Killers in Cold Blood

by Ray Black

  A woman named Anna Darvulia was Elizabeth’s principal collaborator in the early years of her criminal career, but she died young, so Elizabeth relied on the loyalty of the maids in her employ. Three of them were executed on January 7, 1611. Two had their fingers cut off before being thrown into a fire. The other was beheaded before being thrown in, as she had apparently been less involved. A fourth escaped with her life, because she had been bullied into collaborating by the others. As for Elizabeth Bathory, she escaped justice and continued to live in her castle under house arrest, where she died only three years later.

  It seems fair to say that Elizabeth Bathory’s inhumanity to humanity was as much to do with circumstance as anything else. Had she not been born into the nobility she may have had a more socialising experience as a girl and not developed her sadistic tendencies. Indeed, even if she had shown such tendencies, society would have put a stop to them much earlier on. Of course, there is also the possibility that she suffered from a mental disorder due to the effects of inbreeding, which had long been a problem in high society, simply because the accepted gene pool for pairing was so restricted in size that people married their cousins, or worse.

  Mary Ann Cotton

  Some people like to move on whenever they get bored with their lives. Mary Ann Cotton always made sure that she removed all ties with the past by killing so-called ‘loved ones’ with poison. She lived in the north-east of England during the Victorian era but never stayed in the same place for more than a few years. It is unlikely that she would have gone undetected even once in the modern age, with meticulous post-mortems or autopsies being carried out as matters of routine and with state-of-the-art forensic science, but Cotton had murdered three legal husbands, an illegal husband, a lover, a friend, a mother and thirteen children by the time she was convicted. That’s twenty victims, although some may have died of natural causes, given that life expectancy was very low at that time due to contagious diseases and the lack of medical treatments.

  She was born Mary Ann Robson in 1832, at Murton, County Durham. Mary’s father was deeply religious and a fierce disciplinarian to boot, and Mary lived in fear of his harsh punishments. He worked long hours as a pitman to try and make his family as comfortable as possible, but the harsh conditions took their toll and he died shortly after Mary’s fourteenth birthday. Life was extremely hard for a working-class family in nineteenth-century England, and especially as Mary and her younger brother Robert, now had to be raised by their widowed mother. Mary was petrified of being sent to the workhouse, but was saved from this fate when her mother remarried. However, Mary did not like her new stepfather and the feeling was mutual, so she started to look for a way to escape her unhappy home life.

  Mary eventually left home at the age of sixteen to work as a servant to a well-to-do family in South Hetton. Although the family had no complaints regarding Mary’s work, rumours reached the head of the household that their servant had been seen in the company of a local churchman on more than one occasion. However, when questioned by her employers, Mary denied any such illicit liaisons.

  After three years of working for the family Mary decided to take up an apprenticeship to be a dressmaker. Around the same time she met a miner by the name of William Mowbray, by whom she became pregnant. Mowbray did the rightful thing and married his lover in July 1852 and for the next few years Mary moved round the country as her husband took employment wherever he could. Within the first four years, Mary gave birth to five children, but only one survived past early infancy. Although infant mortality was quite common at the time, it would be fair to say that this number of deaths in one family was quite exceptional.

  William and Mary argued frequently and she drove her husband to work longer and longer hours dreading the thought that they should have to live in poverty. William, who was tired of the constant fighting, decided to take a job on a steamer which meant he spent many days away from home. The family set up home in Sunderland and the number of children dying from unexplainable illnesses continued in abnormally high numbers.

  In January 1865 William was forced to spend some time at home because he had suffered an injury to his foot. Mary became his nursemaid but as his foot got better his general state of health went downhill. He died from an intestinal disorder which the doctor found hard to understand as his patient had shown no signs of illness prior to his spell under Mary’s care. The doctor decided to pay the grieving widow a visit fearing that she would be in a state of depression having lost so many of her children and now her husband as well. What he hadn’t expected, was to find Mary dancing around the sitting room in a new dress which she had bought using the money from William’s life insurance.

  After William’s death, Mary decided it was time to move her family once again, and they settled in Seaham Harbour. She wasted no time in forming a new friendship with a local man named Joseph Nattrass, despite the fact that he was already betrothed to another. Despite Mary’s pleas, Joseph told her he planned to go ahead with the wedding and Mary left Seaham Harbour downhearted with her one remaining child.

  Mary returned to an area that she knew and found a home and employment in Sunderland. She was taken on at the Sunderland Infirmary and because of the long hours, Mary’s daughter, Isabella, was sent to live with her maternal grandmother. Mary kept the wards at the infirmary spotlessly clean and her employers commented on her diligence and friendly manner. She was particularly friendly with one of the patients, George Ward, and the couple married as soon as he was well enough to leave. However, shortly after the wedding, George became ill and died in October 1866. The doctors were puzzled by his condition which included paralysis and violent stomach cramps, neither of which responded to regular treatment.

