فصل 6

THE WRETCHED WOMAN

Mary Ann Cotton

Some say Jack the Ripper was England’s first serial killer, but that’s only because the others have been forgotten.

About forty years before Jack came along, England suffered through a terrible spate of murderers. This crew, however, lacked the Ripper’s slick, gory charisma—slaying prostitutes and then mocking the police by mailing them a kidney or two—and so they never achieved his level of immortalization. They were poor, migratory, and desperate. They did it for the life insurance, or to have one less mouth to feed. They got caught. They were women.

When nineteenth-century England experienced a decade known as the Hungry ’40s, a brief national spotlight fell upon female criminality. The silk, cotton, and wool industries had declined in 1839, leading to widespread economic depression, and a handful of reckless ladies began to kill as a means of harsh survival. At least nine were convicted of serial murder. There was Sarah Dazely, the “female Bluebeard” who killed multiple husbands. There was Mary Milner, who poisoned her in-laws. Even as the economy creakily improved, women continued to murder, like Catherine Wilson, a nurse who dosed her patients with sulfuric acid instead of medicine. And by the time the 1860s rolled around, the deadly sisterhood was joined by a pretty young woman named Mary Ann Cotton who couldn’t bear to have anyone standing in her way.

The fact that it had happened before didn’t make it any less shocking. Besides, this girl was worse.

Fine Dark Eyes

Mary Ann Cotton, née Robson, was born in 1832 to poor teenage parents who moved frequently so that her father, a miner, could find work. She was an exceptionally pretty kid, and almost a century later, an old neighbor still remembered her “fine dark eyes.” Although her father fell down a mining shaft to his death when she was nine, and her little sister died young, Mary Ann would later characterize her early childhood as “days of joy.” They were free of the obligations that would haunt her for the rest of her life: marriage, motherhood, and money.

The days of joy ended for Mary Ann after her father died, when she had to help support the family. She was a hard, skilled worker; as a teenager, she took jobs as a Sunday school teacher, a dressmaker, and a maid for a wealthy family. This last gig gave Mary Ann a glimpse into the luxuries that money could buy, and it changed her forever. She was never rich as an adult, but she always splurged on cleaning women. In a world characterized by crushing poverty, unsanitary conditions, and rampant sickness, she took great comfort in the knowledge that every so often, a maid would stop by the house, get down on her knees, and scrub the floor.

When Mary Ann was nineteen, she married a man named William Mowbray. The ceremony took place twenty miles from her home, possibly because Mary Ann was already pregnant and wanted to avoid a scandal. No family or friends were present. This would be the first of many times Mary Ann stood at the altar pregnant and, except for her lover, entirely alone.

Marriage seemed like a way out of poverty, but marriage to William Mowbray turned out to be just another form of destitution. Mowbray took his teenage bride to a shantytown in the southwest of England, where Mary Ann gave birth to four or five children, all of whom died without being registered. (At the end of her life, she couldn’t remember the exact number of babies she’d had during this time.) When the Mowbrays finally moved back to the north, it was with one living daughter, Margaret Jane, who died soon after the move from “scarletina anginosa and exhaustion.” It’s not hard to imagine the psychological toll that the rough landscape, the seemingly inescapable poverty, and the infant deaths took on Mary Ann. Her first foray into motherhood had ended almost as soon as it begun—she had taken a lover and ended up with five or six tiny graves. Perhaps this gave her the feeling that her children were disposable: ill suited to the world and barely worth remembering.

The couple continued to move so that Mowbray could work one rough, poorly paid job after another. He eventually found a position on a steamer ship, so the two of them settled in a town near the coast, where they had three more children: Isabella, a second Margaret Jane, and baby John Robert, who died one year later of “diarrhoea.” The reuse of the baby names implies a certain dispensability of the babies themselves. The first Margaret Jane died in 1860; the second was born in 1861. It was an odd rebirth.

