Presumably, many of my friends who like Hollywood movies have seen johnny Depp's early work, "Todd the Barber," an adaptation of the Broadway stage play "The Crazy Barber," and the first to bring the character of Todd to the public was the 1846 novel Pearl Necklace: A Romantic Story, published by Thomas Paget. The book quickly became popular, the image of the murderous demon Todd quickly took root, and works about him continued to emerge, and to this day, Broadway still stages an opera about Todd the barber.
Many people may think that Todd's story is just an urban legend, but in fact he is a real person, and the story that happens to him is as creepy as it is performed in a movie or an opera.
The historical Todd had a tragic childhood, he was born in Spitafons, East London, on October and 26, 1756, his father was an alcoholic who was keen on domestic violence, his mother was a weaver, he was abused by his husband for many years, and he did not have the extra energy to take care of the young Todd.
Such a family gave Todd a psychological shadow in his childhood, and when he was 12 years old, the alcoholic father and poor mother were found frozen to death on the side of the road. Orphaned, Todd apprenticed to a craftsman who specialized in making razors, and although he did not have a salary, he could at least eat enough.
At the age of fourteen, Todd was imprisoned for stealing a customer's watch, where he was bullied and sexually assaulted by other inmates, which made his already somewhat deformed psychology even more pathological. Todd, who had been in prison for five years, was chosen as an assistant by the prison barber because he knew how to repair razors, and was responsible for shaving the heads and beards of the prisoners, which became his future craft. Since he became a prison barber, the prisoners who had bullied him in the past did not dare to bully him again, for fear that the sharp razor in his hand would cut his throat.
When He was nineteen years old, Todd was released from prison, he worked in several barbershops, his exquisite craftsmanship made him gain many customers, and when he made money, he opened a barber shop near Hyde Park, and it was in this barber shop that he began his killing career. The first man he killed was a fat man who disgusted him, and the fat man lay in a comfortable chair and slept soundly, and the purr upset Todd, so he cut the fat man's throat with a razor, so that he would never make a sound. The bodies were cut by Todd with a razor and then thrown into the river to feed the fish, while bones and organs were thrown haphazardly into drains and became a delicacy for cats, dogs, and dogs.
The fat man's death did not attract any attention, as if there was no such person in the world. This surprised Andd and was happy. Later, he killed two people in succession, and by this time he was already addicted to killing.
When he had more money, he moved to the infamous Fleet Street to open a larger shop (which still exists and became a tourist attraction), and Todd used his craft to unknowingly cut the necks of one guest after another, and hid the victims through specially designed chairs capable of moving corpses, thus achieving his bloodthirsty purposes. During this time, Todd met Lovet, a widow who ran a pie shop, and the two soon developed a lover's relationship. Todd told Lovett what he had done, and instead of being surprised, Lovett became his assistant and helped him dispose of the bodies.
The two transported the corpses to the pie shop through the underground passage and made them into freshly baked, hot meat pie to sell, which not only saved the cost of buying meat fillings, but also achieved the purpose of destroying the corpses. Two people who have no compassion can be said to cooperate seamlessly.
This intimate partnership lasted for nearly six years, but more and more reports of disappearances after haircuts also attracted the attention of the police, and the good days for the evil Mandarin ducks will soon come to an end.
The murderous-addicted Todd accidentally looked away during his last crime, treating a foreign tourist who came alone to get a haircut as a fat sheep, and as always, he dropped the knife in his hand and easily cut the throat of the passengers. He did not expect that the victim's wife was waiting for her husband to return from the hostel, and that a loyal pet dog had been guarding the barbershop.
When Todd transports the body to Lovet's pie shop, the loyal dog follows him and stays outside the pie shop and refuses to leave. Seeing that her husband had been out for a haircut and had not returned, and that his wife, who had gone out to look for her husband, found her dog outside the pie shop and could not be dragged away, the lady realized that her husband's disappearance was probably related to the pie shop, so she called the police.
The police searched the pie shop and accidentally found a secret passage between the pie shop and Todd's barber shop, and also found a large number of human skeletons of different old and new in the passage. The police found many gold watches with names engraved on them in Todd's barbershop, as well as physical evidence such as clothing, rings, and glasses.
Todd, who is in his forties, went back to the prison where he was being held, and according to the evidence provided by his lover Lovet, Todd murdered more than 150 customers in these years, which is only the number he knew after he knew Todd, and how many people Todd had killed before that, she did not know.
On January 25, 1802, the 46-year-old Todd was hanged in full view of everyone, and a literati who had visited the execution wrote notes claiming that Todd was wearing a gold-rimmed vest and straight trousers, and that his hair had been groomed to make him more like a gentleman, and he walked to the gallows with a smile and said to the onlookers: "Welcome to Todd's barbershop." The sentence was creepy, and someone threw stones at him and cursed him to go to hell.
Just as he used underground passages to transport the victim's body, Todd's body after being hanged was immediately transported to the Royal Surgical Hospital, using his remaining body after death to make the last contribution to the future of human medicine.
After Todd's death, he was given the title of "the most notorious serial murderer," a title that was not taken by "Jack the Ripper" in Whitechapel until many years later. But the name "Todd the Barber" is still a horrible term in London today.