As was mentioned in evidence at the trial of his murderer, Russell had a locket containing some of his wife's hair, which he valued greatly.
Fearing that a robbery had taken place in the night, she went to the room of the Swiss valet, François Benjamin Courvoisier, and found him already dressed.
The police were summoned; Courvoisier drew their attention to marks of violence upon the door to his pantry, asserting that this was where the robbers had entered the house.
[2] The police, however, came quickly to the conclusion that the "robbery" had been staged in order to draw suspicion away from some member of the household.
The discovery of several more gold articles, as well as the banknote, hidden in the wainscoting and in Courvoisier's pantry cemented their suspicion of the valet.
His counsel, Charles Phillips, was doing well on the paucity of evidence, such as the lack of blood on Courvoisier's clothes, unusual in a cut-throat murder.
Phillips was supposed by some to be hinting at the guilt of a maidservant in the house, when an inventory indicated that several further items of silverware were missing, and silver matching their description was located in a French hotel in Leicester Square.
Samuel Warren defended Phillips against the charge he had ever imputed guilt to any woman in the house, in his 1855 book, The Mystery of Murder, and its Defence.
[3][page needed] This report was conveyed to Courvoisier by his barrister, and he immediately confessed to both the thefts and the murder.
Also present was the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, who subsequently wrote an anti-capital punishment essay, On Going to See a Man Hanged.