After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - 'Black Widow': Serial Killer of Victorian England

Episode Date: March 11, 2024

Mary Ann Cotton is known as the first British female serial killer. A trail of bodies, many her own children, followed her through life. Bodies she happened to have insurance policies out on. Arsenic appears to have been her poison. How very Victorian.But Mary Ann Cotton was only proved to be guilty of killing one of her alleged victims. So was she really a serial killer? How hard could life be for working class women in Victorian society?Maddy tells Anthony the story.Edited by Tom Delargy. Produced by Freddy Chick. Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here.

Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet. Hello and welcome to After Dark. My name's Anthony. And I'm Maddy.

And today we are in search of one of the most notorious serial killers in Victorian England, one Mary Ann Cotton. Now, as we're about to learn, Maddy's going to tell us a little bit more, but Mary Ann Cotton may actually be the first female serial killer in England. So, Maddy, let's enter her world and find out some more details about these cases. Thanks, Anthony. We're actually going to start today with a ballad, a ballad that's going to be read for us by Felix Harris of Darlington. So thank you, Felix. Take it away. eyes wide open. Sing, sing, oh what should I sing? Mary in cotton, she's tied up with string. Where, where, up in the air, selling black puddings a penny a pair. Merton Village in County Durham, England, February 1842. The village of Merton had been small before the sinking of the mine four years prior. There'd been no more than a hundred folk scattered across a handful of fields,

but already the population was nearly 14 times what it had been and was continuing to grow. It was no longer just locals either. There were miners and their families from Devon, from Cornwall and from Ireland that had all arrived there, forced away from dried-up tin and copper seams in the south-west, and drawn instead to the north, and the promise of a commodity in ever-increasing demand, coal. a bustling warren of workers' cottages, rows of low, identical stone houses, outside of which children played and women conversed, leaning over their doorsteps to chat to their neighbours. Each household depended on the success of the work beneath their feet. Life and livelihood were precious. So when, on a spring afternoon in February, the bell at the entrance to the mine began to sound its terrible warning, everyone knew a disaster was unfolding. Some raced towards it, leaving their doors ajar as they went. Others hung back, afraid. Soon, whispers turned to cries, and the news spread. A man had been killed.

He had slipped and fallen into a shaft. Now his body, unsightly, horribly broken by the fall, was being brought up and bundled into a sack. A short parade followed, the body carried overhead by the miners who'd recovered it, still filthy and blackened from their work. overhead by the miners who'd recovered it, still filthy and blackened from their work. As they passed each cottage, nervous faces appeared at windows and open doors. Women shrank back in fear, praying this macabre delivery was not for them.

Then it came to the cottage at the end of the row. The men set the body, still in its Hessian wrapping, down on the ground. Across it, a stamp read, Property of the South Hetton Coal Company, in bold letters. A woman, the wife of the deceased, appeared and threw herself sobbing onto the floor beside her husband. Behind her, two children, a girl, tall, sullen and dark, and a little boy, ruddy-faced, lingered afraid. Together, this small family had lost their breadwinner, the head of their household, but also the roof over their heads. These cottages were, after all, for employees of the mine only. only. And so it might have followed that this family, like so many who found themselves in this situation, would sink into obscurity, poverty and squalor. But for the girl watching her mother's distress and her helplessness, the story has only just begun. This little girl, Mary, will rise to fame as one of Britain's most insidious and feared murderesses,

one who would rewrite what it meant to be a woman in the Victorian world. oh there's a lot there maddie the first thing that i'm there's there's a couple of things but the first thing this image that you have painted of the body being carried in the Hessian sack through the village and that incredible thing that you described of the women backing away from the doors going, no, thanks very much, I don't want this news. If this is coming to my house, I don't want it. They don't want that darkening their doorstep. No, that's actually quite chilling.

And it's so ordinary in its resistance to death. The second thing, given that this is 1842, the town has increased 14 fold, right? And that fear, because it is fear, I think a lot of the time, that fear for the inhabitants of towns such as this outside of London, that see this huge industrial boom, particularly due to coal mining or the railways often, there is this fear of infiltration. Who is living amongst us? What does that mean? And especially the Irish were not very welcome in a lot of these cases and had to go because this is during the Great Irish Famine. But more than that, we're kind of at the height of Victorian Gothic here, right?

We are. And I think you can link those two things together a little bit. And yes, the fear of the unknown, the a little bit and yes the fear of the unknown the fear of the other the fear of something coming in and potentially corrupting your community that's absolutely something that would have been present in the community that little mary and cotton as she will become she's not a cotton at this point that's the name that she gets through marriage and we will get to her various marriages in a little bit i think for me researching this story the thing that's been most interesting is thinking about the victorian age we have famously a woman on the throne who lends her name to this time period in britain at least

but here we have a working class girl and straight away in the earliest years of her life, she's shown the realities of what it is to be a woman in this society. She watches her mother lose the income to their household when the father is killed in the mine, the roof over their heads. And that's so interesting. We think about communities changing and this society that's in flux and people are literally traveling and coming in and out of parishes communities local areas like never before really and housing is changing lower classes have often rented rooms um you know not had permanent abodes necessarily in cities but in the countryside it's been something of a different story people would probably have stayed in the little cottages they were in most of their lives their families would have done before suddenly we get people