Mowbray was away at sea for months at a time now, and soon enough Mary Ann took up with a red-haired miner named Joseph Nattrass who lived in a neighboring town. Nattrass may have been the love of her twisted life, or just the closest thing to luxury she could find in that little town. Either way, she fell hard for him, and they would stay in touch for years. His arrival also coincided with a curious change in her personality. Before Nattrass, Mary Ann had followed her husband from shantytown to shantytown; after him, she began to take matters into her own hands.

How, exactly, did Mary Ann change from someone who watched those around her die to someone who caused those around her to die? Perhaps her venture into murder was a way to move closer to Nattrass by shucking off her previous identity as someone else’s wife. Or maybe she couldn’t take Mowbray’s long ocean absences anymore and eventually snapped under the pressure of single motherhood. Maybe she just truly hated those around her, and one day she simply thought to herself: enough.

Whatever spurred the sea change in her, it stuck. Mary Ann quickly learned what arsenic could do to the human body, and how easily it dissolved into hot tea.

Fevers

Mowbray died in 1865—maybe innocently, maybe not. His cause of death was listed as “typhus fever and diarrhea,” which doesn’t quite fit the symptoms of arsenic poisoning unless the doctor who filled out the death certificate confused “typhus” with “typhoid.” Typhoid fever did in fact look a lot like arsenic poisoning, and doctors of the time often used the terms “typhus” and “typhoid” interchangeably. Regardless, his death was exceptionally convenient for Mary Ann. She collected a large sum of insurance money, scooped up her two young daughters, and moved to the town where Nattrass lived. Before long, the second Margaret Jane was dead of “typhus fever,” just like her father, and Mary Ann shipped Isabella off to live with her grandmother. Isabella would live to be nine—the oldest of Mary Ann’s murdered children.

But just as Mary Ann found herself child-free and living in the same town as her red-haired crush, she discovered a truth far more unpleasant to her than death: Nattrass was already married. This put a wrench in her plans, but Mary Ann approached it in her usual prosaic fashion. Instead of pursuing Nattrass further, she immediately moved back to her former town and took up nursing. She turned out to be a wonderful nurse, with a knack for making her male patients feel extraordinarily comfortable.

One of her patients was a “well proportioned and muscular” man named George Ward, and he was totally smitten by the arrival of this pretty new worker. One minute he was groaning in his sickbed, and the next he was being nursed to health by an angel. He proposed almost immediately. Again, no one from Mary Ann’s family attended the service, which was quick and kind of depressing. The “witness” on the marriage certificate was the groom from the wedding right before theirs.

During her brief marriage to Ward, Mary Ann never got pregnant. This was unusual for her, and some biographers wonder if it meant Ward was disappointing in bed. This sort of speculation is often flung at female serial killers, implying that their dark need to kill is linked to a ravenous sexual appetite and that one can be exchanged for the other (i.e., when Mary Ann didn’t get her kicks from Ward in the bedroom, she got her kicks from poisoning him). But Ward was certainly disappointing in some way or another, because he died after a mere fifteen months of marriage, suffering from the classic symptoms of arsenic poisoning: diarrhea, stomach pains, and a tingling in his hands and feet.

With her second husband out of the way and the majority of her children dead, Mary Ann continued this new, fatal hustle. She moved again and applied to work as the housekeeper for a wealthy father of five. His name was James Robinson, his young wife had recently died, and he was everything Mary Ann was looking for in a man. She moved into the Robinson home before the Christmas of 1866, and a week after her arrival, the youngest Robinson child was dead, with only twenty-four hours between the first sign of sickness and the fatal convulsion. Mary Ann already had her eye on Robinson, and now she was clearing the playing field of all other distractions.

The death of his child didn’t dampen James Robinson’s passions, though, and Mary Ann was pregnant by early March. But then her mother got sick, and Mary Ann was called away to nurse her. Perhaps she resented the interruption, because nine days later—despite Mary Ann’s supposed skill as a nurse—her mother lay six feet underground. The neighbors were suspicious. Mary Ann had not only loudly predicted the death of her mother a few days before her passing, but had then proceeded to rummage through her dead mother’s possessions in a way that the neighbors found tactless and overeager. Still, Mary Ann ignored their whispering, grabbed her daughter, Isabella, and ran back to Robinson.

