Stranger Than Fiction

April 2026

A Victorian Bluebeard
by Dean Jobb

The Moat Farm tragedy made headlines around the world in 1903. Samuel Herbert Dougal, a retired soldier in his mid fifties, was arrested for forging checks in the name of Camille Holland, his common-law wife. Her name was on the deed to the secluded estate in Essex, northeast of London, that took its name from the water-filled ditch that encircled the main house.

It had been four years since Holland was last seen. Dougal had taken her on a shopping trip in May 1899 and returned alone. He claimed she was visiting relatives or traveling in Europe, but local police suspected he had killed her. Constables and workmen spent weeks digging up the grounds and found her remains buried in a ditch.

Dougal was charged with murder. The discovery of Holland’s body unleashed allegations he was a Bluebeard, a term coined for a fiend who lured women into relationships, murdered them, and plundered their savings. Dougal had been married at least three times before he met Holland and had lived with several other women. And decades earlier, while stationed in Halifax, Nova Scotia as an officer in the Royal Engineers, two of his ex-wives died in a span of a few months.

Holland’s murder cast these long-ago deaths in a new light. Was Dougal a serial killer?

A real-life Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That’s how pioneering true-crime writer F. Tennyson Jesse—great-niece of the poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson—described Dougal. An expert on criminals and their motives, she offered the definitive account of the case in the late 1920s as part of the Notable British Trials series of books, which explore infamous crimes.

As Robert Louis Stevenson’s respectable Dr. Jekyll, Jesse noted, Dougal emerged from the Royal Engineers after twenty-one years with a spotless service record, a good conduct medal, glowing character references, and a pension of fifty pounds a year. As Mr. Hyde, the monster Jekyll unleashes when he takes a serum, Dougal was a manipulative, heartless brute who preyed on a succession of women to line his pockets.

“He was enormously attractive to women,” wrote Jesse, with brown hair, grey eyes, a full beard, and an athletic build. “A slick surface cleverness,” she added, “enabled him to pass as rather a rough diamond of a gentleman in not too critical society.”

Born in London in 1846, Dougal was “a dissolute youth,” Jesse reports, who frequented pubs and music halls before enlisting in the Engineers at nineteen. Military life brought structure to his life and his skills as a draughtsman ensured a steady rise through the ranks. “Hardworking and attentive to his duties,” was the assessment of one of his superiors.

In 1877 he married Lovenia Martha Griffith—she was twenty, he was twenty-two—and she accompanied him when he was posted to Halifax, a Royal Navy base on Canada’s Atlantic coast. Promoted to quartermaster sergeant, he was in charge of the regiment’s telegraph office. The city’s Morning Chronicle later described him as “one of the finest looking men in uniform ever seen in Halifax” and “a great favourite with females.”

A succession of tragedies haunted the marriage. The couple had four children, but five others and possibly a sixth died in infancy. There were whispers of domestic abuse. Griffith “was never kindly treated,” claimed Thomas Price, another member of the Royal Engineers. “Dougal’s moral character was always considered very shaky. . . . The man is quite capable of doing desperate deeds.”

Griffith died on June 27, 1885. She was only in her mid thirties and, by Jesse’s account, passed away “after suffering great pain” and within hours of falling ill. The regimental doctor saw no need for an inquest. Dougal claimed she had been “ailing” for the better part of a decade and had succumbed to tuberculosis. She was interred in the garrison’s burial ground, Fort Massey Cemetery.

Granted compassionate leave, he took his children to England and farmed them out to relatives. He returned with Mary Herberta Boyd, a twenty-eight-year-old he married in Halifax barely six weeks after Griffith died. Within two months she died suddenly and with symptoms similar to Griffith’s—“sudden illness and vomiting,” Jesse recorded, “that ended in death.” Dougal insisted Boyd, too, had tuberculosis, and he attributed her death to having “eaten poisonous oysters.” The regimental doctor once again saw no need for an investigation.

“Dougal was a man of great personal magnetism,” Bessie Stedman told a Halifax newspaper in 1903, as she explained how she became caught up in the lurid tale of murder unfolding in England. “His handsome face and commanding figure attracted many.”