who are living really hand to mouth in terms of the income they're reliant on a company that owns their housing that owns the very way that they make their livelihood they're not using the land as farmers for example They're using it, yes, they're mining the literal earth and everything that's underneath it. But everything is becoming commodified in a different way. Everything is non-permanent for those workers. It's a tenuous existence. And of course, if you are the person working in the mine, it is incredibly dangerous. Yeah, well, that's entirely true. And I absolutely agree. There's also this sense often,

particularly if you're the person relocating, of hope and of a better future and of building something that's more permanent and staking a claim somewhere. And so you're getting this house that has been built by the mine owner, whoever it has been. That might be the first house

that you have owned as a family unit or maybe not owned or rented, but the first house that you will have occupied and it might be it might be better quality than anything that you could afford elsewhere it might give you a sense of social climbing whether that's the reality or not there would certainly be the aspiration for that so it makes me think of worker communities like at Saltaire in Yorkshire, where you've got one man, Mr. Salt, I think his name actually is, who makes this community. He builds new housing, new factories, but he kind of controls the workers in that they're reliant on the economy that he's made. And actually, he doesn't pay them in money. He pays them in tokens that can only be spent within that community. Now, that's an extreme example, right?

That's not happening everywhere, but it is an example of what can happen. And I think it shows what we have to bear in mind in the 19th century. And this is at the beginning of this huge industrial boom. The Industrial Revolution, of course, starts to take off in the 18th century. But this is really when it explodes in a really serious way, and particularly in the northeast of england in terms of mining but there's a level of reliance that workers have on their companies and of course if you're a mining family it's the man in the household who's going underground and as a woman yes you can bring in supplementary income doing laundry doing cleaning work like. But the likelihood is you don't have a job with this company.

And so your housing, your income, your security is all reliant on the man that you are in a relationship with, most likely married, although I'm sure lots of people faked being married in this period. But if he is injured, if he dies, as a woman, you have nothing. You have no power in that community and you have to leave it. And that's the context that Mary Cotton finds herself in. And I chose this part of the story to begin with,

not only because it's kind of her origin story, but because it gives a sense into something of her psychology and what happens next in her life, how she sees her own position in the world. She witnesses how powerless her mother is. And I think she takes steps in the years to follow to change that. You talked about context there. So let's talk about some of the wider context

that is happening in Britain and across the globe at this time as well. We have, just slightly before this, we have the penny post has been introduced. So this is making the commerce of posting letters totally different from what it was the century prior. We also have the railways. We're talking of industrialisation. Mary's father is mining for coal. Coal, of course, amongst other things, is fuelling the railways, quite literally in this period. In 1838, so just four years before Mary's father dies, we've got the London to

Birmingham railway, which arguably has not improved since and will not do. Maddy got caught on a train today on the way into the studio. She's not loving trains today. Not loving them today. In 1851, we've got the Great Exhibition in London, which is, of course, a sort of absolute powerhouse exhibition of British imperial power, but also industrial power, invention, new machines, new ways of doing things, and sort of an investment in the easiness of life, in making things mechanised, using machines in new ways. And of course, Mary's social class are the people who that is built on. Go global then, and you're seeing the abolition of the slave trade

in the British Empire specifically at this time as well. So that's a huge change, a global change. Obviously, we've mentioned the Great Irish Famine prior to this. So there's a mass exodus of movement from Ireland, over a million people who have left the shores of Ireland, and some people would say it's more than a million. A lot of them are coming to the UK and not necessarily to London. They're going to mining communities to capitalise on some of their own experiences that they've had in Ireland as well. The Suez Canal is open. So

again, this transport is not just localised to Britain, it's global. So the world really feels like it's shifting. It's getting bigger and smaller all at once. It's a real time of change. And for people in the working class, they are feeling the effects of that in a way that the upper classes are not. The upper classes are becoming increasingly wealthy and living in increasing levels of luxury. The working class are feeling the detrimental effects, I suppose, of this industry. And thinking as well, in the 1850s, we've got the Crimean War, which is a conflict between Britain, Russia, there's the French fighting, there's Turkish and Sardinian forces as well something like almost half a million people die in that conflict and a lot of the veterans who

survive come back to Britain and they're looking for work and they are often homeless and living on the streets they have limbs missing they've got catastrophic injuries that mean that they can't work in the factories in the mines that are springing up everywhere. And so there's a workforce that is in physical peril and physically suffering a lot of the time, I think. You touched on there that image that I picked up on after you'd finished reading the first narration, which was the women at the doors.

And that's such a striking image that maybe we should hear a little bit more about what women's lives were like at this time. So you mentioned Marianne, who would become Marianne Cotton as a child. Her mother is there. What is life like for these women, particularly when the husbands are away, they're down the mine? What's happening legally, socially, culturally for them? Well, the 19th century generally is a huge time of change for women.

