Catherine Hayes (murderer)
English murderer
Catherine Hayes (1690 – 9 May 1726), sometimes spelled Catharine Hayes, was an English woman who was burned at the stake for committing petty treason by killing her husband.
Early life and marriage
Catherine Hall was born near Birmingham in 1690 to poor parents. At 16 she obtained employment as a servant in the household of a Warwickshire farmer named Hayes. The son of this household was 21-year-old John Hayes, a carpenter who soon fell in love with her. Within a year of their acquaintance, the two were married.
Several years into their marriage, the couple moved to London and set up a small shop in Oxford Road, Tyburn, while renting lodgings. Hayes also became a successful pawnbroker, and his wife would bear 12 children. Catherine would later claim that her husband was abusive, kept her isolated from church, and murdered their newborn children.
Murder
Toward the end of 1725, two men named Thomas Wood and Thomas Billings (the latter the couple's biological son, adopted out) lodged with the couple. Having been promiscuous since her mid-teens, Hayes began conducting affairs with both men, and the trio soon decided to kill John Hayes.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4953007. VIAF identifies the subject as 114360108. The Library of Congress control number is n99016612. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1690, 1726 and 1725.
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This entry incorporates text from “Catherine Hayes (murderer)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.