Christina Collins was not destined for great things. As an ordinary woman, wife and humble member of the working class ranks of 19th century England, her name almost certainly would have ended with her life, had it been allowed to run its natural course.
But as Rugeley remembers, and the inscription on her gravestone confirms, Christina Collins did not die into obscurity.
She was the pitiful victim of a nasty incident on the Trent and Mersey canal in 1839. It pricked the nation's conscience and sent two men to the gallows, and another to the other side of the world on a convict ship.
The 37-year-old seamstress was travelling from Liverpool to London by longboat to join her husband, who had gone to the capital to find work, and was missing his wife dreadfully.
For Christina it was a 200-mile journey,at speeds of little more than 4mph, and one spent in the company of foul-mouthed, drunken, lecherous boatmen. It was also the cheapest form of transport within the means of the poor woman.
Two days into the journey, her body was found floating in the canal. She'd been tormented and molested, facts to which several other boatmen who had encountered her craft along the route, later would testify.
She was fished from the water, and her body carried up the set of steps still known today as "The Bloody Steps".
Boat captain James Owen and his workers George Thomas, from Wombourne and William Ellis, from Brinklow, were all tried and convicted for her murder.
Owen and Thomas were hanged outside Stafford prison on April 11, 1840. Ellis, who was said to have played a lesser role in the incident, was deported to Australia.
Rugeley historian and retired headmaster John Godwin has been fascinated with the story since he was a boy. He spent years piecing together facts and unravelling the truth from more than 150 years of folklore, and wrote a factual account of the incident.
"What interested me was the beauty and the beast aspect to the tale. Here was a a lovely, honourable young woman travelling to be with her husband, who falls victim to foul, lecherous boatmen."
But Mr Godwin feels the men should not have hanged for what they did. What sealed their fate, he says, was their lower than low social status.
"I think that if the trial was held today, they would not have been convicted for murder. There was never any proof that they pushed her into the canal to drown, or that her body was dumped overboard.
"Anything could have happened _ she could have fallen or jumped over. There is no denying, however, that she had a terrifying time, and was certainly meddled with."
Boatmen, he explained, were the scum of the era. They were frequently illiterate, and the itinerant nature of their work meant many had sought it as an excellent hiding place from the law.
The Stafford jury, therefore, was completely open to suggestion: if anyone was capable of such a heinous crime as murder, it was this low-life, they concluded.
A court report from the Staffordshire Advertiser, which published a broadsheet commemorative paper on the day of the execution, made no attempt to disguise the contempt society felt for men of their footing.
They read: "The prisoners were rather rough looking men and their dress and appearance completely indicated the class to which they belonged."
Public outrage about Christina's ordeal at their savage and uneducated hands could not be quietened by the public hanging. People wanted something done to improve the morals of the boatmen, who posed such an obvious threat to decent women of the land.
Many felt that the fact boatmen had to work on Sundays, and therefore had no opportunity to go to church, was the root of the problem.
This fuelled one of Britain's earliest Sunday trading debates and saw the formation of boatmen's missions and schools along the country's waterways.
More than a century later the story caught the attention of Colin Dexter, the creator of the Inspector Morse detective books, who used it as a basis for his novel The Wench is Dead.
The book also won Dexter his first Crime Writers' Association Gold Dagger Award.
Through his investigations, Mr Godwin managed to trace and unite two separate lines of Christina's ancestry from her brother's side, who met at Rugeley to follow the Christina trail.
Stray ends still elude this avid researcher, however: Christina was said to be carrying portraits of her husband and herself in her luggage on her ill-fated journey, neither of which have ever been traced.
What happened to the Australian convict Ellis? Although sentenced to 14 years in the colony, all records end with his deportation.
And who is the mysterious sender of the flowers that to this day still appear on Christina's grave in Rugeley churchyard?