We've got Victoria on the throne, so she's on the throne from 1837 until 1901, so most of the 19th century. But for women in the middle classes, in the lower classes, and to a certain extent in the upper classes, life is changing. Their position in society is changing. Their position in society is changing. How they present themselves and how people understand womanhood and what a

woman is, what her place in the world is, what her legal standing is, all of that is changing. So we're all quite familiar, I think, with this idea of the contradiction in the 19th century. On the one hand, we've got The Angel in in the house which is a really dreadful poem by coventry patmore just i'm sorry but he's i remember doing it for gcse or a level or something oh hideous very victorian and it's this idea of you know women must be beautiful they must be calm they must be literally angels in the house they must have the domestic situation down to a t everything's got to be clean they They've got to look beautiful. They don't speak unless spoken to.

The ideal domesticated and domestic woman. On the other hand, we've got an increased interest in what the 19th century would term fallen women. So this is women who, for whatever reason, and there's a spectrum of reasons, have been pushed out of polite society and pushed to the edges and they are working as sex workers or they are homeless. They are maybe women who've left their husbands because of all kinds of reasons and have left marriages, have left the domestic

sphere and therefore have brought shame on themselves in some way. There's an interest in them in terms of charities. So whilst society at large condemns them, we get this rise of charities that are seeking to help them. I mean, I would say a lot of these charities probably, in terms of case to case, did help women. But it's very performative and it's very much part of this conversation of if you've fallen and failed in some way, society will help you to rise back up.

But you have to be sorry for what you've done. And there's a legacy for both of those two things that you've described there. The charity that's specifically aimed towards women and the idea of the woman, the ideal woman at home. And the legacy of those things is in terms of the charity, it's quite a Georgian legacy. You see the growth of those charities starting to come about in the 18th century. Well, we see it as early as, I think, the 1740s with the Foundling Hospital in London, where for anyone who doesn't know it,

I mean, it's an incredible museum and please go and visit it. But the idea there was that women who'd had children out of wedlock or children they simply couldn't look after could come and give their babies to the hospital and often would never be able to come back for them but in order to access that kind of charity you had to come before a judge and a panel of I think mostly men if not exclusively men who would deem you worthy or otherwise to have your child taken in and looked

after by the hospital so that's very much a Georg idea, but it's having a real boom in the 19th century. And then the second thing is the idea of enforced gender binaries for women in the 19th century. And that is a very Victorian concept, or at least a very 19th century concept, where you see women almost forced inside their homes far more so than they had been in the 17th or 18th century. Now, that's not to say women are not associated with the home in the earlier periods. Of course they are. But in the 19th century,

the legacy of gender performance that we have today begins then. This binary enforced experience was the ideal, an ideal gender performances. Now, they didn't exist, they did, but they were far more popularly enforced and talked about during this period. So this dichotomy of women being in the home

as a Victorian concept and the charity thing has a long history and also then is bringing in some new ideas of gender and women's roles in the 19th century. I do think that's true. I think there's also, we could argue on the other hand, a huge change and advancement in women's roles in the 19th century. I do think that's true. I think there's also, we could argue on the other hand, a huge change and advancement in women's rights in the 19th century. And whilst women are grappling with these ideas of this binary of essentially the angel and

the whore, there is a whole spectrum, of course, of real human beings in between. And the law starts to reflect that to a certain case so i'm going to run through some of these legal changes because i do think they're really interesting so bear with me so we get things like in 1870 we get the married women's property act so women in the uk up until that point could not keep the money that they earned if they were employed money they inherited property they inherited all of that went to their husband this changed in 1870 and they could keep some of it but not all of it there were caveats to that so for example husbands in particular had enormous financial power and whilst the law changed women who'd

been married before that date the law did not apply to them so it only going forward it made change but only to a smaller number of people so also we have the custody of infants act in 1873 so up until this point even if you were the biological mother of your children you did not have custody rights automatically they would be the property of your husband in the same way that the house was your prop was his property and his income, your income, any goods that you owned all went to him. So that only changed in 1873. But again, we're seeing these changes start to come in. Things like in the 1880s and 1889,

interestingly, I always think the year after the Whitechapel Jack the Ripper murders, which I don't think is a coincidence, the Women's Franchise League is founded by Emmeline Pankhurst and this will go on to be the suffragette movement so we've got moves towards equality in terms of gender moves towards making women's lives better legally giving them protection in their domestic spaces so there is a dichotomy going on here on the one hand we've got this struggle where women are being placed in these boxes

and these roles and being told how to behave. And that if they step out of that, they're disgraced and they need help and charity to get back into that box. On the other hand, the reality is,

and we can trace that in the legal record, things are changing. Women are pushing back. Women are really pioneering a lot of these changes particularly towards the second half right of the 19th century absolutely it's really starting to change then yes yeah and today our protagonist marianne cotton she lives through a huge amount of that change she doesn't quite get to the very big changes that happening say in the 1880s

but she lives over that period and would have witnessed. And I absolutely think that those changes are crucial to her story. So tell me a little bit more about her, because I actually have to admit, I haven't heard of Marianne Coffman. This is the first time that I'm becoming familiar with her story. So people might know her, actually, from, I think, in 2016, there was an ITV drama called dark angel which had um joanne what's her name from downtown yes yes i think that's correct so people may have come to her

through that dramatization so she's born in 1832 we know that her father dies whilst working in a mine in the northeast we also know that she's going to be executed for murder in 1873 so how does she go from being... That young child. Yeah, the young child watching the body of her father be brought up from underneath the earth to being a notorious serial killer. So she is called Britain's first female serial killer.

