Britland was born in 1847 and lived at Ashton-under-Lyne, near Manchester. She worked in a cotton mill and sold insurance policies door to door, which is how she came to hold policies on her own family.
In March 1886 her nineteen-year-old daughter Elizabeth died, then in May her husband Thomas, forty-four. Both deaths were recorded as natural. The symptoms of strychnine and arsenic poisoning were readily taken for gastric illness and convulsive fits. She collected on the insurance. She then moved in with her neighbours, Thomas and Mary Dixon, and within days Mary Dixon was dead too.
That third death in the same street in three months was too much for the neighbourhood, and a doctor refused to certify it. Arsenic and strychnine were found, and Elizabeth and Thomas Britland were exhumed.
She was tried at Manchester and convicted. She was hanged at Strangeways prison on August 9, 1886 by James Berry, the first woman to be executed there; she had to be supported to the scaffold. Thomas Dixon was tried as an accomplice and acquitted.
The motive established at trial was that she wanted Thomas Dixon and killed her own family and his wife to have him. The poison used, Harrison's Vermin Killer, was sold openly in shops.