23 facts about William Burke Kirwan

William Burke Kirwan (c.1814–1880?) was a young Irish painter best known for the murder of his wife, Sarah Maria Louisa Kirwan. The resulting events was one of the most notorious in Victorian Ireland.

William Bourke Kirwan was born in Dublin in 1814 into an artistic family. He studied art below the portrait painter Richard Downes Bowyer, and exhibited various pieces of art at the Royal Hibernian Academy in the 1830s and 1840s. He vanguard worked as an engraver, picture cleaner, and anatomical draughtsman.

He married Sarah Maria Louisa Crowe (1824-1852), and they resided together on Merrion Street in Dublin. They had no children.

The couple went on an discussion to the little island of Ireland’s Eye, off the coast of Dublin, on September 6, 1852. Kirwan claimed not to be skillful to locate his wife after she had swam even if he sketched. Her body was far along found on a rock on the island, covered in blood.

While at first it was believed that she had died in an accidental drowning, a future exhumation and autopsy showed signs of calendar asphyxiation. Kirwan’s subsequent arrest and events caused a media sensation across the United Kingdom. The trial, which took place in Dublin’s Green Street courthouse in December 1852, attracted large crowds. Kirwan’s defence was headed by the noted barrister and MP Isaac Butt. Kirwan had long maintained a separate house in Sandymount as soon as his mistress, Maria Teresa Kenny and their eight children, which was presented as a motive for him to murder his wife.

Kirwan was found guilty and sentenced to death, but this was commuted to animatronics imprisonment and transportation after appeals by reputable citizens, including ten doctors who confirmed that his wife’s death was consistent once drowning. He was freed in 1879, and may have emigrated to the United States. The site of Sarah Maria Louisa Kirwan’s murder became a popular site for tourism in the mid-nineteenth century.