How accurate that is, I don't think we can necessarily talk to that. And I'm sure that there have been women serial killers throughout all of history. And in britain that's probably no difference so you know there's some debate over this title but we'll go with it in the victorian era she really captures the imagination of the press of popular culture and that continues right up to the present day she's still someone about whom we tell stories we sing songs songs, we make TV programmes about. Because women aren't supposed to kill, right?

In the same way that Amelia Dyer persists, when women kill, there is a different visceral reaction from both men and women to that experience. And also we know her name and we know her background. Unlike a figure like a 19th century serial killer like Jack the Ripper, we have details here. And so that helps to keep that myth going, I guess. Or not necessarily the myth because it's a history, but it helps us to get closer to her, I suppose. After the loss of her father, a tragic, though not untypical, beginning

for a working classclass girl in Victorian Britain, Mary would have to make her way in the world. A year after the accident at the mine, her mother married again, as before, to a miner. Mary did not spend long with her new family. At 16, she left home to go into service, a good opportunity for a young girl in her position. For a while, she worked as a nurse, looking after the children of one of the bosses of the mine in which her own father had perished. It must have been difficult, stepping into a world so close to her own in many ways, yet utterly distinct. In 1852, aged just 20, she married for the first time. A miner like her father and stepfather, William Mowbray was handsome, a good catch. But ever in

search of work, the couple were forced to move south, with William eventually finding employment in the West Country. Mary knew only too well from her childhood observations of her own mother just how precarious the life of a miner's wife could be. If it was not the constant moving, there was the risk of accident, even death, to consider. And so it was that, determined not to find herself alone as her mother before her, Mary took out her first life insurance policy on her partner. Children soon followed Mary and William's marriage, first a daughter, Margaret Jane, born in 1856, then another, Isabella, two years later. But death was never far from Mary's door, and it was not long before this young family were laying Margaret Jane to rest

beneath the earth. Eventually, work allowed for a return to the North East, where William found employment, first on the steamships that went up and down the coast, and then as a coal mine foreman. Two more children followed, another Margaret Jane, and a boy, John Robert. But little John would not survive long. All too quickly he, like his sister before him, fell ill with a gastric complaint and died. Disaster would not end there. Following the loss of his son, William also began to suffer with a pain in his stomach. In January 1865, Mary's husband followed their children to the grave, leaving behind his wife and two daughters. Ever the pragmatist, Mary applied almost immediately to the British and Prudential Insurance Office. Payouts followed, £35 for

William, about three and a half grand today, and £2 for baby John. Wendy's Small Frosty is the ultimate summer refreshment. And not because it's cool and creamy and made with fresh Canadian dairy. It's also refreshingly cheap. Just 99 cents until July 14th. It's a treat for you and your wallet. Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, Catherine Parr. Six wives, six lives. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this month on Not Just the Tudors,

I'm joined by a host of experts to tell the stories of the six queens of Henry VIII, who shaped and changed England forever. Subscribe to and follow Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. oh it's bleak it's bleak it's a bleak start so she goes from living with her stepfather and her mother in this new family after her father's death. She then moves into service. When she gets married, there must have been a feeling, I think on the one hand, of hopefulness

that she's setting out on her own. But of course, things go wrong very quickly. They're moving around a lot. A lot of the precarity that shaped her life as a child is still shaping her life today because she's chosen a man from the same community that she's grown up in. The fact that she takes out the insurance money

tells me a lot about her. I think she's a particularly savvy person. I think she's someone determined not to lose her power or she has no power to lose. She wants to gain power. She wants to give herself a chance financially in terms of security in this world. It's interesting. It's hard to know, isn't it? Because, yes, she could be doing that.

Or from the very beginning, she might be saying, I'm going to do what I can here. And that involves swindling. I get the impetus to do it. Obviously, I don't agree with the impetus to do that. You mean you've never taken out short-term money in Kilsnacht? It's so interesting when we look back, because we tend to do this pathologizing, don't agree with the impetus to do that. You mean you've never taken out shorts when Ian kills her? It's so interesting when we look back, because we tend to do this pathologising, don't we? I don't mean you and I, but generally when we look back at true crime,

historic true crime, we want to know why something has happened. And so we point to the precarity that she had in her childhood and then she replicates that again. And I think that is very legitimate and possibly the absolute interpretation of what's happening. On the other hand, Marianne Cotton might just be an absolute psychopath. I mean, I'm not saying that she's not.

And as we're going to find out, that very might also be a possibility. Something that really strikes me about her story, and we're going to see this again and again, is thinking about insurance. And this to me feels like a very 19th century phenomenon taking out insurance on human beings the people being insured here are the husband william and the little baby john and it says so much about on the one hand the commodification of male bodies that are used in the workforce and even little baby john who's obviously not going down the mine although it probably wouldn't be that many years into his life before he did do. But it's about the potential, the earning capability of that child for that family. The girls, even little Margaret Jane who dies, she's not insured.

