Mary Ann Cotton murdered a suspected 13 people, eleven of her children and three husbands, in mid-19th century England. She was convicted of murdering one son and hanged in 1873. Cotton was the UK's first female serial killer and the most prolific serial killer in British history until Harold Shipman. Mary Robson was born in Durham County on October 31, 1832, the daughter of a mine pitman. She had a brother Robert and a sister who died in infancy. The family moved to the village of Murton in 1841, when Mary was eight. Her former schoolmaster remembered her as a diligent student of average intelligence, always neatly dressed and groomed. As was the case for most of England's working class in this time, the family was poor, her parents marrying when they were only teenagers, and life was harsh, marked by constant moves to go wherever work could be found. Her father Michael was a stern disciplinarian of both his children.
The Robsons had been settled in their new home barely a few months when Michael fell 150 feet down a mineshaft while repairing a pulley wheel and died. His body was delivered to the family in a sack marked "Property of the South Hetton Coal Company" and since they lived in company housing, they were forced to leave and move elsewhere. Mary's mother married another miner, George Stott, but she did not get along with her stepfather and left home at 16 to become a servant in nearby South Hetton for Edward Potter, a mine manager. After all his children were sent to a boarding school over the next three years, Mary went back home and trained as a dressmaker. It was rumored in South Hetton that Mary had an affair with a married clergyman during this time.In 1852, Mary married mine worker William Mowbray in Newcastle upon Tyne and moved to the southwest of England. The couple had four children, three of whom (Margaret, a second Margaret, and John) died in infancy. The children's births were not registered except for one, and none of their deaths were registered despite British law technically requiring it. The Mowbrays moved back to northeast England where William worked as a fireman on a steamship, then as a mine foreman. Mary argued with her husband over money as she was determined to escape the meager circumstances of her upbringing. William died in 1865 of an intestinal ailment. She collected £35 in insurance payment. The loss of three of four children would have been unusual even in an era of high infant mortality.
Shortly after her husband's death, Mary moved to Seaham Harbor in Durham County and began dating Joseph Nattrass. Her daughter, the second Margaret, died of typus at age 3. Mary returned to Sunderland and became a nurse at a hospital, sending her surviving daughter Isabella to live with her mother. One of her hospital patients was George Ward, an engineer. They married at St. Peter's Church in Monkwearmouth on August 28, 1865. Ward continued to be ill and died 14 months after they wed from prolonged bouts of paralysis and intestinal problems. His cause of death was listed as cholera and typhoid fever. Ward's doctor recalled that he'd been very ill, but his sudden death was still unexpected. Mary collected on his insurance policy.Mary's third husband James Robinson was a recently widowed shipwright in Sunderland. He hired her as a housekeeper in late 1866. James's infant son died of intestinal flu a month later. In his grief, he became romantically involved with Mary, who became pregnant with her fifth child. Mary's mother became ill around this time so she left to attend to her. She began recovering but suffered inexplicable stomach pains and died in April 1867 at age 54, nine days after Mary's arrival.
Mary's daughter Isabella was brought home, soon developed stomach pain, and died, as did two of Robinson's children, Elizabeth and James. All three children were buried the last week of April and within a week of the funerals, Mary collected an insurance payout for Isabella. James increasingly distrusted his wife when she wanted to take out an insurance policy on him; he found that she ran up debts of £60 behind his back and stole some £50 that she was supposed to put in the bank. He then learned that Mary was forcing his older children to pawn household valuables, so he finally kicked her out of the house while retaining custody of their son George.With no place to go, Mary was homeless and reduced to panhandling to survive when her friend Margaret Cotton introduced her to her brother Fred, a pitman and recent widower in Walbottle, Northumberland who'd lost two of his four children. Margaret had acted as a surrogate mother for the two remaining ones until she died suddenly on March 25, 1870 of a stomach ailment, leaving Mary to console the grieving Fred, who soon impregnated her. The couple married on September 17 and Mary gave birth to a son, Robert, the following February. She then found that her former lover Joseph Nattrass was living 30 miles away in West Auckland and was no longer married. Mary began seeing him again and convinced her family to move closer to him. Cotton died December 8, 1871 from an intestinal ailment and Mary collected his and his sons' insurance policies.
After Frederick's death, Nattrass became Mary's lodger and she found work as a nurse for an excise officer recovering from smallpox. His name was widely given as John Quick-Manning, though there are no records from West Auckland of a person with this name. However, there was a Richard Quick Manning, an excise and customs officer who was probably the real identity of Mary Cotton's lover. She became pregnant again at age 39. Frederick's two sons died during the spring of 1872. Nattrass became ill with a stomach ailment and died just after making Mary a beneficiary in his will.Mary was finally busted when a parish official, Thomas Riley, asked her to help nurse a woman with smallpox. She complained that Frederick Cotton's surviving son Charles was in the way and wanted Riley to commit him to a workhouse. Riley, who was also an assistant coroner, said she needed to come with him. She told Riley that Charles was ill and would soon go the way of the rest of the Cottons. Within five days, he died. Riley reported this to police and asked the doctor to hold off on writing a death certificate until the situation could be investigated further.The first thing Mary did after Charles died was go straight to the insurance office, but was told that she could not get her payout until the death certificate was issued. Charles's death was ruled due to natural causes. Mary claimed she treated him with arrowroot and said that Riley falsely accused her because she rejected his romantic advances.
