MARY ANN COTTON
Mary Ann Cotton was the most prolific serial killer in Victorian England. Among her victims were her mother, a lover, a friend, three husbands and numerous stepchildren. It is thought that she killed ten of her own children.
Her life began in Dickensian surroundings. She was born Mary Ann Robson, in October 1832, within Low Moorsley, a small village located not far from the city of Sunderland in north-east England. Consisting of herself, two younger siblings and Mary Ann’s parents, the Robson family was not a large one. However, her father, a miner, seems to have been forever struggling to make ends meet. His life above ground was devoted to his two beliefs: Methodism and the idea that children must be raised with a firm hand.
When Mary Ann was 8, her father moved the family to nearby Murton, where he was employed by the South Hetton Coal Company. Any advancement the family had hoped to make through the relocation soon vanished after he fell 45 metres to his death down a mine shaft.
Six years later in 1846 Mary Ann’s mother remarried. Although her stepfather had none of the financial worries that had plagued her father, the two men had at least one thing in common: the belief in strict discipline. At 16, Mary Ann escaped the family home by obtaining a position as a private nurse. She returned to her mother and stepfather three years later, but only for a brief period. Within months, a pregnant Mary Ann married William Mowbray, a labourer, and left the family home for good.
The young couple lived a somewhat transient lifestyle as Mowbray pursued work in the mines and in railway construction. Ultimately, they ended up where they had begun; in Sunderland, where Mowbray found work first as a foreman with the South Hetton Coal Company, then as a fireman aboard the steamer Newburn. In January 1865, Mowbray died of what was described as an intestinal disorder. Mary Ann received an insurance payment of £35 on his life. Wishing to express his condolences, the attending doctor revisited the house, surprising the widow who was dancing around the room in an expensive new dress.
During their 13-year marriage, Mary Ann and William Mowbray had had nine children, only two of whom were still alive when their father died.
After Mowbray’s death, Mary Ann moved eight kilometres south to Seaham Harbour. She began a relationship with Joseph Nattrass, a man who was engaged to another woman. It was at this point that one of her two remaining children, a 3-year-old girl, died. After Nattrass married, Mary Ann returned to Sunderland with Isabella, her only surviving child. The girl was sent to live with her grandmother, and Mary Ann found employment with the Sunderland Infirmary House of Recovery for the Cure of Contagious Fever, Dispensary and Humane Society. While working there, she met an engineer named George Ward, who was suffering from a fever. His recovery was swift. Ward was discharged and, in August 1865, the two married. However, his ill-health returned soon after the wedding. During much of the marriage, he suffered from a lingering illness. Symptoms included paralyses and chronic stomach problems. When Ward died in October 1866, Mary Ann accused her late husband’s doctor of malpractice.
As she had immediately after the death of her first husband, Mary Ann again left Sunderland. She settled in Pallion, where she was hired by a man named James Robinson. A shipwright, Robinson had also recently lost a spouse, and was in need of a housekeeper to look after his five children. But in December 1866, tragedy again struck the Robinson household when the youngest child died suddenly of gastric fever. Meanwhile Mary Ann, it seems, provided something more than sympathy for her new employer – she was soon with child.
Early in the New Year, Mary Ann received news that her mother had been taken ill. She made the trek back to Sunderland, arriving to find that her mother had all but recovered her health. Yet nine days later, she was dead.
With Isabella in tow, Mary Ann returned to her employer. Soon after their arrival, the girl began complaining of stomach pains, as did two of the Robinson children. By the end of April, all three were dead.
It can be said with some certainty that Robinson initially made no connection between the rash of deaths and his new housekeeper, for in August 1867 the two were married. The child Mary Ann was carrying, a daughter they named Mary Isabella, was born in late November. She lived for only three months.
The death of Mary Isabella proved to be the saddest event in a disastrous marriage. Although the couple would have one more child, the relationship deteriorated rapidly. Robinson soon came to the realization that his wife was running up debts without his knowledge and had stolen money he had asked her to deposit in the bank. After valuables began disappearing from the house, he confronted his children and was told that their stepmother had forced them to pawn the items. In late 1869, two years after they’d married, Mary Ann’s husband threw her out of the house.
