Eventually, Grundy's origin was revealed in a flashback. Grundy was a slaughterhouse worker in 1898, his wife Pinney Grundy was raped by his callous foreman Henry Pittance and she killed herself on the job. When Henry made the workers feed the body to the crocodiles, Grundy snapped, killed Henry, and everyone else in the slaughterhouse, then committed suicide while reciting the "Solomon Grundy" nursery rhyme he would often sing to his infant son.