Smith was born in Bethnal Green in 1872 and had a record of theft and fraud from childhood. From 1898 he lived by bigamous marriage: he courted women of modest independent means under a series of names, married them, took what they had, and left.
Three of them he killed. Bessie Mundy, thirty-one, drowned in a bath at Herne Bay in July 1912, days after making a will in his favour. Alice Burnham, twenty-five, drowned in a bath at Blackpool in December 1913, insured shortly before. Margaret Lofty, thirty-eight, drowned in a bath at Highgate in December 1914, also insured. In each case he had taken the woman to see a doctor about a minor complaint days earlier, establishing a history, and each death was recorded at the inquest as an accident or a fit.
He was caught by a newspaper. Alice Burnham's father read of the Highgate death, saw the resemblance to his daughter's, and wrote to the police. Smith was arrested on February 1, 1915.
He was tried at the Old Bailey in June 1915 for the murder of Bessie Mundy alone. The prosecution was permitted to put in evidence of the other two deaths, on the argument that the pattern was itself probative, the same method, the same doctor's visit, the same insurance, and the defence objected. The trial judge allowed it and the Court of Criminal Appeal upheld the ruling. That decision is the foundation of the English law on similar-fact evidence and is still cited.
The pathologist Bernard Spilsbury demonstrated at the trial how a woman could be drowned in a bath without a struggle or a mark, by a sudden pull on the feet. Smith was convicted and hanged at Maidstone on August 13, 1915.
Alongside Martha Woods in this archive, this is the case that established that a sequence of deaths can be evidence in itself.