Catherine Flannagan and her sister Margaret Higgins took out burial insurance on people in their Liverpool lodging house and poisoned them with arsenic. Flannagan was convicted of one death and hanged; several others were suspected.
She was born in 1829. In 1883 she and Higgins, forty-one, were living in Skirving Street, Liverpool, taking in lodgers and running insurance policies on them. Thomas Higgins, forty-five, Margaret's husband, died on October 2, 1883. His brother's suspicion prevented the burial and a post-mortem found arsenic, extracted from flypapers. The Liverpool press called the sisters the Black Widows of Liverpool.
Flannagan fled and was arrested on October 16, 1883. Three more bodies were exhumed, Flannagan's own son John, her lodger Margaret Jennings, and Higgins's stepdaughter Mary, and arsenic was found in each. Only the death of Thomas Higgins was tried. Both sisters were convicted and hanged at Kirkdale prison on March 3, 1884.