Local newspapers soon began reporting that Mary had moved around north England and lost three husbands, a lover, friend, her mother, and several children all due to stomach ailments. Charles's doctor William Kilburn took samples which were found to contain arsenic. He informed police, who promptly arrested Mary and had Charles exhumed. She was charged with his murder, but the proceedings had to be delayed due to her pregnancy. Mary gave birth to her final child, Margaret Edith Quick-Manning Cotton, on January 7, 1873 (Margaret went on to a long, successful life and died in 1954 at age 81). Her trial began March 5.She was represented by Thomas Foster, who argued that Charles's death was due to inhaling arsenic fumes from wallpaper dye in the Cotton house. The doctor testified that there was no other powder on the same shelf in the chemist's shop as the arsenic, only liquid; the chemist himself claimed that there were other powders. Campbell Foster argued that it was possible that the chemist had mistakenly used arsenic powder instead of bismuth powder (used to treat diarrhea), when preparing a bottle for Cotton because he had been distracted by talking to other people.
The jury took only 90 minutes to find Mary guilty of murdering Charles. She was sentenced to death and despite a flurry of petitions to the Home Office for clemency, it was of no use. She was hanged at the jail in Durham County on March 24. The execution did not go cleanly and she slowly strangled on the noose for 13 minutes.The exact motivations of her crimes are not entirely clear, but she was believed to have been driven by a constant obsession with not being poor, given her upbringing.
Mary's executioner, William Calcraft, was a semi-notorious figure who had been at his job for over 40 years and was known for his addiction to using short drop hanging, which caused slow strangulation of the condemned, much like happened to Mary Cotton, as he believed this entertaining to crowds of spectators who watched executions, although an act of Parliament in 1868 finally abolished public executions in England and limited them to the inside of prisons, so Mary's hanging was not seen by the public. Calcraft hanged some 450 people during his career, including 35 women, and was one of the most prolific executioners in British history. He was finally forced into retirement in 1874 at age 73 and died a few years later.
>>18752088>>18752085i suppose rightists aren't going to grant any thanks to Atlee et al for abolishing this paradise and making it possible for you to aspire to more than living in poverty as the slave of a mine company owned by titled nonces and having ten children per couple, at least six of which die before age 5. but oh look, we own some distant islands and jungles with brown and black people in them look how powerful we are. rule, rule, Britannia, rule the waves!
>>18752085she was nothing to look at. how she seduced so many men may not be known.,
>>18752151>she was nothing to look at. how she seduced so many men may not be known.nearly all sexual encounters among the English working class take place under the influence of alcohol. i don't think sober sex actually exists.
>>18752125Silence, Guardianista.
>>18752085yeah life in the Victorian era sucked especially for poorfags and unlike the USA one didn't have immense open space and cheap land to move to, they were stuck on a shitty, rainy, gray island. the only good part was the lack of mandatory military service unlike the continental European states.
>>18752103this murdering cunt managed to be unnecessarily successful at having kids
>>18752125have you ever interacted with working class chavs? they aren't even really people at all. there's a reason we used to hitch them to a plow and force them to dig coal.
>>18752151Modern chavs look much more grotesque and obese.
>>18752181childbearing was encouraged back then 'cause gotta have more slaves for the mines and factories
>>18752114this is ironic because i'd heard someone tell me that the US had an epidemic of botched hangings back then because the Chief Wiggum county sheriff would carry them out while England had professional executioners with standardized scaffolds and rope lengths
>>18752085left is from a TV movie about Mary Cotton but they have her looking more like an aristocratic dandy than an actual working class person
>Cotton's crimes were made possible by the peculiar circumstances of the Industrial Revolution era. In an earlier, rural age a serial poisoner would quickly get caught; communities were small, everyone knew everyone else, and suspicion would get around in a hurry. In Victorian times, the lower classes had become uprooted from the countryside to work industrial jobs and this combined with the primitive state of contemporary medical care and the poor diet of working class people made it easy for Cotton to poison multiple people without drawing attention to herself.[3]
>>18752085one has to wonder what kind of incomprehensible chav accent this woman spoke in. probably sounded like a pack of dogs fighting each other.
>>18752545northeast England sounds like this. it's close to the Scottish accent.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRfpkcp9br8
>>18752774you also notice he has nearly the same phenotype as MAC
>>18752085regional/national differences were more pronounced back then. British people looked and dressed a lot different from Americans.
>>18752085you can see the retardation in her facelook at that open mouth and drooping lip
>>18752810nah that's just a normal Norf England look
>>18752790so is this bitch English or American?
>>18752842the latter
>>18752790English fashions looked a bit heavier and more somber than American ones of the period, probably due to the much different climate.
>>18752181there was nothing else to do back then except benis in bagina
>>18752085>murdered a suspected 13 people, eleven of her children and three husbandsthats 14