By the beginning of 1870, Mary Ann had been reduced to living on the streets. Her luck began to change when a friend, Margaret Cotton, introduced Mary Ann to her brother, Frederick. As in the case of Robinson, Frederick Cotton had been recently widowed. He’d also suffered through the deaths of two of his four children. Within a few months of meeting Mary Ann, he buried another child, who died of an apparent stomach ailment. Not long into the grieving process, Mary Ann became pregnant with Cotton’s child. Early in the pregnancy, Margaret Cotton died of an ailment similar to that which had taken the life of her young nephew. Although Mary Ann was still married to Robinson – a secret she kept from the expectant father – she and Cotton were married in September 1870.
Shortly after the birth of her 11th child, a boy named Robert, Mary Ann heard news of Joseph Nattrass, her former lover. No longer married, Nattrass was living in the village of West Aukland, a little over 60 kilometres to the south. Not only did Mary Ann quickly move to resume the relationship, she somehow succeeded in convincing her husband to relocate the family closer to where Nattrass lived. Two days after his first wedding anniversary, Cotton died from a gastric fever.
Shortly after her husband’s death, Mary Ann welcomed Nattrass into her home as a ‘lodger’. Although she had received a substantial payment owing from Cotton’s life insurance policy, she went to work as a nurse for John Quick-Manning, an excise officer who was recovering from smallpox. She soon became pregnant by him.
Between 10 March and 1 April, death visited the Cotton home on three separate occasions. The first to die was Frederick Cotton, Jr. His death was followed by Robert, the child of Mary Ann and her late husband. Before the infant could be buried, Joseph Nattrass also died; but only after rewriting his will so that all would be left to Mary Ann.
Once again pregnant, this time with Quick-Manning’s child, Mary Ann’s thoughts turned to marriage. It would appear that to her thinking only one obstacle remained: Charles, the surviving Cotton child. Mary Ann had hoped that he might be sent to a workhouse, but was told by Thomas Riley, a minor parish official, that she would be obliged to accompany him.
After declining, she informed Riley that Charles was sickly, adding, ‘I won’t be troubled long. He’ll go like all the rest of the Cottons.’ Riley, who had always seen the boy healthy, thought the statement peculiar. When Charles Cotton died five days later, he visited the village authorities and urged an investigation.
An inquest held the following Saturday determined that Charles had, indeed, died of natural causes. Mary Ann’s story that Riley had made the accusation because she had spurned his advances would very likely have affected his position as well as his reputation, had it not been for the local press.
Reporters looking into Mary Ann’s story discovered that she had buried three husbands, a prospective sister-in-law, a paramour, her mother and no fewer than 12 children, nearly all of whom had died of stomach ailments. The revelations caused the doctor who had attended Charles to reopen his investigation. He soon discovered traces of arsenic in the small samples he’d kept from the boy’s stomach.
Mary Ann was arrested, and the body of Charles Cotton was exhumed. After another six corpses were dug up in failed attempts to locate the body of Joseph Nattrass,
it was decided that she would stand trial for the murder of Charles alone. Proceedings were delayed a few months until the delivery of the baby fathered by Quick-Manning.
During the trial, Mary Ann attempted to explain Charles’ death by saying that he had inhaled arsenic contained in the dye of the wallpaper of the Cotton home. The theory was dismissed and she was sentenced to death.
On 24 March 1873, Mary Ann Cotton was hanged at Durham County Gaol. Her death was long and painful, the result of an elderly hangman having miscalculated the required drop.
THE BLOODY BENDERS
In Kansas, the Bender family is legendary, and as with all legends, it is difficult to determine the difference between truth and embellishment. However, one claim that can be made with some certainty is that they were the first known serial killers operating in the United States.
Late in 1870, the Bender men arrived in Osage Township in the south-eastern part of Kansas. Like nearly all settlers, they came from the east, but exactly where from has always been something of a mystery. The assumption is that they were German. The patriarch, a giant of a man named John Bender Sr, barely spoke – his vocabulary seemed to consist of little more than muttered curses. His son, John Jr, was easily the more sociable of the two. Though he spoke with a German accent, he was fluent in English and given to laughter.
The two spent the remainder of 1870 and nearly all of the following year preparing their land and constructing a cabin and a barn, several kilometres south of the town of Cherry Vale. In the autumn, they brought Ma Bender and her daughter Kate to the new homestead. They used large pieces of canvas to divide their cabin in half. The back became the family home, while the other half was set up as a general store and inn offering lodging to weary travellers who passed along the Osage Trail. It was a good location, providing a tempting if modest place to stop for many lone men travelling from the east to a new life in the west.
Over the months that followed, people started going missing from along the Osage Trail. In a time of erratic and unreliable mail service, the disappearances weren’t noticed at first; it was only over time, when the names of the missing had begun to accumulate, that suspicions began to be aroused. In neighbouring communities, rumour and speculation began to circulate.
Among the missing was a well-known physician, William H. York, who had disappeared in March 1873 while travelling the 160-kilometre route from Fort Scott to Independence, Kansas. Not long after the doctor’s disappearance, the township decided that all farms in the area would be searched for evidence. Three days later, a local farmer noticed the Bender livestock roaming, obviously in need of nourishment. Further investigation revealed that the inn had been abandoned; nearly all possessions had been removed. The cabin itself contained a foul stench that was later found to be emanating from a trapdoor in the floor, beneath which was a pool of clotted blood.
Excavation of the apple orchard next to the cabin revealed ten bodies, including that of York. The doctor had been bludgeoned from behind and had had his throat cut. Eight other victims had been killed in the same manner; the sole exception was an 18-month-old girl who appeared to have been buried alive beneath her father’s naked corpse. Dismembered parts of other victims were also found buried on the property. It was impossible to tell with any certainty exactly how many people the Bloody Benders had claimed.
The Benders were never seen again. They appeared to simply vanish into the Kansas landscape, leaving questions that have been answered by little more than speculation and fancy.
Among the more likely of the stories concerns the Bender daughter. Remembered as a voluptuous beauty, Kate, it is claimed, was one of the reasons travellers found the inn such an attractive place to spend the night. Some stories tell of her performing throughout the region as ‘Professor Miss Kate Bender’, a psychic medium. Others depict her as a spiritualist who would perform a seance during which the unlucky traveller would be struck on the head through the canvas curtain dividing the cabin.
In fact, the canvas that divided the cabin in two always plays a role in the Bender legend. Although no one saw the family in action and lived to tell about it, their routine is described without variation. First, the unsuspecting guest would be struck through the curtain. The victim would then be dragged into the other half of the cabin, where he would be stripped of clothing and valuables. In the final step, the unlucky traveller would be thrown down the trapdoor to the cellar, where his throat would be cut.
The legends concerning the Bender clan extend as far as their respective fates. Several posses were formed to pursue the murderous family, including one that numbered among its members Charles Ingalls, father of Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder. In her memoirs, Wilder writes of her belief that her father’s posse caught the Benders and dealt with them in a manner typical of the American frontier. A number of different posses claimed that they had brought the Benders to justice, leaving open the intriguing possibility that several innocent people were killed by what amounted to little more than lynch mobs.
Dead babies
It has been said that John Bender Sr ran off with all the money stolen from the victims, leaving the rest of the family penniless. One version of the legend has it that he committed suicide in Lake Michigan shortly after having been confronted by Ma and Kate.
A particularly gruesome story asserts that Kate and John Jr were not sister and brother; rather that they were lovers. According to this version of the Bender legend, the two had many babies together, each of which they disposed of with a hammer to the head. These killings presumably gave the couple practice for future dealings with those travelling the Osage Trail. It has been said that they fled first by train, then by horse into either Texas or Mexico, where John Jr died of a haemorrhage.
