steal. Slip in, take the money, leave unseen. No blood, no screams, just an absence discovered in the morning.

But the problem with considering lines is that once you see them, you also see how thin they are.

What if they wake? she thought. What if one of them cries out?

She had no illusions about mercy. A servant caught stealing from barristers’ tenants in the Temple was finished. Whipped, imprisoned, transported, hanged. The men upstairs could argue legal nuance all day; the law’s hand was simple where people like her were concerned.

Caught stealing or caught killing—a rope was a rope.

On that February night, standing in the stairwell with fog pressing at the windows, Sarah felt calculation outweigh conscience.

Survival is not clean, she told herself. It never had been.

She opened the chamber door with a key she had copied in brass and candle wax weeks before.

Inside, the fire had burned to low embers. The air smelled of wool, stale tea, and worn feather beds. Three shapes lay beneath blankets: two older women, one younger, their breaths soft as the movement of the fog outside.

Sarah’s heart hammered. Her hands did not shake.

She set her linen bundle down quietly. Every creak of the floorboards seemed thunderous, but no one stirred. She moved to the bed, lifting the corner of the coverlet, feeling for the iron box she knew was there.

Her fingers brushed cold metal. She eased it out, breath held.

A board creaked.

Anne, the maid, stirred, murmuring something in her sleep. Sarah froze in a crouch, box in hand, every muscle tight. She could leave—now—carry the box and run, pray the noise wouldn’t rouse anyone else.

Instead, she stood very still, listening to her own breathing and the blood pounding in her ears.

She could not afterward say exactly when thought slipped into action. Only that a moment later, her hand was on the hearth, finding the handle of a small iron skillet. Only that when Anne’s eyes opened in the dark, Sarah was already moving.

There was no elegance in what followed. Only speed, fear, and blunt force.

When it was done, the chamber was no longer a place of whispered prayers and tidy drawers. It was chaos: overturned stools, linen strewn, a smear of blood drying on the floorboards, three bodies silent under their nightcaps.

In the hearth’s low light, the green of an apron looked black.

Sarah stood in the wreckage, chest heaving, the iron box heavier now than its weight in coins could account for. She had crossed several lines at once, and there was no going back.

For an instant, a kind of numbness flooded her. Then the habits that had kept her alive all these years surged back.

Work fast. Think first. Don’t look too long at what you can’t undo.

She wiped what she could. Took what she could: the small silver tankard, some linen, coins stuffed into the pockets she’d sewn into her stays. She slid two guineas into her hair, twisted into the roots where no one would think to look.

Then she set her bundle of “laundry” at the door and slipped back into the corridor, closing it softly behind her.

Fog wrapped around her as she climbed down into the Temple’s dark.

The bodies were found the next day.

Mrs. Mary Love, a neighbor, came looking for Mrs. Duncan. When no one answered, she fetched help. Together they forced the door and stepped into a nightmare.

Drawers yawned open, contents scattered. The little chamber looked as if a storm had torn through it. On the floor and beds lay Mrs. Duncan, Mrs. Robinson, and Anne Price, all quite still, their caps askew, their faces marked by violence.

Screams brought others. Soon the narrow staircase thronged with frightened women and grave, tight‑lipped men. Messengers ran for officers. Neighbors peered through doorways, whispering.

By that afternoon, suspicion had narrowed like a hunting dog’s gaze.

Sarah’s name came up more than once.

She had been seen at odd hours. She had made a strange remark to a man named William Johnson days earlier—that her circumstances would soon change. She had done washing for Mrs. Duncan. She moved between chambers more than most servants.

When officers came to her attic room, they found the silver tankard bearing Mrs. Duncan’s mark. They found linen that matched fabric from Tanfield Court. They found, upon closer search, gold guineas twisted into her hair.

Sarah did not plead ignorance. Not entirely.

She admitted to taking the tankard. Admitted to stealing linen. Admitted, in a level voice, that she had been in the chambers the night of the murders.

But she denied the killings.

She spoke instead of others: a washerwoman, Mary Tracy, and two brothers, James and Thomas Alexander, who had once worked in the Temple and whom she now blamed for the violence. They had persuaded her to steal, she said. They had done the rest.

She could produce no witness to this. The Alexanders were gone. Mary Tracy denied everything.

It did not matter. The law liked simple lines.

The trial at the Old Bailey drew crowds.

A young woman from the servant class accused of murdering three women in the Temple precinct—one of them elderly, one a servant like herself, all of them asleep in their beds—was a story London had time for.

In court, Sarah stood small and upright. She wore a plain gown and a cap pulled down over her dark hair. The courtroom’s candlelight carved hollows in her cheeks, but her eyes remained steady.

