Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Mothers began to bet on their sickly children’s lives, enrolling them in burial clubs just in time to benefit from the maximum payout. Sometimes they would enroll them in several burial clubs at the same time. When children spoiled the gambit by recovering from their illness, some desperate mothers used arsenic to help them along in the opposite direction. Family members enrolled relatives without their knowledge. And since there were no regulations requiring that death certificates be signed by a medical practitioner giving a cause of death, it was easy to disguise a murder. And even if there was a doctor attending to a death, it was easy to miss signs of poisoning among all the other diseases that frequently killed people in those times.

  THE GREAT FEMALE SERIAL KILLER EPIDEMIC OF THE HUNGRY ’40S

  By the 1840s instances of female serial killers increased dramatically: At least nine women were executed in cases of serial murder between 1843 and 1852. This “epidemic” coincided with a severe downturn in Britain’s economy, beginning with a decline in the silk, cotton, and woolen industries in 1839. Food became scarce as people’s purchasing power collapsed to a fifteen-year low in 1842. The amount of property crime shot up dramatically in those years. While the economy recovered slightly between 1843 and 1845, a poor harvest the next year along with a rise in the price of cotton and the collapse of railway investment shares drove the economy into another depression for the remainder of the decade, which subsequently became known as the “Hungry ’40s.”

  Elizabeth Eccles

  The first of the notorious female killers of the Hungry ’40s was Elizabeth Eccles, in her late thirties, who in the autumn of 1842 reported the death of her thirteen-year-old stepson—a common enough occurrence. He was employed at a mill at three shillings a week, which he would promptly turn over to her. He was also enrolled in the mill’s burial club. Eccles applied to the mill for burial funds and received fifty shillings. She then promptly asked for another fifty to bury her daughter, who apparently died at about the same time. Since the mill did not employ the daughter, the company refused to pay and alerted the authorities. A coroner’s inquest detected the presence of arsenic in the two bodies and in the body of another daughter who had died in 1840. She confessed that she killed her stepson when he threatened to tell his father that she had been drinking and killed her daughter for “the love of money.” Elizabeth Eccles was hanged in May 1843.

  ARSENIC AND ITS EFFECTS

  In the 1840s, arsenic was available as a common household material from any corner druggist. It was a common ingredient for rat poison and as a beauty product as well, said to cure pimples and other skin blemishes. It was cheap: An ounce of white arsenic would cost about ten pence. It was colorless, odorless, and soluble in hot water. Two to four grains—a fraction of a teaspoon—was a lethal dose of the substance. (There are 437.5 grains in one ounce.)

  Symptoms of arsenic poisoning are horrific and begin within an hour of ingestion: an acrid sensation in the throat and the onset of unbearable nausea followed by uncontrollable vomiting, which continues long after the stomach is empty. The victim begins to vomit a whitish fluid streaked with blood. The mouth becomes parched, the tongue is thickly coated, and the throat is constricted. The victims suffer from an intense thirst but any attempt to drink immediately results in further bouts of vomiting. In the next stage, the victim suffers from uncontrollable bloody diarrhea and intense abdominal pain with more vomiting, accompanied by a severe burning sensation from the mouth all the way down to the anus. The urine is meager and bloody. Symptoms can include cardiac arrhythmias and ventricular fibrillation often leading to the misdiagnosis of a heart attack in the victim. Whitish lines (Mees’ lines) that look much like traumatic injuries are found on the fingernails.

  In the final stages, the victim goes pale and the skin takes on a bluish hue, accompanied by a sheen of foul-smelling perspiration. Breathing becomes harsh, irregular, and shallow, the hands and feet go very cold and numb, and the heartbeat grows feeble. Finally, the victim’s limbs convulse while their legs are seized by painful cramps. Death comes anywhere from six hours to several days after the ingestion of arsenic, depending upon the amount of poison ingested and physique of the victim.

  Essentially, arsenic affects how the body’s cells function, disabling their ability to absorb and use proteins and chemicals necessary to sustain human life.

  The symptoms of arsenic poisoning resemble cholera, a common deadly infectious disease at the time, the cause of which medical science would not understand until the 1880s. (Bacteria in the water supply or on drinking and eating utensils was often found to be the culprit.) The traces of arsenic left no visible evidence during an autopsy. However, it could be detected by chemical tests—and could be sometimes detected in exhumed corpses several years after death. But it would be several years before coroners began to catch on to the series of murders being secretly committed by some women and testing for arsenic became routine in suspicious cases. In 1847 the Daily News trumpeted: “The earth no longer covers the dead. The chemical test discovers what the autopsy left hidden.” While the British medical journal The Lancet pronounced as late as 1862, “The secret poisoning of the Middle Ages was…only a secret because the art of chemical analysis was then very imperfect.”122

  Sarah Dazely

  In the meantime, the revelations of serial poisoning murders continued. In March 1843, authorities charged Sarah Dazely with murder. Although in her twenties, Dazely had already been married seven times with her last three husbands dying inexplicably. She was about to be married an eighth time when her husband-to-be, upon hearing neighbors referring to his bride as “a female Bluebeard,” decided to cancel the wedding and bring his suspicions to the police. The three husbands were disinterred along with an infant who had died in 1840. Chemical tests revealed the presence of lethal doses of arsenic in two of the husbands while the other corpses had decomposed too much for testing to be possible. Financial gain was never identified as a motive in the murders by Sarah Dazely—she seemed to kill almost vacantly, simply to remove impediments her husbands presented in her desire to marry somebody else. On August 5, 1843, she was hanged publicly before an unruly crowd of 10,000 spectators.

