Certainly she has not followed the infamous example of Dr Edgar Scrawfer, the Victorian murderer. Dr Scrawfer also ran an old people’s home. But he was a scoundrel and treated his residents poorly, squeezing their savings out of them. He wasted this money on gambling and drink and fell into serious debt. And one night, desperate to find a way to repay his creditors, he hatched an evil plan.

One of Dr Scrawfer’s guests was one-hundred-and-eight-year-old Mrs Mavis Trench. Now Mrs Trench was very old, but she was by no means the oldest person in the country, nor even the county (which was not Gatshire, but a county nearby). Fully thirty people stood above her on the national ladder. But Dr Scrawfer realised the prestige that would come to him were she to become so. He could have waited for the other thirty to fall off that ladder, as this would surely not have taken long. But he needed money badly. And he feared Mrs Trench herself would go the way of all flesh in the meantime (which would have left Mrs Margaret Hartley as his oldest tenant, and she was a mere eighty-one).

You can guess what happened. On the morning of the 21st of December 1897 the doctor was hanged for the murders of one-hundred-and-thirteen-year-old Mrs Edna Small (fed a meal of poisonous mushrooms) and one-hundred-and-twelve-year-old Mrs Dorothy Briggs (stabbed in her bath), as well as conspiracy to murder one-hundred-and-eleven-year-old Mr Seymour Perkins (slain while drinking a glass of mead Dr Scrawfer had offered him) and the one-hundred-and-eleven-year-old Reverend Bernard Wilson (ambushed in his church by a gang of assassins Dr Scrawfer had hired). He was caught when one of his accomplices gave himself up.

During the trial Mrs Trench died and it turned out she had bequeathed a thitherto-unsuspected fortune of one thousand pounds to the home.