Few crimes have the power to shock in the way a parent causing harm to their child does - it's as true today as it must have been in 1885 when Swansea was gripped by the case of a father accused of murdering his young daughter by throwing her off the town's pier into the stormy sea.
It later emerged that widower Thomas Nash had remarried just weeks before the death of his youngest daughter but had not told his new wife about his children. Nash would go on to be convicted of the killing, and a crowd estimated at up to 4,000 people gathered outside Swansea prison on the cold and snowy day he was hanged, with papers reporting what while those there - many of whom were noted to be women and children - were largely well behaved, "some roughs indulged in throwing snowballs" around.
Nash was born and grew up in Pembrokeshire before moving to Swansea as a young man. Little is known of his life in what was then a booming industrial town but it is known that he married, and worked in a variety of jobs including as a furnaceman. He and his wife Martha had two daughters, Sarah and Martha Ann, but it seems his wife died in the year after the birth of their second child, WalesOnline reports.