  Eliza Joyce

  In July 1843 an alcoholic Eliza Joyce was tried for the attempted murder in September 1842 of her stepson. She was already suspected in the death of her 18-month-old stepdaughter in October 1841 and in the death of her 3-week-old daughter in January 1842. Chemical testing could not detect any traces of arsenic and Joyce was acquitted. Her family, however, disowned her entirely and after a year of misery with another infant in a workhouse, Joyce broke down and confessed she had used overdoses of laudanum, a popular opium-based drug used for pain relief and as a sedative for ailments ranging from colds to meningitis to cardiac diseases in both adults and children.

  On August 2, 1844, she was hanged before a crowd of 5,000.

  Sarah Freeman

  The case of 29-year-old Sarah Freeman, who was executed in 1845, was reminiscent of twentieth-century female serial killers who continually murdered their family members without any response from authorities. In a thirteen-month period, Freeman murdered her illegitimate 7-year-old son, her husband, her mother, and her brother. Having completed seven years of school, Freeman was relatively well-educated for the times, but apparently had some sort of personality disorder—she was reported to be so violently short-tempered that her parents expelled her from their home.

  Sarah supported herself through prostitution and had two illegitimate children. In 1840 she married a laborer named Charles Freeman and then promptly poisoned him and her son for the twenty-pound payout from a burial club she had enrolled them in. She opened a small shop with the money and moved back in with her parents and brothers. Once again, her violent temper forced them to ask her to leave. She then proceeded to murder her mother and then one of her brothers. It was only after the fourth death that the doctor sent Charles’s stomach and intestines for chemical analysis and discover
ed massive amounts of arsenic.

  In the press much was made of the fact that, despite the evidence that members of the same family were dying in the same way, no investigation by the coroner was undertaken. The coroner’s office was accused of economizing on the conduct of tests at the expense of working-class citizens. Tried only for her last murder, Sarah Freeman apparently cursed out the court and jury when sentenced to death and was executed on April 23, 1845, before a crowd of 10,000 spectators.

  Mary Ann Milner

  In July 1847 Mary Ann Milner was tried for poisoning her mother-in-law and sister-in-law. She was found guilty in the case of her sister-in-law. She also eventually confessed to murdering her sister-in-law’s infant daughter by feeding her cereal laced with arsenic. Her father-in-law, who ate a poison rice pudding served up by Milner, survived but sustained brain damage. Milner appeared to be underdeveloped intellectually and emotionally, barely able to read or write. She apparently “did not get along” with her in-laws. She committed suicide on July 29, a day before her scheduled hanging.

  Sarah Chesham

  Cases that surfaced in the countryside appeared to be more disturbing in that there were indications that neighbors were not only aware of poisoners but actually used their services. The Times would claim in 1851 that in one district, “the use of arsenic became a kind of family secret, a weapon in the hands of the weaker vessel by which an ill-favored husband or a troublesome family might be readily put out of the way.” At the center of these accusations was the 35-year-old Sarah Chesham, who was accused of poisoning an illegitimate baby in the village of Clavering at the behest of the father. The mother of the infant claims that Chesham had inexplicably visited her on two occasions and fed the baby “sugar” and that each time the infant became ill afterward. According to the Times, the village was aware that Chesham had killed her own children with poison and was someone who

  …could put any expensive or disagreeable object out of the way. The village of Clavering seems to have long ago taken it for granted that the prisoner had poisoned her children, and yet they say little more about it than if she had killed her pigs. It is beyond question that an accepted and reputed murderess walked abroad in a village unchallenged and unaccused, and that all the inhabitants had seen her children buried without a remark or outcry…123

  Nothing could be proven in the death of the infant, but police exhumed the bodies of two of her sons who died under suspicious circumstances within days of each other. The doctor attending the death of the first son recalled that Chesham refused to order a coffin for him, explaining that one coffin can easily hold two bodies. Several days later, her second son died and the two sons were buried together in one coffin. Both had been enrolled in a burial club. When the bodies of her sons were tested, massive doses of arsenic were detected. The problem was that the arsenic could not be conclusively traced to Chesham, and she was acquitted. She went back to the village where she offered advice on how to prepare “special” mince pies that would alleviate any financial family burden. (This kind of rural deprivation-driven serial murder was also reported in the Tiszazug region of Hungary in the 1920s, when police arrested a small secret cabal of female killers who prepared potions for those wanting to murder inconvenient relatives. Some forty murders were uncovered.)124

  Mary May

  In the meantime, Mary May, also in her late thirties, was executed in August 1848 for enrolling her half-brother in a burial club without his knowledge and then serving him a drink laced with arsenic. She planned to use the money to buy a horse and cart so that she could peddle her wares village to village. Mary May had sixteen children, fourteen of whom had died. Shortly before her execution, she also confessed to having murdered her husband, but denied killing the children.