She doesn't produce any income when she dies. There's a disparity here in terms of the value of men in this society, particularly in terms of the working class and their capability as earners, and the value of women and girls. So obviously, the first child to die is female, which is followed then by a male child's death. We would imagine then that Marianne hasn't killed the first child because she would know that there's no value in killing the first child.'s what i'm assuming not knowing all the facts yet so are we learning that she sees opportunity in death in these early deaths or is she orchestrating them this early on do we know

okay so there's kind of two strands to her crimes i mean obviously she's we wouldn't be here talking about this story if she hadn't murdered them and william and little john get this gastric complaint yes so that's the husband and the baby the male child we know straight away something's not right and we hold on to that so she seems on the one hand to be killing them for the insurance even this this early? Even this early. That seems to be an element. You know, they die conveniently and she gets the payout. However, don't rule out her not killing Margaret Jane, the daughter. And what I think,

and this will hopefully become clear as we go through the story, is that Mary looks after herself. She's number one. And if there's any hangers-on who aren't serving her in some way, they have to go. And I wonder if the first child that she has, Margaret Jane, if there's an element of that.

If the baby is not useful, she's holding her back, or she can't deal with the child in some way. This is speculation. Sure, sure. And we're going to find out this in terms of the story. or she can't deal with the child in some way, this is speculation. Sure, sure. And we're going to find out this, in terms of the story, proving her crimes. It's very difficult.

And you've got to remember that this is in a world, in a time, in an environment where death is all around and people do get ill and die. Yes, children die all the time. The infant mortality rate is just phenomenally depressing in the 19th century, as it is for most of human history, but specifically in this period, because children are going out to work as well. And there's increased concentration of population, so there's more disease. You know, you think about little children in cotton mills. I grew up in the Staffordshire, Cheshire area, where we would visit a lot of those mills as part of school trips.

And we'd always be asked to think of the children your own age in these mills who would have to, for example, when the looms were moving, run in and grab the cotton and try and get out before the blades or the metal machinery was moving back. Incredibly dangerous. Children were losing limbs all the time dying all the time being crushed by machinery that kind of thing so it's hard within that chaos and that darkness that is just present in victorian society it's hard to define mary's crimes with any accuracy with a lot of specificity but this early situation with the deaths and the insurance it's going to become a pattern so we've lost one husband now but i have a feeling that's not the end of her marital bliss okay we're moving on to husband number two who is a gentleman called george ward now i'm literally going to run through this almost as a list because the amount of human beings that she goes through the amount of children that she's going to have, the amount of children that she's going to have

and the amount of men that she's going to have relationships with who end up not alive at the end is quite remarkable. So we know that she's moved back to the northeast, having spent time in the south with William. William's died. Little baby John has died. Margaret Jane has died. But don't forget there's Margaret Jane II

because, of course, that's a very 19th century tradition. Usual thing, yeah. Yeah, that's completely... To us, it feels quite creepy, but that would be normal to rename the next child the same thing. And then we've got Baby Isabella as well. So she's got two young daughters in tow. She needs to find work.

She needs to find security. She needs to find a man, really, to take care of her because those are the choices available to her. She does get a actually in the sunderland infirmary and she is working alongside doctors she's working as a nurse so respectable it's quite respectable and also crucially there's got to be some medical knowledge required there and that is going to serve her quite well in what's coming up and access to things i'm already imagining and access to things yes so she meets george the second husband he's a patient at the infirmary she's serving him it's a romantic love story she's the nurse he's the patient they get married very very quickly so they meet and

they're married within a few weeks in august this is august 1865 now almost immediately yes after this wedding he starts to get a little bit of pain in his tummy she's not waiting around this time and of course because he's been ill in the infirmary there's almost an opportunity there to maybe kill him off no one's's going to notice. You could say, he wasn't well anyway, bless him. You know, I married him as a favour to cheer him up in his last days. So by October 1866, so this is just over a year after their wedding,

in which he's been ill pretty consistently, he dies. Right, okay. Bye, George. Yeah. Now, the attending doctor who has been working with Mary at the infirmary and has been the doctor for George when he's been a patient there, does admit this is a bit odd.

He's quite surprised by George dying, but he concedes health's not been great. George came in with a broken toe and now he's got some gastro thing and he's dead. But I mean, OK. Oh, God. So he's like, yeah, I'm going to sign it off. It is what it is. Of course it is. You know what? Don't make work for yourself.

The whole area around where they're living, there are lots of slums where workers are living. There's lots of diseases like cholera. He's like, you know what the likelihood is? He does have something. I'll tell you what didn't happen. This nurse did not kill him. Yeah.

Except that she did. She did. Well, she probably did. Yeah. You know, let's be clear. We don't know. So what does she do next? Oh, she gets married again. I know she does. Well, before probably did. Yeah. You know, let's be clear. We don't know. So what does she do next? Oh, she gets married again.