  After George’s death, Mary decided to move on again, after all she didn’t want the finger of suspicion pointing at her. On her own again, Mary needed to find employment once again and managed to get a job as a housekeeper to shipwright James Robinson. He had recently lost his wife and needed someone to look after his children. Mary had excellent references and James decided to employ her in November 1866.

  True to form, tragedy followed Mary wherever she went and just two days before Christmas, James’s youngest child died following a bout of gastric fever. Still grief-stricken over the loss of his wife, James turned to Mary for comfort which resulted in her becoming pregnant. Although a new marriage was now on the cards it had to be postponed when Mary was needed to go and nurse her mother following a sudden illness in March 1867.

  Although her mother was showing signs of making a full recovery by the time Mary arrived, within days she started to complain of stomach pains which had not previously been a symptom of her illness. Nine days after Mary’s arrival, her mother was dead. Before returning to the Robinson house, Mary decided to go and fetch her daughter Isabella, who had enjoyed her life with her maternal grandmother. Within three weeks of returning to James Robinson, not only was her own daughter dead, but a further two of the Robinson children. Amazingly James did not suspect that his sweet Mary Ann was in any way connected with the deaths and they mourned their losses together. The couple got married in early August and their first child, Mary Isabella, was born in late November. However, by March the new baby had also died from a gastric disorder and now James Robinson was starting to have doubts. Not only had there been so many deaths since Mary had arrived in his house but she also constantly pressed him for money and was also pressurising him into taking out an insurance on his life.

  James Robinson had always been very good at handling money so you can imagine his shock when he started hearing rumours that Mary had run up vast debts without his knowledge. When he questioned his remaining children, he learned from them that Mary had coerced them into pawning valuables and giving her the money. James was fuming and after a violent argument he threw Mary out of the house and she left, taking their baby daughter with her.

  Mary had always dreaded living in poverty and for once in her life she was forced to wa
nder the streets. Desperate and alone she visited an old friend and asked the woman to look after her baby while she went to post a letter. Needless to say, Mary never returned and Mary Isabella was returned to her father on January 1, 1870, a move which undoubtedly saved the young child’s life.

  Mary was soon back on her feet and dating a recent widower Frederick Cotton, having been introduced by his sister Margaret, a friend of Mary’s. Like James he was a recent widower and had lost two of his four children in infancy. Margaret had been left to raise the family but, as I am sure you have already guessed, she died from an undetermined stomach complaint shortly after Mary started seeing her brother. This left the way open for Mary to console Frederick and once again she soon became pregnant with his child. They were married in September 1870, despite the fact that she was still legally married to James Robinson. However, compared to her other crimes, bigamy seemed of little importance.

  Mary wasted no time in insuring the lives of Frederick and his two surviving sons. Mary gave birth to baby Robert in 1871 and a couple of months later learned that her former lover, Joseph Nattrass, had never gone ahead with his planned wedding and was living in West Aukland. Suddenly, Mary lost all interest in her husband and moved to West Aukland to rekindle her old passion.

  Frederick Cotton died of gastric fever in December 1871, and as soon as the coast was clear Mary asked Joseph to move into the house. However, quickly realising that Joseph was never going to keep her in the lifestyle she had become accustomed to, she decided to get a job working as a nurse to an excise officer called John Quick-Manning. John was recovering from a bout of smallpox and Mary realised that he was a far better prospect than Joseph Nattrass. She soon became pregnant by her new paramour, but there were just too many obstacles standing in the way of another marriage.

  Undaunted by this fact, Mary worked quickly. Frederick Jr died in March 1872 and baby Robert shortly afterwards. Joseph became ill several days later but not before revising his will and leaving everything to Mary. Young Charles Cotton was still a problem, however, and in spring 1872, she sent him to the local pharmacy to buy a small quantity of arsenic. The chemist would not sell to Charles as it was illegal to sell toxic substances to anyone under the age of twenty-one, but Mary was undeterred and sent a neighbour instead. By July Charles had died of gastric fever. Mary started to panic and realised she had been living in one area for far too long, particularly as there were already some malicious rumours going round the neighbourhood.

  The only person Mary had talked to about Charles’s death was a government official by the name of Thomas Riley, whom she had originally approached to see if she could get Charles into a workhouse. When Riley had seen the boy he had been a healthy young lad and he was quite shocked to learn that he had died so quickly. He took his suspicions to the police, who questioned the physician who had attended Charles. The physician was also surprised to learn of his death and Riley managed to talk him into delaying writing a death certificate until the boy’s death had been investigated.

  Mary made a big mistake following the death of Charles. Instead of calling for the doctor, she had gone straight to the insurance office and collected on his life insurance. However, she learned that they would not give her the money until she was in receipt of a death certificate and Mary went visibly pale when she learned that there was to be a formal inquest.

  However, the brief inquest did not show that Charles had died from unnatural causes, which is not surprising because arsenic poisoning was very hard to trace and its symptoms were similar to those of natural illness. Mary was angry at Riley and told him in no uncertain terms that he could pay the costs of Charles’s burial.