  The next year, Sarah Chesham was back in the news, now accused of murdering her husband, Richard, when he became ill and died after Chesham insisted on caring for him. The news of her bragging and offering advice on poison pies to her neighbors was the focus of outraged press reports. Chesham was again tried and this time convicted and executed in March 1851.

  A panic was fanned by these press reports, which hinted that secret societies of female serial killers exchanged recipes for poisoned dishes that could be served to husbands, children, and other family members to profit from burial club payments or to simply relieve oneself of them. By now Parliament had passed a bill banning insurance payments of more than three pounds on any child under the age of ten. In 1855 this ban would be raised to six pounds for a child under five, and ten pounds for a child between the ages of five and ten. A death certificate from a physician was required before funds could be released to a beneficiary.

  THE SALE OF ARSENIC ACT (1851)

  As Chesham was awaiting execution, the House of Lords debated a proposed Sale of Arsenic Act, which required that purchasers of arsenic identify themselves and the amount of and purpose for the poison be registered in the vendors’ records along with the purchaser’s name. Arsenic was then tinted with a warning color and nobody could purchase less than ten pounds of uncolored arsenic without endorsement by a witness and a written explanation why uncolored arsenic was required. As the history of Chesham’s role as a possible village human exterminator-for-hire made the rounds of the press, the House of Lords proposed an amendment to the act adding a clause restricting the sale of arsenic to adult males only. Referring to lower-class rural women, one of the Lords proposing the amendment warned, that “there was a degree of mysterious horror attached to the use of poison, which seemed to attract and fascinate a certain class of minds.”

  Some opposed the proposed restriction. The nineteenth century liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill lobbied against the amendment, arguing that it:

  …singles out women for the purpose of degrading them. It established a special restriction, a peculiar disqualification against them alone. It assumes that women are more addicted than men to committing murder! Does the criminal calendar, or the proceedings of the police courts, show a preponderance of women among the most atrocious criminals?

  …If the last two or three murderers had been men with red hair, as well might Parliament have rushed to pass an Act restricting all red haired men from buying or possessing deadly weapons.125

  In fact, the House of Commons had collected extensive statistics on gender and murder from all the judicial districts in the United Kingdom between 1840 and 1850. Historically, females represented ten to eleven percent of all of convicted murderers, except in the murder of children where the proportion of female killers is higher than males. But when it came to poisoning in the U.K. in that period, females represented 54 percent of the total of 235 defendants tried for murder or attempted murder by poison in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland.126 (A more recent study determined that there were 342 charges of murder by poisoning in England alone between 1750 and 1914. Females represented nearly 62 percent of the murderers charged in those cases—a total of 210 women.)127 Despite the unfavorable statistics, cool heads prevailed and when the Sale of Arsenic Act was finally adopted on May 23, 1851, there was no clause excluding women from purchasing arsenic. The only restriction was that the purchaser had to be an adult.

  Mary Emily Cage

  There was one more case of a female serial killer from the 1840s when Mary Emily Cage was hanged in August 1851 for the poisoning of her husband. Six years earlier, five of her fourteen children had suddenly died in a two-week period in unexplained circumstances, but there was no conclusive evidence that she was responsible.

  Not much detail is known about the 1840s generation of female serial killers other than that they were lower-class impoverished women of limited or no education, frequently living in rural areas or small towns, who used poison to kill both male and female victims related to them. The motive was usually to either profit from burial club payments or to simply relieve themselves of their husbands, children, or other family members. Revenge and rage appeared to be the motive in one of the cases (Mary An
n Milner).

  Catherine Wilson

  The epidemic of female-perpetrated arsenic serial murders appeared to cease as the 1850s unfolded. There were no comparable cases to those of the 1840s but it is debatable whether that was the result of the Sale of Arsenic Act or murders simply went undetected because female killers began to use other methods. The arrest of Catherine Wilson in 1862 revealed an entirely new profile of the female serial killer.

  Unlike the downtrodden, uneducated women who killed their impoverished family members for burial money, Catherine Wilson moved effortlessly among the upper-middle classes posing as a servant or nurse. She was intelligent and cunning. She killed family members, acquaintances, and patients for inheritance or simply to steal their possessions. She developed trusting relationships as a nurse and often convinced her patients to include her in their wills. She did not use arsenic to kill, preferring instead to murder her patients with overdoses of medicine or having them drink sulphuric acid. Leaving behind a trail of victims, she moved around Britain from town to town until she settled in London. Her murders were traced as far back as 1854. She was convicted of murdering her landlady and executed before a huge crowd of 20,000 spectators on October 20, 1862.