April 1867 was a bad month for the Robinson household. Within the span of ten days, three of the children were rolling about in bed, foaming at the mouth, and vomiting compulsively. Nine-year-old Isabella, the last Mowbray, died of “gastric fever”; six-year-old James Robinson died of “continued fever”; his eight-year-old sister, Elizabeth, died of “gastric fever.” All of these “natural causes” were easy cover-ups for arsenic poisoning. The fact that the deaths came in such quick succession shows us how heavy-handed Mary Ann could be with the poison and how impatient she was with the requirements of quasi step-motherhood—but it also shows us just how frequently children died back in those days. Even this triple death didn’t make anyone particularly suspicious. Life limped on.

James Robinson married his children’s murderer in another solitary ceremony sometime during August 1867. Their first daughter was born that November, and she was dead of “convulsions” within months. (Mary Ann used pregnancy as a way to secure marriage, but she wasn’t especially interested in raising the children.) Robinson was solidly in denial by this point. Later, he would admit that “at the time, he would not let his mind dwell on some thoughts: that he dare not.” By 1869, Robinson and Mary Ann had another child together, baby George—and they were also beginning to argue fiercely about money. Robinson was learning that Mary Ann made a habit of minor financial deceptions: she ran up little debts, she kept money she claimed to have spent, and she enlisted his last surviving son to pawn clothes for her. They fought about the latter incident furiously, and Mary Ann grew so upset that she ran away, taking baby George with her. While she was gone, Robinson boarded up the house and moved in with his sister. Later, in a plaintive letter, Mary Ann would spin this action as betrayal on his part: “I left the house fore a few days I did not wish to part from him . . . When I returned ther wos no home for me.” After a few months away, Mary Ann sashayed back into town with baby George and dropped him off at a friend’s house in order to “mail a letter.” She never returned for the child. Eventually, George was reunited with his father. Mary Ann must have realized she was never going to get back together with Robinson—who certainly should have suspected by this point that he was married to an insatiable killer—and so she was freeing her hands for her next project.

“It Is No Fever I Have”

Now, at thirty-seven, Mary Ann worked and wandered. She was free of husband and children for the third time in her life, and rumor has it she moved in with a lusty sailor and then stole all his wealth when he was away at sea. But it wasn’t long before she jumped back into the domestic fray. The home was, after all, her battleground, her wrestling mat—the place where she did her best and bloodiest work. She was the dark underbelly of the Victorian era’s feminine ideal: the idea that nothing was sweeter, nothing was purer, than a good woman at home.

Mary Ann began to correspond with an acquaintance from her younger days—a wealthy spinster named Margaret Cotton. Margaret had a brother, Frederick Cotton, who was a widower with two sons and, like Robinson before him, desperately needed a housekeeper. Poor Margaret probably thought she was doing her brother a favor by sending over the qualified and charming Mary Ann, but she had no idea what horrors Mary Ann was about to bring down on the entire Cotton family.

Mary Ann became Frederick Cotton’s housekeeper at the beginning of 1870, and four weeks later, his loving sister Margaret was dead. Margaret’s money went straight to her brother and her brother went straight to Mary Ann, who was soon pregnant. She married Cotton in the fall, despite the fact that she was still technically married to her previous husband. Later, this would be the only crime she’d confess to: bigamy. A few weeks after the wedding, she took out life insurance on his sons.

In 1871, the new fivesome moved to West Auckland: Mary Ann, Frederick Cotton, his sons Frederick Jr. and Charles Edward, and the new baby, Robert Robson. In West Auckland, Cotton found work as a hewer at a coal mine, but the move also profited Mary Ann—because, conveniently enough, they moved onto the same street as a certain redheaded miner from her past. Joseph Nattrass was no longer married, and Mary Ann had no compunctions about getting rid of her latest husband. She’d buried men before.

