The most famous portrait of an eighteenth-century murderer was made in a condemned cell at Newgate in March 1733. William Hogarth went there two or three days before Sarah Malcolm's execution and sketched her seated at a table, a young woman of twenty-two. He turned the sketch into an engraving and an oil painting, and the prints sold across London while the case was still news. Malcolm had been convicted of killing three women in a set of chambers in the Temple, and she went to the gallows insisting she had killed none of them.
She came from an Anglo-Irish family, was born in County Durham in 1711 and was raised in Dublin. In London she found work as a laundress and charwoman for residents of the chambers above the Inns of Court, and she appears in some contemporary accounts under the spelling Mallcombe. One of the households she served was that of Lydia Duncomb, a woman of about eighty, who lived in Tanfield Court with Elizabeth Harrison, about sixty and infirm, and a maid, Ann Price, who was about seventeen.
On February 4, 1733, all three were found dead. Duncomb and Harrison were strangled. Ann Price's throat was cut. Money and valuables were gone. Suspicion settled quickly on the laundress who knew the rooms, and when she was taken, bloodstained linen was produced against her, along with some forty-five guineas that had been hidden in her hair.
At the Old Bailey on February 23, 1733, Malcolm conducted her own defense. She did not deny being in the house or having the stolen money. Her account was that she had kept watch on the stairs while others did the robbing: a woman named Martha Tracey and two brothers named Alexander. The blood on her linen, she told the court, was her own menstrual blood, and in 1733 no one could test that claim either way. The jury took fifteen minutes to convict her of murder. Tracey and the Alexanders were never charged, for want of any evidence against them. Robbery of a dwelling house was itself a capital crime, so her own version of events would have hanged her too.
Eight men condemned at the same sessions were hanged at Tyburn on March 5. Malcolm was not sent with them. Because of the nature of the crime, a special order directed that she be executed near the place where it happened, and on March 7 Newgate's portable gallows was set up in Fleet Street, between Fetter Lane and Mitre Court. A vast crowd gathered. She was driven there in a cart, fainted on the way, and went up in a crape mourning gown, holding her head high enough that some in the crowd said she looked painted. The night before, she had handed a paper to the Reverend Mr. Piddington, curate of St. Bartholomew the Great, who published it; it read more as a justification than a confession. After the hanging her body was taken back to Newgate by coach and buried in the churchyard of St. Sepulchre's.
The Victorian prison historian Arthur Griffiths called her an "unsexed desperado." The verdict has not gone unquestioned. The accomplices she named were real people who were never tested in court, the blood could not be typed, and at least one modern scholar has found her defense more convincing than her jury did. The case against her rested on the stolen money, the stained linen and her knowledge of the rooms, and none of that proves she was the one who strangled two women and cut the throat of a third. Hogarth's painting of her is in the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland.