Thomas Higgins, a hod carrier, died on October 2, 1883 after two days of violent stomach pain. The doctor who had been called to him, a Dr. Whitford, put it down to dysentery brought on by cheap whiskey, prescribed opium and castor oil, and signed the certificate the same way. His brother did not believe a word of it.
Thomas had been strong and in good health, and Patrick Higgins did not go to the police first. He went round the insurance offices of Liverpool, one after another, asking whether anyone held a policy on his brother's life. He found five. Together they came to a hundred and eight pounds and nineteen shillings, something like eight thousand pounds today, and every one of them had been taken out by the women Thomas had been living with.
Then he went to the police, and they came to Ascot Street on the day of the funeral, with the coroner's officer, while the wake was still going on. Catherine Flannagan, hearing that there was to be a full post-mortem, got out of the house. Her sister Margaret did not, and was arrested standing there. Catherine moved from one lodging house to another for nearly a week before she was taken in Wavertree, and on October 16 both sisters were formally charged with his murder.
The post-mortem found arsenic in quantities that pointed to poisoning over several days. The analyst, Dr. Campbell Brown, found arsenic dust in a pocket Margaret wore at market and an arsenic solution, carrying some unusual adulterants, in a bottle from the house. Investigators first assumed rat poison, but its usual adulterants were missing, and two illiterate women would not easily have bought arsenic from a chemist. The answer was flypaper, sold in every shop: soaked in water it gave a solution matching the one in the bottle, adulterants and all. The same method turns up in a run of Liverpool and Lancashire cases of the period.
The instrument behind the whole business was duller than poison and considerably more useful: the burial society. These were working-class insurance arrangements that paid out a few pounds on a death to cover the cost of a funeral. Premiums ran to pennies. A policy could be taken out by somebody other than the person insured, and more than one society could be talked into writing one on the same life.
Four deaths were eventually laid at the sisters' door, and the money is the point of all of them.
John Flannagan was Catherine's own son. He was twenty-two when he died in December 1880, and his mother had been telling the neighbors for some time that he was unwell, so nobody was surprised when he went. She collected about seventy pounds from several societies, roughly five thousand pounds now; one account puts the payout at seventy-one pounds.
Mary Higgins was Thomas Higgins's daughter by his first marriage, eight or ten years old depending on the account. She died in November 1882, within weeks of her father remarrying. Her new stepmother had paid one shilling and sixpence in premiums and collected between twenty-one and twenty-two pounds.
Margaret Jennings was a lodger, the daughter of another lodger, Patrick Jennings, and somewhere between sixteen and nineteen. She died in January 1883. Catherine Flannagan, who had insured her, collected about seventy-nine pounds.
There is a fifth death in the background that nobody was ever charged over. Thomas Higgins's first wife died while the family was lodging at Catherine Flannagan's house in Skirving Street, and Margaret, herself recently widowed in circumstances later described as suspicious, married the widower in October 1882. Neither death is attributed here. But a household in which two spouses die in succession before the insured children start dying is part of the shape of this case. Other accounts describe both sisters as unmarried in 1880, which leaves the earlier widowhood unsettled.
The sisters moved as they went: 5 Skirving Street, then 105 Latimer Street, then 27 Ascot Street.
Catherine Flannagan was charged on October 16, 1883. She had been born in Ireland in 1829 and had come to Liverpool as part of the famine emigration; Margaret was born there too, in 1843. They were poor women in the poorest part of a rich port, and what they did for a living was take in lodgers.
On January 16, 1884, Detective Inspector Stephen Boyes oversaw exhumations at Ford Cemetery. He identified a coffin by the plate on its lid, had it carried into a shed, and waited for the doctors. Mary Higgins was identified on the spot from a description given by her uncle, Patrick Higgins again.
The police surgeon, Frederick Walter Lowndes, recorded what was in front of him. The grave clothes were intact but soiled. The child's face and body were discolored after more than a year in the ground, and her eyes and part of her nose had gone. Her organs were healthy apart from lung disease. And part of her bowel was stained yellow.
That yellow stain is what made him look further. The viscera gave what he called abundant evidence of arsenic. So did the other two bodies.
On February 7 a grand jury at Liverpool Assizes returned true bills against both sisters for the murders by arsenic of Thomas Higgins, Margaret Jennings and John Flannagan.
The trial opened at St George's Hall on February 14, 1884, before Mr. Justice Butt, with the Thomas Higgins case taken first. The public galleries were full and the local coverage was a sensation. On the evening of Saturday the 16th, after fifty minutes, the jury convicted both women. Margaret Higgins collapsed in the dock as sentence was passed.
The other charges were then dropped, and the reason had nothing to do with the strength of the evidence. Both women were already sentenced to death, so prosecuting the remaining murders could achieve nothing, and the practice of the day was not to proceed. Three deaths with arsenic in the body went without a verdict because the heaviest available punishment had already been imposed once.
They petitioned for commutation to life imprisonment and were refused. The Catholic chaplain of Kirkdale, Father Bonté, attended them, and a writer who has been through the trial papers records that they were said to be quite resigned.
Bartholomew Binns arrived on March 1 with an assistant, Samuel Heath, a double execution being allowed two men. On the morning of Monday, March 3, 1884 he put the white caps over their heads, adjusted the nooses and drew the bolt. Catherine Flannagan was fifty-five. Margaret Higgins was forty-one, or forty-five depending on the source.
Their wax effigies stood in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's for close to a century.
Two questions outlasted them both. The first is how many people actually died. Police inquiries continued after the execution and turned up other family members, friends and lodgers insured for small sums, and the figures that have circulated since run well past anything the evidence supports.
The second is whether the sisters were the whole of it. At her arrest Catherine gave her solicitor a list of six or seven other deaths that she said were burial society killings, and names to go with them: Margaret Evans and Bridget Begley as poisoners alongside her sister, Catherine Ryan as the woman who had obtained arsenic for one of them, and Margaret Potter, a Mrs. Fallon and a Bridget Stanton as the agents who had arranged the insurance. By her account Evans had started it, with the killing of an intellectually disabled teenager. Her story contradicted itself in places, and it came from a woman facing the rope.
Some of it held up in the paperwork. Several of the women she named appear again and again around suspicious deaths of the period; Stanton was linked to the policies on three of them. When an insurance supervisor called to see Thomas Higgins before issuing a policy on his life, a woman who was neither sister met him and presented a Thomas who, the supervisor realized once he saw the dead man, had been an impostor. At least four other women were investigated, and the courts concluded they were not poisoners themselves but were in some way party to what was going on. Nobody else was ever convicted of anything at all.