The prosecutor laid the case out like an account book: opportunity, means, gain. Sarah knew the building, possessed keys, had been seen on the stair. She was found with Mrs. Duncan’s tankard and coins hidden in her hair. No one had seen anyone else enter Tanfield Court.

Mrs. Love described finding the bodies, her voice catching on certain words. Mr. James Kerrill, one of the barristers, recounted seeing Sarah early that morning with a laundry bundle and noticing something heavy wrapped within. William Johnson told of her remark about her circumstances changing.

Each piece, on its own, might have been dismissed. Together, they formed a pattern the jury could easily follow.

Sarah’s defense was not the plea of a cowed servant.

She spoke clearly, carefully, shaping her account like a narrative she hoped the twelve men might choose to believe. Yes, she had stolen. Yes, she had lied about some movements. But she had not killed anyone. She had been with Mary Tracy and the Alexanders, she insisted. It was they who had pressed her for keys, they who had slipped into the chamber, they who had smashed skulls while she remained outside.

No one could corroborate this. No money or blood was found on anyone but her.

Her composure disturbed some. One pamphleteer later wrote that she seemed “more actress than penitent”; another thought he saw in her “a boldness that bespoke hardened guilt.”

Others saw something else: a woman on the lowest rung, facing a system that could not imagine such cunning in anyone but her.

Was she inventing accomplices to save herself, or naming partners more careful than she? Was she refusing to confess to protect some scrap of power, or clinging to the one version of events that let her live with herself?

The court did not trouble itself with such questions.

The jury retired and returned quickly.

Guilty.

The judge pronounced sentence: death by hanging. Her body, afterward, to be given for dissection. That, too, was part of the law’s lesson.

In Newgate Prison, time narrowed.

Sarah sat in a small stone cell, the shrieks and moans of other prisoners leaking through the walls like cold. The chaplain visited, urging her to confess fully, to unburden herself before God.

She did not.

She never admitted to the murders.

Some said this proved her depravity—that she went to the rope with lies still on her tongue. Others, later, wondered if that unbroken denial meant something else: that in the geometry of her own mind, the line between theft and killing still mattered, even if the law made no distinction in punishment.

On 7 March 1733, they took her out.

The morning was pale and chill. Crowds thickened along the route to the scaffold near Fleet Street, faces blurred by breath and curiosity. Executions were public theatre in Georgian London: part punishment, part sermon, part spectacle.

Sarah walked between guards, rope coiled like a question over her shoulder. She wore a dress she had altered herself in prison. Some said she looked calm. Some thought she seemed more resigned than repentant.

At the gallows, she glanced over the sea of faces. Somewhere beyond them, the Temple precinct sat in its customary fog, chambers locked, fires burning, lawyers arguing over other people’s lives.

The noose settled around her neck.

A chaplain prayed. The executioner did his work. The crowd, after its collective intake of breath, eventually turned away.

Sarah’s body went to a surgeon. The painter William Hogarth came to see it and made an etching of her face in death: sharp, composed, eyebrows arched as if she still measured the room.

London moved on.

Cases replaced cases, scandals replaced scandals. But Sarah Malcolm did not vanish entirely.

Her story lingered in pamphlets and legal reports, in Hogarth’s print, in whispers among those who lived and worked in the Temple.

Some called her a monster—a servant who repaid small kindnesses with murder, who used trust as a weapon. For them, the tale tidied easily into a moral: beware the ingratitude of the lower orders; the gallows must remind them of their place.

Others, particularly in later years, saw a harsher pattern.

They saw a young woman boxed in by poverty, working within arm’s reach of money she could never touch. They saw the ease with which suspicion settled on a servant’s shoulders, the eagerness of court and public to believe the worst of her, the lack of serious pursuit of the “Alexander brothers” she accused.

They saw a mind sharp enough to map the Temple, to time movements, to speak in court with more poise than many above her—all spent in a life where the only paths to change ran through workhouses, brothels, or crime.

Whether Sarah Malcolm was the sole architect of the Tanfield Court murders or not, one thing is clear: she grasped for power where she had been given none, and in doing so, stepped into a darkness from which there was no return.

The law wrote its version of her story: criminal, convicted, executed. The crowd added its own: notorious, wicked, a warning.

But beneath those labels lies something more unsettling and human: a young woman in a city that prized property over people, choosing a terrible risk rather than a slow suffocation. A mind that turned observation into opportunity, and opportunity into ruin.

Three women died that February night. So did any chance Sarah had of being anything but the villain in other people’s accounts.

Yet the questions she left behind—about guilt, desperation, class, and justice—are why her name still stirs unease when the fog curls low over London’s Temple and footsteps echo in stairwells she once climbed.