October 1, 1794 - Thomas Griffiths Wainewright
His legacy sits at the uneasy intersection of art, crime, and literary mythology — a figure whose actual convictions involved bank fraud, while suspicions of poisoning several people close to him, including a sister-in-law whose life he had insured, were never proven in court. What makes Wainewright enduringly notable is partly the gap between what was suspected and what was prosecuted, and partly how enthusiastically figures like Wilde transformed him into an aesthete-villain for their own purposes. The embellishments say as much about the 19th century's appetite for a certain kind of cultivated wickedness as they do about the man himself.
From Wikipedia
Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (October 1794 – 17 August 1847) was an English artist, author and suspected serial killer. He gained a reputation as a profligate and a dandy, and in 1837, was transported to the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land (now the Australian state of Tasmania) for frauds on the Bank of England. As a convict he became a portraitist for Hobart's elite.
Wainewright's life captured the imagination of renowned 19th-century literary figures such as Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Edward Bulwer-Lytton, some of whom wildly exaggerated his supposed crimes, claiming among other things that he carried strychnine in a special compartment in a ring on his finger.
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