THE PLAISTOW HORROR: The Boy Who Slept Next To His Mother’s Corpse After Murdering Her

A Victorian crime that refused to stay buried

The household at 35 Cave Road looked ordinary from the street: narrow terraced houses, coal scuttles, a mother whose laughter had thinned into nervous ticks. Inside, a child was already becoming a riddle that London doctors, magistrates and newspapers could not solve. The story of Robert Coombs begins at birth — a forceps delivery that left indentations on his temples — and traces a line through medical experiment, violent fascination, and a decision so calculated that it resembled a performance.

Birth trauma, sedatives, and an appetite for horror

Robert’s early history reads like overlapping case notes. Headaches and wandering pupils followed the forceps birth. Potassium bromide, common in Victorian practice, was prescribed for years; later clinicians would debate bromism’s slow erosion of affect and judgment. At the same time the East End’s penny dreadful culture fed an unusually bright boy with a steady diet of violence. He memorized trial proceedings, medical testimony, and how to time an alibi. Those pieces — neurological injury, chemical exposure, and obsessive study — created a mind both obsessively curious and emotionally detached.

A murder planned like a courtroom rehearsal

The killing of Emily Coombs was not an act of sudden rage. It was staged. The knife was bought, hidden, and retrieved after the household had settled for night. The truncheon delivered blunt force; the blade found the heart. Then came the experiment of concealment: quicklime purchased under false pretenses, letters forged to extract money, pawning of valuables to finance daily life. For ten days in sweltering July, the two boys lived around a decomposing body, attending cricket matches and writing practiced explanations until a visiting relative forced the door open.

Law, performance, and the curious verdict

The public trial became a theatre of extremes. At the Old Bailey, a crowd that mixed curiosity with moral panic watched a boy who alternated between grimaces and sobriety. Medical testimony catalogued childhood trauma, wandering pupils, and bromide withdrawal; prosecutors catalogued planning and concealment. The jury returned a verdict that satisfied no simple narrative: guilty of murder but insane at the time — a legal compromise that sent Robert to Broadmoor rather than the gallows.

Broadmoor: order, accomplishment, and an ambiguous recovery

Broadmoor’s regime in the late nineteenth century surprised many: private rooms, occupational therapy, music and cricket. Over 17 years Coombs learned tailoring, won chess tournaments, took up the mandolin and became a model inmate. Physicians recorded a paradox. Behavior normalized; technical skills flourished; emotional blunting persisted. Where violence had once been methodical, Broadmoor replaced spectacle with structure. Doctors disagreed about diagnosis — moral insanity, schizophrenia, traumatic brain injury — but all agreed on one thing: Coombs did not fit tidy categories.

The long transfiguration: From Broadmoor to Gallipoli

Release at age thirty presented the most confounding twist. Emigrating to Australia, Coombs chose a path of service rather than escape. He enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force, volunteered as a stretcher-bearer at Gallipoli, and earned praise and a medal for conspicuous bravery. The man who had once watched a hanging with clinical interest now carried the wounded under fire, sometimes bleeding himself, and returned to the front despite wounds that would later limit him.

Care, cultivation, and a strange form of guardianship

Settlement in rural New South Wales established a rhythm: market gardening, afternoon lessons in music, and the quiet adoption of a beaten boy named Harry. Over years Coombs provided food, instruction and shelter. His compassion was practical and sustained, a caregiving that required daily choices rather than grand confession. Yet intimacy remained elusive. Neighbors praised his patience; friends noted an emotional distance that never quite melted. The relationship posed the hardest question: can behavior that looks like redemption be entirely authentic when the emotional core remains peculiar?

Questions that resist tidy answers

The Coombs case sits at the intersection of medical uncertainty, legal philosophy and cultural spectacle. Did forceps injury displace conscience? Did prolonged bromide use create a psychosis that aligned with violent fantasy? Did Victorian print culture incubate criminal scripts? Every plausible explanation fractures under scrutiny. Brothers raised in the same house experienced vastly different outcomes. Numerous doctors wrote meticulous notes, and yet modern psychiatrists still debate what combination of brain, environment and culture produced a 13-year-old matricide who later saved lives at Gallipoli.

• Medical ambiguity: physiological findings supported both brain injury and psychiatric disorder.
• Social context: poverty, an absent seafaring father and a violent domestic environment shaped choices and opportunities.
• Cultural feedstock: violent literature gave a script, but not an inevitable ending.

Coombs’ life refuses binary moral judgment. The legal finding of guilt alongside insanity underscores the limits of categories meant to contain human contradiction. Whether his final years represent redemption, careful performance, or something in between depends less on tidy explanations and more on tolerating complexity. The paperback biographies, medical journals and trial transcripts remain eloquent about facts; they are less eloquent about what it feels like to be two selves at once — a child who killed and a man who learned to save. That unresolved interiority is perhaps the most disquieting legacy: a reminder that human lives can outgrow the narratives assigned to them, and that sometimes the only honest verdict is uncertainty.