In a dwelling on College Green (demolished in 1860, on the site now occupied by the Marriott Hotel), during 1764, Mrs Frances Ruscombe and her maid, Mary Sweet, were brutally murdered. Thomas de Quincey, author of Confessions of an English Opium Eater, makes mention of this in his essay ‘On Murder considered as One of the Fine Arts’, first published in Blackwoods’s Magazine in 1827.