I know she does. Well, before she does that, she claims some more insurance money. She has taken out a policy on poor George as he's been on his sickbed. So she's cashed in from husband number one, William, and now husband number two, George. So she's got all those payouts. Don't forget, she's still got the children in tow. The two girls. So again, she's got all those payouts. Don't forget she's still got the children in tow. The two girls. So again, she's probably looking for some security. She's got a little bit of money,

but she's not going to stop there. She's not happy with that. Enter husband number three. Three, yeah. James Robinson. Hi James. So in 1866, so the same year that George has died she is hired as a housekeeper for a shipwright in Scotland Why did she move on

from the hospital? You don't know how could you possibly know what the decision that was but that seems like a strange one to move on from Let's completely

speculate here for a second and this is speculation thinking about the doctor and the fact that he did find the death of George a little bit strange I'm wondering if she feels

she has to move on I don't know why I asked Yeah if there's a sort of suspicion there that she's escaping and running away from. If that's your speculation, it's mine too, I think. Okay. We're making it up, but yeah, go on. We're making this up. We can do it.

So she's hired as a housekeeper. She's changed jobs. And don't forget, she's been in service before when she was 16. So this is not an unusual situation to move between these different kinds of jobs if you're a working class woman. So James Robinson, his wife has recently died. He's been looking for a woman to run his household because, of course, the domestic sphere, you require a woman to organize that. There's also two children from his marriage. So he's got two children and a baby, also called John.

Someone get a pen and paper and start writing down these baby names because it's so confusing. There's a lot of children. So stay with me. This is a maths podcast once more. When it all comes down to it. That's what it is. It's just maths.

Baby John. Yes, not her biological child. This is second baby John who she's inherited as the housekeeper. He dies from yes yeah i thought yeah sure now mary yeah now becomes pregnant with james's child so she's not just doing the housekeeping in this household yes and you know that's as much james's responsibility as hers yes now mary's mother who's been maybe looking after her children elsewhere, who aren't in Robinson's household, her mother starts to get ill now.

So Mary leaves Robinson's house for a while. Plot twist. And goes to attend her mother as a nurse. Yeah. Now. Pregnant. Pregnant. Is there a question of respectability there?

Does she have to go and spend her pregnancy somewhere else? I don't know. But she's with the mother, nursing her. The mother has got terrible stomach pains and she soon dies. So that's the mum gone. Now, at least one of Mary's children, who was living with her mother, is now back in her care. So she brings Isabella from the first marriage

back into James Robinson robinson's household so now the household is james robinson yeah mary who's pregnant and she's still working as the housekeeper but obviously they're in a relationship as well yeah james robinson's two children from his previous marriage and now isabella yes from mary's first marriage. So it's becoming a little bit complicated. Now, Isabella and Robinson's two children. Yeah, go on. Stomach pains, dead. Isabella and Robinson's two children,

who are male or female? Don't ask me that. I won't, okay. Okay, so Isabella and Robinson's two children now all have stomach aches. You know, children live together, they get bugs. We all know this. They're all dead. They're going to die.

They're all dead. Now, interestingly... I don't even know what number we're up to in terms of death now. Like, we're heading for 10. I've lost count immediately. So Isabella, the child from her first marriage, has an insurance policy on her and the payment comes in. Oh, so she does have a...

So she does at this point. On Isabella. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So she does at this point. On Isabella. Yeah, she does on Isabella. Maybe Isabella was more valuable. Maybe she was old enough to go to work. Who knows what the criteria were for that insurance. But the insurance payout is £5, 10 shillings and sixpence, which it's really hard to get your head around

putting a financial price on a human being, a child in this case. But obviously for Mary, this is really helpful income and it's giving her power and independence whilst she's losing her own children so mary and james they're now they have no children other than the child that mary's pregnant with now because those three children all died yeah they've all died they get. They go on to have two children. There's another John, is there? There's a Margaret Isabella now. So we've had Margaret Jane and Isabella. Now we've got Margaret Isabella.

She dies very young, almost immediately. And then they have a George who's born in 1869. This whole time, Mary's putting increasing pressure on James to say, look, I've lost two husbands. I need to put a life insurance policy on you. You need to make sure that you're taking responsibility for me. And he's a little bit suspicious because she is now surrounded by death. But I mean, this is the other thing about her. I think this is quite interesting. And it shows something of her sort of secret life and her financial dealings that she's actually in quite a lot of debt and this is quite similar to the palm of the poisoner story that we did yeah where she's getting the insurance money but then she's spending it on on stuff yeah things that she wants that she needs that she fancies and she's actually been stealing the money that james is earning as a shipwright and he gives it to her for housekeeping duties.

Presumably she has to take some of it to the bank. She's responsible for looking after that money. And when he comes to ask where that money is, it's all gone. So coupled with the suspicion, where she's suddenly saying, let's get the life insurance on you, he actually throws her out.

And because of the law not changing at this point, he keeps custody of little baby george right so the only surviving child of the couple he keeps so mary is now out on the street yeah she hasn't completed her cycle of insuring her husband and killing and killing and claiming the money and of course she's married. There's no option for divorce here because she can't claim that he's physically assaulted her or anything like that. So according to the law, she can't just divorce him.

