Sweeney Todd

Sweeney Todd is a legendary serial-killer who has become the titular villain of many works of fiction based on an old "penny dreadful" known as The String Of Pearls. The story is best known today as a very popular and successful musical by Stephen Sondheim Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

However, despite his origins as a fictional character Sweeney Todd has always been rumored to be based on a historical figure, even though most scholars dismiss such claims - this aspect of Sweeney Todd arguably marks him as one of the earliest examples of urban legend.
 * Synopsis: "The Tale of Sweeney Todd"

HistoryEdit
Sweeney Todd's story begins in Victorian London, his given name is Benjamin Barker and lives with his wife Lucy and year-old daughter Joannah. A local judge by the name of Turpin grows jealous and lusts for Todd's wife, leading him to frame Todd for a crime and send him away to Australia, then a British penal colony. In this time, he invites Lucy to a formal party at his manor where he rapes her. Lucy, filled with grief, poisons herself with arsenic, however fails to kill herself and subsecquently goes insane. Joannah is adopted by the judge as his ward.

Fifteen years later Todd manages to return to London with the help of a merchant sailor, and reopens his business as a barber under his new alias. He vows revenge against Judge Turpin and begins a plan to kill him in the barber shop. As Todd is about to slit the judge's throat with a razor while giving him a shave, the sailor who helped him escape enters the shop announcing that he and Joannah are in love. An enraged Turpin leaves, leaving Todd with an unsatisfied vengeance.

In desperate anger and sorrow at soceity, Todd begins a rampage, killing numerous innocent customers by cutting their throats while shaving them, and dropping them down a trapdoor to the bakehouse of his neighbor and co-conspirator, Mrs. Lovett, who uses them to bake into meat pies which she sells at her shop, which are wildly popular due to the public being oblivious to the truth.

In the story's climax, Todd lures the Judge back to his barber shop and murders him. On running down to the pie shop bakehouse to help Mrs. Lovett dispose of the bodies of the Judge and a beggar woman he hastily killed as the jugde approached, he discovered the woman is actually Lucy, his wife whom he thought to be dead. He then becomes enraged and accuses Mrs. Lovett of hiding the truth, whom claimed to be protecting Todd by keeping Lucy's fate unknown. He then puts on a facade of forgeiveness and compassion, then waltzes Lovett over towards her large pie oven, where he throws her into the fire and slams the door shut. Todd then holds Lucy's body in his arms while Tobias who nicknamed Toby, a boy who worked for Mrs. Lovett in the pie shop appears, he had been locked in the bakehouse with many murdered bodies after he became suspicious of Todd's actions and consequently went insane. Toby picks up Todd's razor and kills him with a swift cut across the throat.&nbsp