In his 1913 book The Benders of Kansas, Minnesota defence attorney John Towner James maintains that in 1889 Ma and Kate were captured in Michigan and brought to Kansas. According to James, the two women were to be tried for York’s murder, but were let go when the trial date was postponed from February 1890 to May 1890. The story here is that the county didn’t want the expense of lodging the prisoners for three extra months.
As would be expected of a story in which imagination has replaced fact, the land once occupied by the Benders is said to be haunted by the ghosts of their victims.
THE SERVANT GIRL ANNIHILATOR
The American writer O. Henry is perhaps best remembered today for The Gift of the Magi, a Christmas tale featuring Jim and Della, a young couple with no money. As the holiday approaches, Della sells her long tresses to a wigmaker so that she might buy a platinum chain for Jim’s watch. Meanwhile, Jim sells his watch and uses the money he receives to buy a set of jewelled combs for Della’s hair. The moral is difficult to miss: material possessions, whether bejewelled or made from platinum, are of little value when compared to love. It is a heart-warming, sentimental story, typical of the author’s work. How odd, then, that this very same man has the distinction of having provided a nickname for one of the first American serial killers, the Servant Girl Annihilator.
O. Henry’s epithet, provided to friends working at the Austin Daily Statesman, was one of several used to describe the murderer who terrorized Texas between 1884 and 1885. Another name was the Austin Axe Murderer. Neither was entirely apt, but both continue to be used to this day for a killer who was never caught.
The Servant Girl Annihilator began his bloody work on the cold New Year’s Eve of 1884. His first victim, a 25-year-old live-in ‘negro servant’ named Mollie Smith, was found next to the outhouse of the home in which she was employed. Wearing only a nightdress, she had been raped and bludgeoned to death. The murder weapon, an axe covered in Mollie’s blood, was discovered inside the outhouse. No one in the house proper had heard anything. Indeed, all had appeared peaceful until Walter Spencer, Smith’s common-law husband, had awoken from his usual night’s sleep in great pain. He discovered a deep cut across his face. The bedroom he and Mollie shared was in bl
oody disarray and his ‘wife’ was gone. Spencer’s cries for help awoke the rest of the house.
In the early morning hours, the local marshal led a pack of bloodhounds through the snow-covered streets of Austin. It was a horrible way to usher in the New Year.
Though Austin was then a small city – fewer than 25,000 lived within its limits – murder was not entirely unknown there. Still, the savagery displayed in Mollie Smith’s death was big news indeed. Suspicion settled quickly on Smith’s former lover, a black man named William Brooks. An all-white coroner’s jury ignored Brooks’ alibi and witnesses, concluding that he was probably guilty of the crime. Eventually, the ex-boyfriend was released due to lack of evidence.
Five months later, on 6 May, another black woman, Eliza Shelley, was murdered. A 30-year-old cook, Shelley lived with her three children in a cabin on the property of her employer, L. B. Johnson. It was Johnson’s wife who, hearing Shelley’s screams, sent her niece to check on the children. The girl found the family cook lying dead on the cabin floor, her skull very nearly split in two. Shelley’s nightgown was raised, exposing most of her body. Bloody footprints of a barefooted man trailed from the awful scene.
This time, there had been a witness. The victim’s 8-year-old son spoke of seeing a man enter the cabin. This unknown figure pushed the boy away and threw a blanket over him. Falling asleep, he’d seen nothing further, and had even slept through his mother’s screams. Upon waking the next morning, he was blissfully unaware of her fate.
False leads
Again, the authorities cast around for suspects. A mentally handicapped 19-year-old was arrested, seemingly for no other reason than that he had no shoes. When his feet were measured and shown to be of a different size to those of the killer, he was released. An acquaintance of the Shelleys was also held, for no other reason than that the two had been seen arguing.
The murderer struck again 17 days later. The victim, Irene Cross, was yet another black female servant. This time, it seemed, there had been no axe; it appeared that she had been stabbed in the head. One arm was almost severed from the rest of her body. In this case, the authorities arrested no one.
The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases Page 3
