George Joseph Smith (11 January 1872 – 13 August 1915) was an English serial killer and bigamist who was convicted and subsequently hanged for the murders of three women in 1915.

In 1898, under the alias George Oliver Love, Smith married Caroline Beatrice Thornhill in Leicester; it was his only legal marriage.

On 3 July he left her, but not before taking £30 (equivalent to £4,000 in 2023) drawn from her savings account and selling her belongings from their Camden Town residence in London.

In January 1915, Divisional Detective Inspector Arthur Neil of the Metropolitan Police received a letter from Joseph Crossley, who owned a boarding house in Blackpool, Lancashire.

The other clipping contained the report of a Blackpool coroner's inquest, dated 13 December 1913, concerning a woman named Alice Smith (née Burnham) who had died suddenly in a boarding house while in her bathtub.

[1] The letter, dated 3 January, was written by Crossley on behalf of his wife and Mr Charles Burnham, who both expressed their suspicion on the striking similarity of the two incidents and urged the police to investigate the matter.

He then interviewed the coroner, Dr Bates, and asked whether there were signs of violence on the woman; none were seen except for a tiny bruise above the left elbow.

When Smith was arrested for the charge of bigamy and suspicion of murder, the pathologist Bernard Spilsbury was asked to determine how the women died.

There were no signs of heart or circulatory disease, but the evidence suggested that death was almost instantaneous, as if the victim died of a sudden stroke.

On 8 February, the chief police officer of Herne Bay, a small seaside resort in Kent, had read the stories, and sent Neil a report of another death which was strikingly similar to the other two.

A year before Burnham's death in Blackpool, one Henry Williams had rented a house with no bath in 80 High Street, for himself and his wife, Beatrice "Bessie" Mundy, whom he had married in Weymouth, Dorset in 1910.

He took his wife to a local GP, Dr Frank French, owing to an epileptic seizure, although she was complaining only of headaches, for which the doctor prescribed some medication.

This time, when Spilsbury examined Bessie Williams, he found one sure sign of drowning: the presence of goose pimples on the skin on her thigh.

Using French's description of Bessie Williams when he found her in the bathtub, Spilsbury reasoned that Smith must have seized her by the feet and suddenly pulled them up toward himself, sliding the upper part of the body under water.

Smith elected not to give evidence in his own defence, indicating this to Marshall Hall in a handwritten note (pictured).

For example, the doctor and suspected serial killer John Bodkin Adams was charged for the murder of Edith Alice Morrell, but the deaths of Gertrude Hullett and her husband Jack were used in the committal hearing to prove the existence of a pattern.

In Evelyn Waugh's book Unconditional Surrender, which is set during the Second World War, General Whale is referred to as "Brides-in-the-bath" because all the operations he sponsored seemed to require the extermination of all involved.

It is also mentioned in Ngaio Marsh's "Artists in Crime" and in Patricia Highsmith's novel A Suspension of Mercy on page 63: "Not for him the Smith brides-in-a-bath murders for peanuts."

On page 273 of Monica Ferris's novel "The Drowning Spool" it mentions "a certain George Joseph Smith" who is discovered through the work of "a very clever forensic investigator back then".

Margery Allingham's short story "Three Is a Lucky Number" (1955) adapts the events and refers to James Joseph Smith and his brides.

It is also mentioned in Gladys Mitchell’s novel “Brazen Tongue” (1940) in which the local detective Stallard claims to Mrs Bradley that “like George Joseph Smith, we’ve ’eclipsed the European war’” in the reporting of the series of murders that opens the book.

The protagonist of Anthony Burgess's 1968 short story "An American Organ" wishes to emulate Smith by murdering his wife in a bath.

Silent Witness episode Fatal Error (2003) contains a reference to the case in connection with a series of murders based on forensic pathology textbook examples.

[12] This story is the basis for the Canadian play The Drowning Girls by Beth Graham, Charlie Tomlinson and Daniela Vlaskalic.