Curtain call: the murder of William Terriss

What happened

William Terriss, one of the most popular actors on the London stage, was stabbed to death outside the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre on 16 December 1897. His attacker was a minor actor named Richard Archer Prince, who had performed alongside him and who was waiting for him at the door that night.

Prince had spent years struggling for work. His drinking and increasingly erratic temper had cost him roles, and he had come to believe that Terriss, of all people, was the reason he could not find employment. He had tried to waylay Terriss at the theatre more than once before that December night. Terriss, by contrast, had shown Prince real kindness, including recommending him for help from the Actors' Benevolent Fund, assistance Prince appears to have taken as confirmation of exactly the failure he blamed on his rival rather than as the favour it was.

Terriss was fatally wounded at the stage door and died within minutes. Prince made no attempt to flee the scene.

The evidence

This was not a case built on circumstantial threads. Prince was found at the scene with the weapon, and witnesses at the theatre could speak to the years of grievance he had been voicing about Terriss beforehand. The physical facts of the killing were never seriously in dispute. What the case turned on instead was Prince's state of mind, whether he understood what he had done, and whether the law of the time could hold him responsible for it.

Prince, by the time of his arrest, was already known around the theatre world by the nickname Mad Archer, a reputation that predated the killing and that his defence leaned on heavily.

How it's been argued over, then and since

Prince stood trial at the Old Bailey the following January. He was found guilty of murder but, under the law as it stood at the time, guilty but insane, and was committed to Broadmoor rather than sent to the gallows. This is one of only three of our eight real cases with an actual verdict: Terriss's killer was caught, named and tried within weeks, and the facts of what happened at the stage door have never been in real dispute.

What has stayed genuinely open is the question underneath the verdict, one that has followed this case for well over a century: whether Prince was truly unable to understand what he was doing, or whether insanity was simply the label Victorian law reached for when a killing made no rational sense and needed somewhere to be filed. Terriss was, by all accounts, decent to a man who had nothing left to lose. That gap between a real kindness and its outcome is the part of the case that still gets written about.

Murder Mystery Party's case, Curtain Call, puts your table at the Adelphi's stage door on the same December night, working through the same grievance and the same waiting man, and asks your guests to weigh what everyone at the time already knew against what the verdict actually decided.