Mary Ann had always been a quick killer, relying on the realities of poor hygiene, the misdiagnoses of doctors, and the high rate of infant mortality in Britain’s tiny towns to explain the fact that death followed her wherever she went. But now she was getting even more reckless. She no longer had time to stay married for a few years or to let her children celebrate one last birthday before she snuffed them out. Frederick Cotton died quickly, and just as quickly Nattrass moved in with her and the children as a “lodger.” Now, Mary Ann surely intended to marry Nattrass when she killed Cotton. Murder and remarriage had been her modus operandi up to this point, and for a while marrying Nattrass must have seemed like the final step to achieving the life she wanted. Nattrass excited her. He represented love and rash adventure, and he may have unknowingly inspired her to become a killer. But Mary Ann wanted more than just love. She craved money, too, and before she could marry Nattrass, she met a new man. He was richer than Nattrass, and at this point in Mary Ann’s life, that was everything.

The new man, a tax collector, went by the name of Quick-Manning. He’d been suffering from smallpox when he met Mary Ann, who was still taking on nursing jobs, and she charmed him the way she charmed all her patients. Meanwhile, the town’s sympathy for Mary Ann was beginning to drain away. They had felt terrible for her when she arrived in town and almost immediately became a widow with three tiny children to care for, but when Nattrass moved in with her, people started growing suspicious. And her seduction of Quick-Manning really put everyone on edge.

Worse, it was pretty obvious to neighbors that Mary Ann was mistreating the Cotton children. The poor kids looked like they were starving. When a neighbor gently brought it to Mary Ann’s attention, she responded that the Cotton kids were “weak-stomached” and didn’t have much of an appetite. The reality was that Mary Ann had always had a low tolerance for children of any sort, whether they were hers or not, and she needed to clear the way to Quick-Manning. So she killed Frederick Cotton Jr. (“gastric fever”), poisoned her baby Robert Robson (“convulsions and teething”), and began to poison Nattrass himself (“typhoid fever”)—all within twenty days of each other. A neighbor girl came by to help nurse the sick children, and noticed that the baby was barely breathing, staring off into space with glazed, unmoving eyes. “He’s dying,” said the girl. “Who shall I fetch?” Mary Ann responded, “Nobody.” Joseph Nattrass knew his lover was poisoning him, but by that point there was nothing he could do. He was too close to death. Every so often, his body would shake with a paroxysm that caused him to clench his hands, grit his teeth, and draw his legs up, while his eyes rolled back in his head until only the whites were showing. Another neighbor who stopped by to help noticed that there was something unnatural about his illness. “I saw him have fits, he was very twisted up and seemed in great agony,” she reported. “He said, ‘It is no fever I have.’” As Nattrass convulsed, the tiny corpse of Robert Robson lay stiffly nearby. The baby had died four days earlier, but Mary Ann was waiting for Nattrass to perish so she could bury them at the same time. She wanted to save a little on funeral expenses.

One Last Child

Once all that messy business was over, Mary Ann got pregnant. Quick-Manning was the father, and she was all primed to marry him, but there was just one final problem standing in the way: her stepson, Charles Edward, the last Cotton boy. She resented everything about him, and must have cursed herself for leaving one kid alive for this long. Neighbors noticed how cruelly she treated little Charles: beating his ears, pulling at his hair, and, on Easter, throwing his one tiny treat—an orange—into the fire.

One afternoon, a local grocer and druggist named Thomas Riley stopped by Mary Ann’s house to ask if she could nurse another smallpox patient. As they chatted, Mary Ann kept bringing the conversation back to Charles Edward: how much of a burden he was, how the responsibility weighed on her. Charles Edward cowered in the corner of the room, listening. Mary Ann batted her eyes and asked Riley if he could possibly put the child into the workhouse. Riley said no.

Unfazed, Mary Ann replied, “Perhaps it won’t matter, as I won’t be troubled long. He’ll go like all the rest of the Cotton family.”

