Member-only story
Louie Calvert — The Convicted Murderer Who Cried Wolf
The story about the 1926 Murder of Lily Waterhouse
In June 1926, it was in the middle of the Roaring Twenties. Prohibition and bootlegging in the United States was rampant and would be the center of future films and books about the era.
We never hear much about what was going on in the rest of the world. And in this case, we’re going to the UK in 1926.
So, in June 1926, Lily Waterhouse was found beaten and strangled to death in her house. And there was only one suspect: her tenant, Louie Calvert.
But Louie told the police it was someone else. A man named Fred Crabtree.
Louie Calvert
Early Life
Normally, we don’t know much about historical murderers’ early lives — especially if they were female sex workers. However, Louie did us all a favor.
She wrote her life down before her execution.
The bad news? I couldn’t find the autobiography and had to go off of what others wrote about it (Jakobi 2017 and Ballinger 2010). Something to note about the autobiography is that Louie never shies away from what she did wrong and most aligns with the facts we know. But, in life she was a chronic liar. The difference is she…
