Wimbledon finalist got life sentence for murdering woman and banished to Devil's Island

Wimbledon has welcomed characters good and not so good since the first edition of the tournament in 1877. And only three years in, the event hosted a finalist who, later in life, would turn to alcohol and drugs before being locked up for brutally murdering a woman and putting her body in a suitcase.

That is the story of Vere St. Leger Goold - the player said to have a 'killer backhand' whose life took a sinister turn after his run in south-west London. Goold, who was born to an Irish noble father in 1853, became his country's first tennis champion and was also said to be a skilled boxer.

In the same year he won the Irish title, Goold advanced all the way to what was then known as the Wimbledon All-Comers final, where he was beaten in straight sets by John Hartley.

That, coupled with his Irish triumph, ended up being the highlight of a short-lived tennis career. Goold began to slip away from the top-level tennis scene in 1883, and according to Marca, he had given up the sport altogether by 1885 after 'succumbing to alcohol and drugs'.

The same report states that Goold fled to Canada to get out from under a mountain of debt in 1891, the same year he married Frenchwoman Marie Giraudin.

More than a decade and a half passed before Goold's life would spiral completely out of control. It is understood that he and his wife agreed to go to a Monte Carlo casino as they believed they had a money-spinning method to tilt the odds in their favour.

Reports of what happened next vary, but it is claimed they ran out of money and borrowed from a rich Swedish woman named Emma Levin. Shortly afterwards, authorities found her cut-up remains in suitcases that were bound for France, and discovered a mountain of evidence in Goold's room, including weapons and bloody curtains.

Goold's wife was given life imprisonment in exchange for a death sentence. She lived out the rest of her days in a Montpellier prison and died of typhoid in 1914.

By that point Goold was already five years dead. He had been shipped off to the ominous-sounding Devil's Island - part of French Guiana - on a life sentence, and he would remain there until 1909, when he committed suicide at the age of 55.