His method of killing — eliminating only those victims who regained consciousness and could identify him — reflected a cold operational logic that made him exceptionally difficult to catch. Working at a classified defense facility lent him an institutional shield that delayed his arrest even after suspicion had formed. The investigation required a month of crowded tram rides with a surviving witness and a chance encounter before authorities could build a case, and the trophies recovered from two separate residences confirmed the full scope of what the courts ultimately recorded as nine murders and forty-two rapes.

Botting worked as the state's instrument of death at a time when public execution was both legal spectacle and social ritual, officiating at Newgate during a period when capital punishment extended to crimes far beyond violence. His tenure included the beheading that followed the Cato Street hangings — the last legal public decapitation in England — marking him as a figure present at a grim threshold in penal history. The report that he died alone in the street, with no passerby willing to help, suggests the depth of personal revulsion his role inspired, distinct from any abstract objection to the institution itself.