  This could very well have been the end of the matter, leaving Mary free to kill again and again, had the press not got hold of the story which set a spark to the gossip that was already rife in West Aukland. Quick-Manning was appalled when he heard the gossip and quickly severed his ties with Mary.

  Mary decided it was time to leave, unaware that the net was closing in around her. A doctor who had taken part in the initial inquiry into Charles’s death had kept some samples from the contents of his stomach. He was unconvinced that his death was natural and when he carried out further tests, his suspicions proved founded when he discovered large quantities of arsenic. The doctor went straight to the police and Mary was arrested before she could run from the hands of the law.

  Mary Ann Cotton was forty when she went to court in March 1873 and she looked like a haggardly old woman. The trial had to be delayed while Mary gave birth to the daughter fathered by Quick-Manning. Her defence was that her most recent victim had inhaled arsenic vapours from wallpaper, as arsenic-based paints were often used in those days. However, a local newspaper had revealed the trail of death behind her movements, so the jury only took ninety minutes to find her guilty of murder.

  As she seemed an outwardly pleasant and affable person, a number of petitions were presented to the home secretary in an effort to have her death sentence commuted to life imprisonment, but to no avail. Even her pleading letters to James Robinson fell on stony ground. She wrote:

  . . . If you have one spark of kindness in you – get my life spared . . . you know yourself there has been . . . most dreadful lies told about me. I must tell you, you are the cause of all my trouble. If you had not abandoned me, I was was left to wander the streets with my baby in my arms . . . no place to lay my head.

  Mary was led to the gallows on the morning of March 24, 1873, at Durham County jail. It may have been deliberate or perhaps just an error of judgement, but the executioner made Mary’s rope too short. Her neck failed to break and she died slowly but surely from strangulation.

  Although no one is certain exactly how many people died as a result of Mary’s toxic potions, it has been estimated that it could have been as many as twenty-one – ten of her children by various husbands, three husbands, five stepchildren, her mother Margaret Cotton and her lover Nattrass. Mary Ann Cotton, however, maintained her innocence right up to the end.

  Lizzie Borden

  Lizzie Borden will be forever immortalised by the Victorian playground rhyme:

  Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks, when she saw what she had done she gave her father forty-one.

  In fact Borden wasn’t convicted for the crime, but it was one of those cases where likelihood convicted her in the eyes of the public, despite the lack of evidence in court. The rhyme itself was composed by a newspaper journalist shortly after the double murder and was actually inaccurate, even though it stuck in the public consciousness. Apart from the fact that Borden’s guilt could not be proved, she actually gave her stepmother eighteen whacks and her father nineteen.

  Had the crime occurred in the modern era Borden would undoubtedly have been convicted through forensic evidence, but she committed the heinous act back in the day when forensics meant obvious proof, such as blood stains – hence the phrase ‘caught red-handed’. As there were no witnesses and Borden had had plenty of time to clean herself up, she was effectively in the clear before the police had even arrived on the scene.

  In the present day, police work by the principle that ‘every contact leaves a trace’, a motto coined by Edmund Locard (1877–1966) who was a leading French criminologist. Even he didn’t live to see the time when it would be possible to detect the tiniest trace of DNA, chemical or fibre that could incriminate a suspect, but he set the benchmark that forensic scientists continue to aspire to achieve. Very few people are found not guilty of indictment in modern times if forensic evidence seems to place them fairly and squarely in the frame.

  Lizzie Borden’s stepmother and father were found with their heads bludgeoned by a blunt instrument on August 4, 1892 in Massachusetts, USA. Andrew and Abby Borden were apparently ‘found’ by Lizzie Borden, who summoned the help of the family maid Bridget Sullivan, who had been cleaning windows outside at the time of the slayings. In fact, Lizzie only reported the death of her father at first, whose
body was found on the couch. Her stepmother’s corpse lay in a room upstairs and was ‘discovered’ afterwards.

  It would be no exaggeration to say that the police investigation and court case left something to be desired by contemporary standards. An axe-head and shaft were found in the basement, but officers argued about whether Borden would have had time to clean them, so they were dismissed as the murder weapon. The police also found a number of bloodstained rags, but they were dismissed as evidence too, simply because Borden had stated that she was menstruating at the time and that she had used the rags as sanitary towels.

  The police failed to discover any bloodstained clothing when they first searched the house, but Borden was seen burning a dress only a few days after the murders. Unbelievably, the jury believed her when she told them that she had disposed of the dress because she had ruined it with paint. The twelve good men and true deliberated for only an hour and acquitted her, because they had been presented with no hard evidence as absolute proof of guilt.

  Borden became something of a cause célèbre following the murders, not least because she was the subject of trial by media. She was ostracised by family, friends and neighbours, but the public at large elevated her to celebrity status. Perhaps it was because they felt that she had beaten the establishment, even though it had involved murder.