So she's lost a lot of her power and standing. And if she has been killing everyone, as we highly suspect, she hasn't been able to do that this time. On this one, right. Now, she's out on the streets, but she meets a man called Frederick Cotton. You can see what's going onerick cotton you can see yes you can see what's going to happen here he's a widowed minor again there's a pattern here where she's yeah maybe seeking these men out

he's from northumberland he has two sons who've been left behind he's got a frederick jr and a charles right okay so keep those in mind she moves in with them so with yeah frederick frederick jr and charles yeah and she's soon pregnant again with this frederick cotton's child don't forget she is still married to the previous husband james legally so they can't get married but they do bigamously they go to a different parish somewhere else in the northeast and in 1870 they get married and their son Robert is born

so they're now a household so there's Frederick Cotton yes her bigamist husband number four husband number four Mary yep

there's Frederick Junior and Charles who are his children and now there's a Robert who's been born they're both of their child what do you think happens next oh the kids are going to start dying the i'm going to say this order his two first and then the baby okay so it's him first it's frederick cotton first she gets him out of the way so he starts to get this gastric fever which i think is a vict Victorian catch-all term for... We don't know what's going on.

Like, unsettling ugliness and then death. Pretty grim way to go. Yeah, no, I make light of it, but it's not. It's really grim. But she's already taken a policy out on him and his two sons. So the sons, obviously, Frederick Jr. and Charles have the policies on them now, so they're in real danger. And they are now in a household with her, the baby Robert,

and they're just left their father's side. If this was a movie, James is coming back to save everyone. Well... He doesn't, does he? Your face dropped. I don't think he does. No, okay. Okay, so one thing that she does at this point,

obviously the man of the household is missing, so she takes on a lodger, a man, to come and live with them. Right. Maybe for protection, for some extra income, she's renting out the rooms. the household is missing so she takes on a lodger a man to come and live with them right maybe for protection for some extra income she's renting out the rooms he is gonna start to get ill as well there's some debate in the press that will follow this story once people start to realize the chaos that's followed her around her life there's some debate that she was in a sexual relationship with him. How much of that is stereotyping by outside Victorian society

and how much of that is true? I think in Mary Cotton's case, we look at her pattern, which is forming relationships with men and their children and then killing them. I wouldn't be surprised if she was, but again, this is speculation. Of course, that evidence is not there in the historical record so we don't know we don't know so we've got frederick jr we've got charles we've got baby robert now frederick jr and robert they're goners gastric fever right so we've only got little charles left so this is frederick crotton's

son from a previous marriage whom she is now responsible for. She's got the lodger who's giving her the income, but the son Charles, he's not serving any purpose as far as Mary's concerned. So time is ticking for him. I'm going to tell you what happens next. Okay, good. Yeah, yeah.

Mary's downfall would come when a parish official, Thomas Riley, employed her as a nurse for a woman nearby suffering from smallpox. During the long hours she spent with Riley beside the bedside of the patient, Mary complained about her responsibilities to young Charles Cotton, the surviving son of her husband Frederick. She even asked Riley if he would be able to take the boy and place him in a local workhouse for her. Riley, taken aback by Mary's apparent lack of motherly care of the child, became suspicious. When, not long after she made this request of him, Charles died. Riley decided to go to the police. It all seemed just too convenient, and there was something in Mary's detached manner that unsettled him. But if Mary was guilty of

killing Charles, as Riley suspected, she would not be so easily caught. An inquest into the death returned a verdict of natural causes. Mary herself gave evidence and even claimed that Riley's accusations of foul play were, in fact, the result of his humiliation after she rejected his advances. Two narratives were now at play. On the one hand, there was the respectable parish man, a do-gooder who had stumbled upon a malicious murderess. On the other, there was Mary, the innocent widow struck down by endless tragedy and beset by men who wanted her for themselves. But what was the truth? Soon rumour turned to journalistic investigation, as local newspapermen began to take up the story and dig into Mary's past.

There they found three dead husbands, a dead mother, lovers, and potentially up to 11 deceased children, all consumed by some mysterious stomach complaint. Something, they concluded, was not right. The doctor who had been called for the inquest over young Charles Cotton's death was asked to look again at the case. The boy's body was exhumed and traces of arsenic were discovered within it. Attempts were also made to recover the buried body of Charles's father, Frederick Cotton, but the time elapsed since death and the crowding of the graveyard made it impossible to find.

Mary's arrest came quickly. Though the charge would be for the murder of Charles only, there was no way of proving the others. At the trial, Mary appeared before the jury, heavily pregnant with her thirteenth child, the result, according to the press, of her illicit intercourse with one or more of her reported lovers. And yet, despite this, public opinion was not entirely against her. Calls were made for contributions to a defence fund, and, in some quarters, the story of a hard-done-by-mother reduced and alone in the world garnered great sympathy. a hard done by mother reduced and alone in the world,

garnered great sympathy. But this would not be enough to save her. After just 90 minutes of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of guilty. On the 24th of March, 1873, after the safe delivery of her baby, Mary Ann Cotton was hanged at Durham County Jail. So we have arsenic.

