Who Was Mary Ann Cotton?
Mary Ann Cotton was a notorious 19th-century serial killer. She became known as the "Black Widow." Her chosen poison was the tasteless and aroma free arsenic. She carefully added arsenic to her teapot before pouring her unsuspecting victims a good old British cuppa. Then she claimed their life insurance policy payouts.
She was born Mary Ann Robson on or around Halloween 1832 in Low Moorsley, Durham County in the northeast of England. Her father was a coal miner; he died when she was young. She left home at 16 to pursue nursing and send money home to her mother. She returned home after three years and took up dressmaking as a career.
In 1852 Mary Ann married a labourer named William Mowbray and they had nine children over the next decade. The expanding family frequently moved from home to home and county to county. At some point during their tempestuous marriage, William took out a life insurance policy for himself, Mary Ann, and three of their children.
In 1864 William fell ill with an agonising "gastric fever" from which he never recovered. Some of their children suffered the same fate before and after William. Mary Ann collected £35 on the policy (over £3,500 today) and then left her one surviving child, a daughter, in her mother's care.
"Gastric Fever" Strikes Again
Mary Ann relocated to Sunderland to resume her nursing career. After approximately one year as a widow, she married George Ward, a patient at the hospital she worked in. He died within a year and Mary Ann was swift to collect the payout on his life insurance policy.
She made another career change and became a housekeeper for the Sunderland shipwright and widower James Robinson. One of his five children succumbed to gastric fever within days of Mary Ann's arrival.
Robinson allowed her to take a break and nurse her ailing mother in Seaham Harbour. Yet again, it is assumed that Mary Ann used her "arsenic in the teapot" method to dispose of her mother. Mary Ann took her daughter to the Robinson household. In April 1867 her daughter and two of the Robinson children fell fatally ill with gastric fever.
Much to the horror of his relatives who didn't care for Mary Ann, James Robinson married her in August 1867. She bore him a daughter who died of gastric fever. Their son George survived.
Bigamy and Murder: Frederick Cotton
In 1869 James Robinson discovered that his dear wife was stealing from him. He was weary of her repeated petitions that he should take out a life insurance policy for himself. Clearly Mary Ann Robinson fancied an exit and a substantial payout from the marriage. He either threw Mary Ann out of the house or she fled. Either way, James lived to tell the tale of his time with her.
For a while Mary Ann was homeless, but by September 1870 she had married widower Frederick Cotton, a friend of the Robinson family. In 1870 he was supported by Mary Ann after the untimely deaths of his sister and his youngest child. (Another teapot outing?) When she married Cotton in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, she was still married to Robinson—so the murderer was now also a bigamist.
Charles Edward Cotton's Murder
Mary Ann had a son with Cotton the following year. By the close of 1871, Frederick Cotton and two more of his children were dead. The life insurance money was most welcome to the not-so-grieving widow.
During a short liaison with James Nattress, Mary Ann fell pregnant by another man. John Quick-Manning had employed her as a nurse to tend to him during his recovery from smallpox. Nattress died from gastric fever in 1872, and at the same time, Quick-Manning refused to marry Mary Ann.
She tried to leave her seven-year-old stepson Charles Edward Cotton at a workhouse. She told an official that caring for Charles was the reason that she couldn't take over the nursing of another smallpox sufferer in the area. She was not successful in abandoning him there, but she was confident that she "wouldn't be troubled long" by Charles.
When the official heard about Charles' death, he alerted the local police. Finally, someone was suspicious enough to report Mary Ann Cotton to the authorities.
A Children's Rhyme About Mary Ann Cotton
Mary Ann Cotton, she's dead and she's rotten
Lying in bed with her eyes wide open
Sing, sing, oh what should I sing?
Mary Ann Cotton, she's tied up with string
Where, where? Up in the air
Selling black puddings, a penny a pair
Mary Ann Cotton, she's dead and forgotten
Lying in bed with her bones all rotten
Sing, sing, what can I sing?
Mary Ann Cotton, tied up with string
Death Sentence for the Serial Killer
A postmortem on Charles revealed the presence of arsenic in his system. Two of Frederick Cotton's children and James Nattress' bodies were exhumed. Arsenic was detected in their corpses.
Mary Ann Cotton was charged with the murder of Charles Edward Cotton, and as she awaited trial in Durham Prison, she gave birth to her 13th and last child, Margaret Edith Quick-Manning Cotton, in January 1873. Only two of her children survived her, including this new daughter. George Robinson was the other.
In March 1873, her three-day trial began. Her defence argued that arsenic was present in many Victorian homes and that each of the deaths could have been caused by the inhalation of arsenic powder used to produce green wallpapers, or perhaps the chemists who supplied the arsenic as a beauty product confused it with bismuth.
The prosecution counsel was untroubled. They had a pile of evidence and countless witnesses to testify against her. It's believed that she may have murdered more than 21 people before justice caught up with her.
Mary Ann Cotton was sentenced to death for the murder of Charles Edward Cotton. She was also charged with the murders of 11 of her children, her mother, three of her husbands, and her former lover but these charges were not required as just one conviction with a death sentence was sufficient.
"Monster in Human Shape"
Her execution by hanging on March 24th 1873 at the jail was not without incident. The hangman William Calcraft was clumsy and the trap door that she was to fall through was at the incorrect height to break her neck. The executioner completed his task by pressing down on her shoulders and snapping her neck. It took her over three minutes to die. She had an audience of 50 people as she drew her final breath.
She never confessed to any of the murders.
It wasn't until the 20th century and the discovery that Dr. Harold Shipman had murdered over 250 of his patients that Mary Ann Cotton was "bumped off" the top spot as England's most prolific and deadly serial killer.
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