Ruth Osborne was drowned in April 1751 when she and her husband John were stripped, bound, and repeatedly dragged through a pond near Wilston Green in Hertfordshire. He survived; she did not. Nor did Thomas Colley, who was convicted of Ruth’s murder and later executed. Ruth’s death was officially the last in the British Isles involving a trial by ordeal by water known as swimming a witch. The incident’s notoriety may stem from attention to the murder in the press of the day, in subsequent scholarly analysis, and on social media. Yet, for all that, nothing seems to deal with the silent, absent-present, and abject geographies that Ruth’s and Thomas’s deaths evoke and nothing accounts for their elemental and entangled throughlines to the present. So here I provide fresh readings about how bodies of water have been used in violent biopolitical acts against poor people and women. My aims are to open spaces in which to recognize, respect, and extend posthumous dignity to the dead and, more challengingly, in which to consider possibilities for forgiveness.