Six days later, Riley was walking past Mary Ann’s house and caught sight of her in the doorway, openly distraught. She told him that Charles Edward was dead, and begged him to come inside and look at the body.

Inviting people in to witness her victims had always been one of Mary Ann’s tricks. She was unperturbed by doctors and encouraged them stop by and recommend cures for the “typhoid fever” and “convulsions” her patients always seemed to be suffering. This was one of the ways she avoided detection—playing the bereaved nurse, mother, and wife. By inviting Riley to come inside and witness the corpse, she was placing a bet on herself: that Riley would read the death of the sickly, starving child as natural—inevitable, even—and wouldn’t dream of accusing his weeping stepmother.

But with this death, and her casual remark about the “rest of the Cotton family,” Mary Ann had gone too far. Riley was certain that she’d murdered her tiny stepson. He refused to look at the body, and instead went straight to the police.

An inquest was held, and Charles Edward’s poor little body was laid out on a table. The postmortem was a sloppy one, because the boy’s death was ruled “natural.” Still, the doctor must have had his suspicions, because he was careful to preserve some of Charles Edward’s viscera, which he buried in jars in his own yard.

Mary Ann went on her way, but her days of freedom were numbered. The town gossips and local papers had already picked up on Riley’s suspicions, and people eventually convinced the doctor to investigate Charles Edward’s body again. So the doctor dug up the jars, analyzed their contents using a more systematic technique, and found arsenic in everything. He ran to the police station at midnight, and Mary Ann was arrested the next day.

The Short Drop

Initially, Mary Ann was only accused of the murder of Charles Edward, but soon enough the charges expanded to include the murder of Joseph Nattrass, Frederick Cotton Jr., and the baby Robert Robson. Their bodies were exhumed and tested, and huge amounts of arsenic were found in all three. Police tried to exhume Frederick Cotton Sr., but in a bizarre twist, they couldn’t find his body anywhere, despite digging up several graves in the process.

Mary Ann gave birth to Quick-Manning’s child in prison, and during her trial she would breast-feed the baby in front of the court, refusing to talk. It was a savvy move, working the jury’s sympathies by tapping into Victorian ideals of femininity. (The era’s perfect woman was captivated in all her stifling glory in the 1854 narrative poem “The Angel in the House,” which gushed, “For she’s so simply, subtly sweet/My deepest rapture does her wrong.”) How could this silent, breast-feeding mother be capable of murder? Reporters watched her in the courtroom, noting her “delicate and prepossessing” beauty, which was deliberately obscured in the portraits of her that ran next to their articles.

Her defense latched onto the fact that no arsenic had actually been discovered in her house at the time of Charles Edward’s death. They argued that the boy had been accidentally poisoned by arsenic fumes rising off the green wallpaper in his bedroom and by flakes of the arsenic-and-soft-soap mixture Mary Ann used to clean house. The prosecution brought in a prestigious doctor to discount this theory. There was simply too much poison in the corpses, the doctor said. Joseph Nattrass’s body, for example, contained four times the amount of arsenic necessary to kill a man.

The only time Mary Ann broke down was when the defense gave a melodramatic speech about the implausibility of a mother killing her own child. “A mother nursing [her baby] . . . seeing its pretty smiles, while she knew she had given it arsenic!” they wailed. “Making its limbs writhe as it looked into her face, wanting support and protection!” How could any “simply, subtly sweet” Victorian mother possibly be accused of such horrors? At this point in the proceedings, Mary Ann started to cry. Sympathetic onlookers may have interpreted her crying as agreement with the defense: Yes, exactly, I could never do that to a baby. Really, though, the defense was describing exactly what Mary Ann had done numerous times, to numerous babies. She knew all about the ways that “pretty smiles” could turn into writhing and vomit and foaming at the mouth.

Ultimately, Mary Ann was convicted of “the awful crime of murder” for the death of Charles Edward. “You seem to have given way to that most awful of all delusions,” said the judge, “. . . that you could carry out your wicked designs without detection.” She blanched as she heard her sentence read aloud: death by hanging.

