page_title: Uxoricide
section_title: Known or suspected examples
hierarchical_section_title: Uxoricide / Known or suspected examples
caption_attribution_description: 18th century illustration of murderer Matthias Brinsden stabbing his wife.
context_page_description: Uxoricide is the murder of one's wife or girlfriend. It can refer to the act itself or the person who carries it out. The killing of a husband is called mariticide.
context_section_description: Cambyses II of Persia married two of his sisters and installed the younger as queen consort of Egypt. During his insanity, he murdered her for weeping for their brother Smerdis, whom Cambyses had murdered.
  Ptolemy XI of Egypt had his wife and stepmother, Berenice III, murdered nineteen days after their wedding in 80 BC. Afterwards, Ptolemy was lynched by the citizens of Alexandria, with whom Berenice was very popular.
  Herod the Great had his second wife, Mariamne I strangled for suspected adultery, though she was innocent of the charges. According to Josephus, regret over this act almost caused Herod to go insane.
  Roman Emperor Tiberius probably had his second wife, Julia, starved to death in 14 AD, while she was in exile on Pandataria. Their marriage was unhappy, and he had been publicly embarrassed by her adultery years earlier. Her alleged paramour, Sempronius Gracchus, was executed around the same time on Tiberius’s orders.
  Roman Emperor Nero ordered the death of his first wife, Octavia, soon after divorcing her in 62 AD. He also reportedly kicked his second wife, Poppaea Sabina, to death in 65 AD after an argument.
  Prince John of Portugal, Duke of Valencia de Campos murdered his wife María Teles de Meneses in 1379, after her sister Queen Leonor Teles, fearing for the succession of her daughter Beatrice and her own position as regent, accused her of adultery.
  King Henry VIII of England had two of his six wives executed: Anne Boleyn on charges of adultery, treason and incest, and Catherine Howard on the charge of adultery.
  George Forster murdered his wife and child by drowning them in Paddington Canal, London: he was hanged at Newgate on 18 January 1803.
  Edward William Pritchard (1825–1865) was an English doctor who was convicted of murdering his wife and mother-in-law by poisoning. He was the last person to be publicly executed in Glasgow.
  The Reverend John Selby Watson (1804–1884) was sentenced to death in 1872 for killing his wife, but a public outcry led to his sentence being reduced to life imprisonment. The case is notable for Watson's use of a plea of insanity as his defence.
  William Henry Bury (1859–1889) was executed in Dundee, Scotland, for the murder of his wife Ellen in 1889.  He was suspected by some of being Jack the Ripper.
  Dr Crippen (1862–1910) was an American homeopathic physician hanged in Pentonville Prison, London, England, on 23 November 1910, for the murder of his wife, Cora Henrietta Crippen.
  George Joseph Smith (1872–1915), the "Brides in the Bath Murderer", was convicted and subsequently hanged for drowning three women, all of whom he had trigamously married, between 1908 and 1914.
  Herbert Rowse Armstrong (1869–1922), a solicitor in Hay-on-Wye, was hanged for the murder of his wife by arsenic poisoning.
  Dr Buck Ruxton (1899–1936) murdered and dismembered his wife in Lancaster, England in 1935.
  Beat Author William S. Burroughs (1914–1997) shot and killed his wife, Joan Vollmer (1923–1951), during a drunken recreation of The William Tell act. Vollmer's death was ruled a culpable homicide, after Mexican police investigated.
  Philosopher Louis Althusser strangled his wife to death on 16 November 1980. He was not tried, on the grounds of diminished responsibility, and was instead committed to a psychiatric hospital. He was discharged in 1983.
  Richard Crafts of Newtown, Connecticut, was convicted of killing his wife Helle in 1985. The crime became known as the "woodchipper murder" because of the way he disposed of her body.
  In August 1996, Janet March disappeared from her home in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee. Her husband Perry was convicted of murdering her despite the absence of her body ten years later, after his father had confessed to helping him dispose of the body, whose location he couldn't accurately remember.
  Mark Hacking murdered his pregnant wife Lori Hacking in 2004. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 2005.
  Joe O'Reilly was convicted in 2007 of the murder of his wife Rachel at their home in Co. Dublin, Ireland, in October 2004. With the crime (Rachel O'Reilly had bee
caption: 18th century illustration of Matthias Brinsden murdering his wife.
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