Timothy Connell's Headstone (Mary Russell Murders)

This is the site's first Irish entry, found via a blog post that itself cited the BBC's 2018 murder-stones article. Timothy Connell was a stableman aboard the brig Mary Russell, tending mules being shipped from Cobh to Barbados. On 22 June 1828, the ship's captain, William Stewart - gripped by paranoid fear of a mutiny after a former captain, James Gould Raynes, was given passage home and was overheard speaking Irish with the crew - bound seven men hand and foot on the floor of the main saloon and killed them all with a crowbar and then an axe: Raynes, chief mate William Smith, second mate William Swanson, carpenter John Cramer, seamen John Howes, Francis Sullivan and John Keating, and stableman Timothy Connell (a second stableman, James Morley/Murley, and an 11-year-old passenger survived). Stewart was tried at Cork Assizes on 11 August 1828 for Raynes's murder; unusually, both prosecution and defence sought the same verdict, and he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. The case, largely forgotten for over a century, was the subject of a 2010 book, 'The Ship of Seven Murders' by Alannah Hopkin with Kathy Bunney. Connell's headstone stands in Old Kilmurry Cemetery near Passage West, Co. Cork, naming Captain Stewart directly as his killer. Ireland's own Schools' Collection (Dúchas.ie, folklore gathered from schoolchildren in the 1930s) separately records that the same small cemetery holds a memorial to at least one more of the victims (given there as 'M. O'Connell', which may be a variant or garbled rendering of one of the crew names above rather than a distinct person) - worth checking in person whether more than one inscribed stone from this case survives.