We have arsenic and we have her going down for the murder of poor little Charles Cotton. The only murder that she has proven. I presume she never admits to it. No, so she absolutely maintains her innocence as far as I'm aware until the last moment the arsenic is very interesting we think of arsenic as a very characteristically victorian it's a classic murder weapon and a woman female yeah a woman's weapon absolutely something that presumably she would have come into contact with during her time at the sunderland infirmary as a

nurse and something that people could buy fairly openly. And not that expensively either. It was a household product. What I think is so interesting is at the inquest, there's this debate about whether Charles has ingested arsenic because Mary's given it to him or has he ingested it through something else in the household? And what we have to remember is, serial killing stepmothers aside,

there are all kinds of dangers in the Victorian home. There are these hidden dangers, hidden killers. Cleaning products. Cleaning products. Supposedly medicinal things. And there's arsenic in the paint on the walls and wallpaper in particular. And if Charles was going around

licking that paint off the walls... Well, this was apparently a bit of a killer of Victorian children. That, you know, they're down at that level, they would come into contact with paint on the skirting boards, on the walls, and it could do them serious harm. And the defence actually used that

as an argument in this case. And they do say you know there's no way to prove that charles wasn't licking the wallpaper or the paint or whatever it was but ultimately she does go down for it it's fascinating to me that there is this huge split in opinion it seems today and you know we've entered this story knowing that she's called the first female serial killer in Britain. But it's highly suspicious at best that she's followed by this trail of bodies and bodies of people who are dying from the same kind of stomach complaint. Until you were reading that last part, I was like, well, of course she did this. Like, of course, this is what we've set up.

We know she's a serial killer. But then when you said that there was a split in, I'm surprised that there was a split in opinion because actually women get hounded in the media at this time. You could argue the same exists today. But they are absolutely vilified. So the fact that there was even an opposite side is really surprising to me. I think it comes back to that idea of charity

that we were talking about, of redeeming women who have fallen who have committed crimes who have committed faux pas in terms of social or moral rules can i check something there so that the sympathy they didn't necessarily think she was innocent they just thought it's a mixture okay and i think i i wonder and again we're speculating because so much of this case now is speculation. I wonder if a lot of the people who are raising money for her defense fund, who feel sympathy towards her. I wonder how many of those actually think she hasn't done it. Yeah.

It's interesting to know. I wonder if a lot of those people, their motive is to try and save her, to rehabilitate her into the world. But as you say, she is also vilified in the press. At the opposite end of the extreme, she is shown to be something less than human and as being possessed by a real evil. And we see that in the way that she's portrayed in the press. So there's an image that I've included for you

that we can maybe get up on the screen and talk about. But to me, this is the absolute epitome of the Victorian treatment of women who maybe rightly in this case, you know, maybe she did commit all of these murders, that they are made to be physically ugly as a parallel to their moral ugliness. And I think that's what we see

with the portrayal of Marianne Cotton. Yeah, so the picture Maddy is talking about shows Marianne in an oval or circular shape and she's looking directly at us. This is a drawing, not a picture. She's got very severe features, good old high, strong cheekbones. Her eyebrows are really arched,

Disney villain arched. She looks like a Disney witch, doesn't she? She also looks quite serpentine. There's something quite snake-like about some of the features, like her nose and mouth, that direct stare, very resolute in what she's doing. And then the other images around her are a depiction of a policeman and other locations that she would have been associated with

during the crime. Yes, so we get the domestic space in which she's killed little Charles, allegedly. So again, like this idea that she has corrupted the domestic sphere that's meant to be all about safety and comfort. And then we've got the depiction of the policeman who, I'm assuming he's the policeman who arrests her or who proves the case in some way.

And he's shown as being particularly handsome and heroic and she is the opposite of that and she meets our gaze with a kind of almost an arrogance she's depicted as quite smug and there's a directness about her that is probably quite unbecoming for a Victorian audience fascinating Fascinating. Do you think that she murdered all the other people? That was going to be my thing. Gosh, when I started, I was dead sure. But now I do. I think on the balance of probability,

she's had a hand in some of these murders. It's the insurance money for me. The fact that she claims them so frequently and that she's persuading husbands to take out those policies before they start to get ill that's interesting to me yeah i have a feeling there might be some people like her mother for instance who maybe she didn't kill she's just become part of the can yeah yeah just because why why would she do that and actually her mother was quite useful to her and you spoke about

how she was killing people she didn't have a use for, really, or more useful that they could be is through the insurance money that she would get for them. And maybe she did get insurance money for her mother, too. But I think she did. And then you have to kind of come face to face with this kind of quasi monstrous depiction being somewhat realistic in that. Yes, it's Arch. Yes, it's very negative in this portrayal of her but if she was a horrible person she was a horrible person you know what i mean her womanhood doesn't negate the actions in that sense and actually as you've been saying it heightens it almost it makes

it all like she is not fulfilling that domestic goddess that domestic angel role that she should be doing and not only she's not fulfilling that, she's destroying it, actively destroying it. And if you destroy that, you destroy the nation, you destroy the nation, the world. It's all that microcosmic thing. It's bringing everything down around her. I think that's a perfect place to end.

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