William Chester Minor's London murder was the violent event that bound Minor’s life to George Merrett’s and altered the course of both families. The killing in Lambeth on 17 February 1872 left Merrett dead, his wife Eliza with six children and another child on the way, and Minor’s later scholarly achievement inseparable from the crime that preceded it.

Setting and Shooting

In Victorian London, gunfire in Lambeth was considered exceptionally rare, despite the district’s poverty and reputation for street crime. Shortly after two o’clock on Saturday morning, 17 February 1872, three revolver shots rang out; some accounts allowed that there might have been a fourth. Henry Tarrant, a young constable on the graveyard shift near Waterloo Railway Station, recognized the sound, blew his whistle, and ran toward Belvedere Road, where he believed the shots had come from.

The account places the killing in a crowded, impoverished part of the city. George Merrett was a working-class farmer’s son from Wiltshire who had come to London to make a living. His death left Eliza Merrett, then pregnant, and their six young children facing the loss of their principal support. The book emphasizes that the victim’s family was already struggling to preserve a degree of stability amid Lambeth’s hardship; the killing made that precarious situation worse.

The Trial and Minor’s Fears

At Minor’s trial in early April, held at Kingston Assizes because the area remained within Surrey’s jurisdiction, testimony disclosed how long his fears had troubled him. A Scotland Yard detective, Williamson, told the court that Minor had visited the Yard about three months before the killing. Minor complained that men were entering his room at night to poison him, and identified them as Fenians associated with the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

Williamson described repeated allegations and a pattern of escalating suspicion. Shortly before Christmas, Minor had persuaded the Commissioner of Police in New Haven to write to Scotland Yard in support of his fears. After moving to Tenison Street, he continued to contact Williamson. In a letter dated 12 January, Minor said he had been drugged and feared that the supposed conspirators intended to kill him and make the death appear to be suicide. The testimony made clear that the killing could not be separated from the delusions that had already brought Minor to police attention. The available account establishes what the witnesses said and the court’s alarm at the evidence, without making the trial a simple substitute for the later history of his illness.

Consequences for the Merrett Family

In lucid moments, Minor was contrite about the consequences of the delusion that had led to the killing. He gave a large part of his income to support Eliza Merrett, and she regularly visited him. These acts connected the man responsible for the death to the family left behind, but they could not undo the loss or restore the household’s former security.

Eliza never fully recovered from the shock of the murder. She later developed a drinking problem and died of liver failure; the account records no grave for her. The aftermath thus extended beyond the moment of the shooting and beyond the legal proceedings, shaping the lives of the widow and children for years. Merrett’s own grave at Tooting Cemetery is now unmarked: where the records place him is a small patch of discoloured, settled earth among later monuments.

Dictionary, Friendship, and Public Memory

The murder also forms the grim prehistory of Minor’s work for the Oxford English Dictionary. The book explicitly warns against allowing the story of an American soldier’s remarkable contribution to the dictionary to eclipse the crime that enabled his subsequent life of extensive work. Minor contributed tens of thousands of illustrative quotations to a project that ultimately comprised twelve volumes, 414,825 defined words, and 1,827,306 quotations. That achievement is part of the aftermath, not an exoneration of the killing.

A familiar account of how Minor and James Murray first met dramatized the connection between scholarship and confinement, but Hayden Church invented that version for publication in 1915. A letter Murray wrote in 1902 instead indicates that he first contacted Minor around 1880 or 1881, initially supposing him to be a retired medical man. Murray’s visit to Broadmoor took place in January 1891, after he had sought permission from the institution’s governor. The two men then knew one another personally and met regularly for almost twenty years. Correcting the legend restores the actual chronology: their friendship grew out of sustained correspondence and shared work, years after the murder.

The book sets Minor’s modest grave in New Haven against Merrett’s unmarked burial place. Minor’s name survives among the Oxford English Dictionary’s contributors, and the dictionary can serve as a lasting memorial to his labor. Merrett, by contrast, has no comparable public remembrance. The narrative’s final emphasis is therefore not only on the unlikely path from crime to scholarship, but on the unequal distribution of memory: Minor is recalled through the great dictionary, while the man he killed risks disappearing from the record.