The hangman chosen to execute Mary Ann Cotton was a controversial figure with several botched executions under his belt. He preferred to use a “short drop” from the platform, which occasionally had the unpleasant side effect of not breaking the prisoner’s neck. When this happened, the hangman would have to press down on the shoulders of the dying as they strangled slowly, spinning at the end of the rope.

During her final days, Mary Ann wrote frantic letters to family and friends, asking them to petition for a reprieve. She had no idea what was going on with her trial; at one point, she wrote that the lawyer for the prosecution would be “thare to defende mee.” She continued to insist she was innocent, and her letters took on a martyred, incredulous tone as she complained about the “lyies that has been told A Bout me.” She also begged her one surviving husband, James Robinson, to visit her and to bring baby George. Naturally, he refused.

She did make one final maternal gesture, though, when she arranged for her last child to be adopted. But even this was tinged with malice. Apparently, days earlier, she had been caught “rubbing its gums with soap,” thinking that if her baby grew ill, “her life might be spared until its recovery.” Mary Ann had been a mother, now, for exactly half of her life. Whether she liked it or not, her existence up to this point had been largely defined by being secretly pregnant, or publicly pregnant, or recently pregnant, or pregnant with another man’s child. Seduction and, by extension, pregnancy, had been one of her most faithful weapons (the other was a nefarious white powder available at any pharmacy). Mary Ann used her fertility to control the rise and fall of her life. Giving away this last baby was a powerful sign that everything—the seduction, the marriage, the birthing, the poisoning—was very much over.

Was Mary Ann a sociopath, addicted to the rush of killing the innocent? Was she a capitalist, climbing the social ladder of husbands in a desperate attempt to gain some autonomy? She was clearly striving for something, but it’s unclear what she wanted most. Money? Freedom? Other people’s pain? She saw marriage and motherhood as a form of imprisonment—one that she desperately wanted to break free from—but also as a form of salvation, and so her methods were cyclical to the point of madness. She killed one husband only to marry the next; she poisoned one child and soon became pregnant with another. What did she think would happen with that next husband, that next baby? Was she expecting something to kick in deep inside her: a final sense of satisfaction, comfort, maternal instinct, love? No matter how many horrors she inflicted on other people, nothing ever really changed for her. And so she never escaped her hall of mirrors, forced to relive her own sordid history time after time.

Frightfully Wicked

Mary Ann walked the four minutes from her cell to the scaffold on March 24, 1873. She was forty years old, wearing a black-and-white-checked shawl that disguised the fact that her arms were bound to her sides with a belt. Those types of shawls were considered fashionable in surrounding towns, but after Mary Ann was photographed in hers, the trend quickly died off. A crowd of people gathered outside the jail to catch a glimpse of her. The journalists inside wrote that she looked like “a doomed wretch,” sobbing hysterically as she shuffled forward. On the scaffold, she shuddered when the rope went around her neck. Her last words were “Lord, have mercy on my soul”—and then the ground dropped from under her feet.

It took her three minutes to die, and the executioner had to steady her twitching body with his own hands.

“The announcement of her execution may dispel a popular idea, long too prevalent, to the effect that a female assassin, however frightful her wickedness, may generally hope for a reprieve in consideration of her sex,” ran the Burnley Advertiser a few days later. “But the atrocities of Mary Ann Cotton put her beyond the pale of human mercy, for, unless she was fearfully maligned, no more hideous monster ever breathed on earth.” Of course, England had no idea that in fifteen years their most famous serial killer would start disemboweling prostitutes in the poorest areas of London. He would then be the most hideous monster to ever breathe on earth, and would capture the attention of the press in a way that Mary Ann Cotton never did.

About a week after she died, a moralizing play called “The Life and Death of Mary Ann Cotton” opened. For a while, children sang about her on the street: “Mary Ann Cotton, she’s dead and she’s rotten/lying in bed with her eyes wide open.” But soon enough she was forgotten, and the cycle of birth and death went on as before in the little towns of England.