She was twenty-two when they met not long after Boyd’s death. When Dougal was transferred to England in 1886, he convinced her to come with him. He promised they would marry as soon as they arrived at his new posting. In the meantime, to avoid scandal, she pretended to be the new Mrs. Dougal. They had a child together, but still he refused to marry. When Dougal began to pursue other women, she returned to Halifax with their child and announced—again, to protect her reputation—that she was a widow.

Dougal retired from the army in 1887. He supplemented his military pension as a salesman peddling cutlery, glass, and china. When the British government announced a search for a new executioner, Dougal applied for the job, stressing his engineering experience. Along the way he moved in with a widow, Marian Paine, and fathered two more illegitimate children before she left him—“owing,” she said, “to his cruelty.”

In 1889 he took over a pub in the village of Ware and hatched a plan to burn it down and collect the insurance money. He set fires twice that summer before he succeeded in gutting the building, but was arrested and charged with arson. While he was acquitted at trial, the notoriety ended his dream of killing people for a living. He had been shortlisted for the job of executioner but the Home Office dropped him as a candidate in light of the arson allegation.

In 1892, while working on the construction of a military barracks in Dublin, he met and married his third wife, Sarah Henrietta White, who was half his age. They had two children before Dougal turned up in London, where he moved in with a fifty-something woman named Emily Booty. He took control of her savings, about ninety pounds, before revealing he was married. Dougal invited his wife and children to join them in London and incredibly, Booty endured these bizarre housekeeping arrangements for months.

When Dougal, uttering threats, drove her from the house, she had him arrested for stealing belongings she had left behind. Dougal stood trial for theft in 1895, defending himself with a plea to the jury that a conviction would wipe out his military pension. The jury took pity, censuring Dougal’s conduct as “bad in the extreme” but finding him not guilty.

Dougal’s luck, however, was about to run out. Back in Ireland with his wife and children, Dougal was hired as a messenger at the Royal Hospital in Dublin. When checks forged with the names of the hospital’s administrators began turning up, Scotland Yard was called in. Dougal was convicted in January 1896 of forgery and sentenced to twelve months at hard labor.

Stripped of his military pension, he was a desperate man when he was released. In 1898 he met the woman who would be his biggest meal ticket yet. Camille Cecile Holland, who had just turned sixty, was elegant, refined, religious, and virtuous—everything Dougal was not. And, thanks to an inheritance, she had £7,000 in the bank.

Only weeks after they met Holland moved in with Dougal, despite knowing he had a wife and family in Ireland. At his bidding, she bought Moat Farm in 1899. Three weeks later, Holland disappeared.

Dougal’s wife, Sarah White, arrived from Ireland the next day and helped herself to Holland’s clothes and belongings. For four years, Dougal forged Holland’s name and cleaned out her bank account. In the spring of 1902 White, fed up with his cruelty and adultery, moved out. In her place a succession of female servants passed through the household, adding to Dougal’s growing list of conquests and illegitimate children.

A constable began making inquiries and in March 1903 Dougal was arrested for forgery. After five weeks of digging on the grounds, a woman’s body was uncovered near the main house. She had been shot once through the head and buried in a drainage ditch. The clothing was identified as belonging to Holland.

Dougal stood trial in June 1903. The evidence was circumstantial, but he had motive and opportunity and had known she was dead—why else would he have dared to forge her name for four years? He was convicted of murder. The man who had once applied for the job of executioner was sentenced to death.

Dougal issued a statement claiming he had accidently shot Holland in the head with a revolver, then concealed her body out of fear that no one would believe him. As he stood on the scaffold in Chelmsford prison, a chaplain pressed him to confess. “Are you guilty or not guilty?” he was asked. “Guilty,” Dougal blurted out just as the hangman pulled the lever.

Was he guilty of two murders in Halifax as well? Scotland Yard detectives made inquiries into the deaths of Griffith and Boyd in 1885, but the bodies were not exhumed to test for traces of arsenic or other poison that might have survived. The monster hanged in 1903 had likely gotten away with murder long before he moved into Moat Farm.

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Dean Jobb’s latest true crime book A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue (Algonquin Books and HarperCollins Canada) tells the incredible story of Arthur Barry, who charmed the elite of 1920s New York while planning some of the most brazen jewel thefts in history. It’s a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Canadian bestseller. Find him at deanjobb.com.