19. Sidney Harris Fox murdered his mother on the very day her life insurance policy was due to expire
Sidney Harris Fox (b. 1899 CE) was a British criminal and con-man, beginning his criminal life with petty theft whilst in his early teens before advancing to cheque forgery during the First World War. Offered immunity from prosecution in return for military service, Fox successfully gained an officer’s commission in the Royal Air Force by erroneously claiming to be an Old Etonian before being caught continuing to issue fraudulent bank cheques and imprisoned for three months. Living in poverty, Fox and his mother, Rosaline, survived on a combined 18 shillings per week (the equivalent of £53.75 in 2018). Habitually cashing worthless cheques across Britain, Fox was imprisoned in 1927 for these crimes and his mother was sentenced to a workhouse; upon release Fox again returned to crime, initiating a relationship with a wealthier woman in order to steal her jewelry and was imprisoned once more until 1929.
Persuading his mother in April 1929 to register a will listing him as her sole beneficiary, Fox also took out a short-term life insurance policy against her accidental death expiring on October 23. On precisely the 23rd of October 1929, Fox raised the alarm of a fire in their shared hotel suite and his mother’s deceased body was subsequently recovered. Despite a doctor certifying death by suffocation and Fox’s account of events, a patch of suspiciously unburnt carpet near the stove resulted in the exhumation of his mother’s body for a forensic post-mortem; the examination of Rosaline, employing revolutionary new techniques of forensic pathology, revealed busing on her larynx and an absence of soot in her lungs, resulting in the medical conclusion that she had been strangled and the fire set after death. Fox was charged with murder, failing to provide an adequate defense or explanation for his actions, and was hung at Maidstone Jail on April 8, 1930.