The Man Who Hired Idiots to Commit Murder

Dominus Owen Markham — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 13:10:27 GMT

PT.1 The Rogues

There’s a certain kind of arrogance that only the very wealthy and the very stupid share equally. The belief that money, applied liberally enough, will solve any problem. Including, apparently, the problem of a wife who refuses to sign her divorce papers.

Hugh Watt was a former Member of Parliament. A man of standing. A man who had dined at good tables, spoken in Parliament, and moved through Victorian society with the quiet confidence of someone who had never truly been told no.

And yet, by the autumn of 1905, he was sitting in the dock at the Old Bailey having been undone... by a newspaper seller, a career criminal with six convictions, and a Yorkshire printer who thought he was being recruited by the King of England.

Let’s take them one at a time.

Thomas Worley: The Newspaper Seller Who Took the Money and Did Absolutely Nothing

Thomas Worley had a stall outside the Hyde Park Hotel. He sold newspapers. He ran the occasional errand. He was, by all accounts, a perfectly ordinary man going about perfectly ordinary business.

Then Hugh Watt approached him.

The pitch, delivered in Hyde Park with all the subtlety of a man who had clearly never hired a criminal before, went something like this: there’s a woman. She’s been a nuisance. Go to Hampton Court, pretend to be an old servant, get her to come outside... and hit her in the stomach. Her insides are apparently in poor condition. Ten pounds if you manage it.

Worley’s response was, essentially, to take the money and do nothing. Over and over again.

He took five pounds here. A sovereign there. He invented a trip to Ascot. He fabricated a sighting of Mrs. Watt crossing the road. He conjured up a whole fictional surveillance operation from the comfort of wherever he actually was, which was definitely not following anyone.

When Watt complained that results were thin, Worley recruited a friend.

James Shuttle: The Criminal Who Was Too Honest to Commit Murder

James Shuttle... known to the streets of Knightsbridge as “Nosey”... had six convictions to his name and made no particular secret of how he earned a living. When Worley brought him to meet Watt in Green Park one evening, Shuttle played the part beautifully.

He told Watt he’d just finished three years for killing a woman.

He hadn’t. But Watt didn’t ask for references.

The plan, as presented to Shuttle, involved checking into the Howard Hotel in Norfolk Street, bribing a chambermaid, acquiring a jemmy, obtaining chloroform, and murdering Mrs. Watt in her room. Watt handed over five pounds as a starting budget. Shuttle divided it with Worley and went nowhere near the hotel.

What he did do, to his considerable credit, was go and warn Mrs. Watt directly. Then he went to her solicitors. Then he made a signed statement. Then, eighteen months later when he read about Watt’s arrest in the papers, he walked into Scotland Yard and did it all again.

Shuttle was, in the end, the most honest man in the entire story. Which is saying something, given that he was also a thief, a liar, and a man who once failed to show up to prosecute a woman he’d had arrested because he fancied his chances at the races that day.

John Lightfoot: The True Believer

And then there is John Lightfoot. The most extraordinary witness of the lot.

Lightfoot was a printer from Yorkshire. A man who had been to Paris, done some betting, come back with a few hundred pounds in his pocket, and apparently told enough people he’d inherited a fortune that the Hull Daily News ran a profile on him. He hadn’t. But he didn’t correct them either, which tells you everything you need to know about John Lightfoot.

He was sitting in Hyde Park on the afternoon of August 25th, 1905, when two men approached him and asked for a match.

One of them was Hugh Watt. The other introduced himself as Lord Kinloch, Equerry to the King, who had personally been tasked with getting this murder charge hushed up. For reasons that seemed perfectly logical at the time, Lightfoot believed every word of it.

Over the following weeks he was wined, dined, coached in false testimony, introduced to a man posing as the King’s Counsel Rufus Isaacs (who was actually a bankrupt called Bernard Abrahams), paid a total of twenty pounds in gold sovereigns, and promised five thousand more once the case was settled.

He gave his false evidence at Marlborough Street Police Court. Then he went home to Yorkshire, told his wife everything, decided he’d been made a fool of, and came back to London to confess the lot.

He pleaded guilty to perjury. He got twelve months’ hard labour. And then, from his cell at Wormwood Scrubbs, he gave the prosecution the most damning evidence of the trial.

At sentencing, he tried to make a statement explaining his full reasons for committing perjury. The Court wouldn’t allow it. He wrote the reason on a piece of paper, showed it to the judge and jury, and the judge ordered it sealed.

It remains sealed.

We will never know what was on that paper.

What Undid Hugh Watt, Really

Here’s the thing about Hugh Watt’s downfall that I keep coming back to.

He wasn’t undone by brilliant detective work. He wasn’t caught because of some forensic breakthrough or a clever inspector with a magnifying glass. He was undone because almost every single person he recruited to help him... didn’t.

Worley took the money and invented a fictional investigation. Shuttle pocketed the five pounds, warned the target, and eventually walked into Scotland Yard. Lightfoot took the twenty pounds, gave false evidence, went home, thought about it for approximately forty-eight hours, and then told the truth to anyone who would listen.

The private detective he hired through proper channels, Herbert Marshall, went to Scotland Yard the same morning Watt laid out his chloroform plan, before Watt had even made it back to Knightsbridge.

Hugh Watt spent years, and a considerable amount of money, attempting to have his wife murdered. And the reason he failed... the reason he ended up in the dock... is that he consistently, catastrophically misjudged the people he was dealing with.

He assumed that a newspaper seller, a man with six convictions, and a credulous printer from Thirsk could all be relied upon to stay bought.

None of them could.

Five years’ penal servitude. Guilty on all counts.

The rogues won.

Next issue: the private detective, the chloroform bottle, and the question of whether Dr. Blake of Putney knew more than he was letting on...

Until Next Time

Dominus Owen Markham

Inside True Crime

The Man Who Hired Idiots to Commit Murder

Thomas Worley: The Newspaper Seller Who Took the Money and Did Absolutely Nothing

James Shuttle: The Criminal Who Was Too Honest to Commit Murder

John Lightfoot: The True Believer

What Undid Hugh Watt, Really