'Murdered upon a summer's day and laid in a lonesome grave,
Her face was covered up with clod, her eyes they could not see,
And the very last words poor Liza said were,
'Nearer my God to thee'

Anon

In 1909 Miss Eliza Barrow, a 49 year old valetudinarian spinster with private property to the tune of £4000, moved into a four room top floor flat in Tollington Park, London N4. Her landlord Frederick Seddon occupied the ground floor with his wife Maggie, five children and elderly father. Seddon, the area supervisor for an insurance company, made some quick calculations of Miss Barrows wealth and advised her that in return for a small annuity and the remission of her rent, he would agree to manage her business accounts. She duly signed over to him her properties in Camden Town and early in 1911, he increased the annuity in exchange for her India Stock.
That summer, Miss Barrow fell violently ill with constant diarrhoea and vomiting. The top floor of the house stank so badly that the attendant doctor advised the Mr and Mrs Seddons to hang sheets soaked in carbolic around the sick room. They went one step further. Seddon instructed his daughter Margret to purchase from the chemists a box of fly paper, which in those days was coated with arsenic. These they proceeded to hang around the recumbent Eliza Barrow, suspended over saucers of water to aid evaporation. Ten days later, after several disturbed nights, Miss Barrow died.

Seddon arranged for her burial in the cheapest public grave possible, accepting a commission of 12 shillings from the undertaker for the business, but he hadn't reckoned on the fact that Miss Barrow's burial would be published in the register of the local newspaper, or that a cousin of hers Frank Vonderahes, would read it. As the Barrow family vault lay in Highgate Cemetery and no application had been made to bury Miss Barrow there, Vonderahes contacted the police. An exhumation was ordered and Eliza's body was found to contain fatal amounts of arsenic.