Mary Ann Cotton was hanged at Durham County Gaol on March 24, 1873, for the murder of her stepson, Charles Edward Cotton. The boy died at West Auckland, in County Durham, in the summer of 1872. A doctor who had examined him found arsenic, and a jury at the Durham Assizes found her guilty after 50 minutes. It was the only killing for which she was ever tried.
Her case has never been only about Charles. By the time of her arrest she had been married four times, the fourth time while her third husband was still alive, and had moved from one pit village and shipbuilding town to another across the North East of England. Husbands, children, stepchildren, her own mother, a sister-in-law and a lover had died around her, many of them insured. After her arrest the police had three more West Auckland bodies exhumed, and she was charged with those deaths too, but the Crown proceeded on Charles's case alone. Beamish, the open-air museum of the North East, says she may have had as many as 21 victims, including three of her four husbands and 11 of her 13 children. Almost all of that rests on suspicion, inquest records and later research, not on a court's finding.
The House of Commons record of March 4, 1873, shows that the conduct of the prosecution was raised in Parliament. Two reports by W. T. Stead's Northern Echo, of Darlington, published on March 24 and 25, 1873, describe her last days and her execution. The Durham Chronicle of March 8, 1873, preserved by Durham University Library, reports the verdict and sentence. The University of Leeds holds the notebook in which Thomas Scattergood, the Leeds analyst, recorded his tests in the case. For her life before 1872 the main accounts are a background note published by Durham University Library and Encyclopaedia Britannica, which sometimes differ from one another and from later accounts.
Mary Ann Robson was born in 1832 at Low Moorsley, in County Durham, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica, which gives her birth date as October 31, 1832, while marking the day as uncertain. Durham University Library's background note says she was born at Murton, a colliery village in the same part of the county. Her father was a pitman. The Durham University note says he was killed when she was 14. At 16 she became an apprentice dressmaker.
Little else about her childhood has been reliably reported. The Northern Echo, writing on the day of her execution, said she had once been a churchgoer trusted in her community and, if report could be believed, a Sunday school teacher. The paper quoted a line from one of her letters from the condemned cell in which she said she had once trusted in God and had been happier then than anyone on earth.
At 20, according to Durham University Library, she married William Mowbray and left home. The library describes him as a timekeeper. The couple went south, to Devon in the library's account, and had five children there. When they came back to County Durham five years later, four of those children had died. The family moved about before settling in Sunderland. Three more children were born there, and all three died. William Mowbray died too. Mary Ann collected 35 pounds in insurance, the library says.
The library's note differs from other accounts on where the Mowbrays lived in the south (many later writers say Cornwall) and on the number of children. Birth and death records for the children of the southern years have not been reported, and the reports do not say how any of them died.
After Mowbray's death she worked as a nurse at the Sunderland Infirmary. There she met a patient, an engineer named George Ward, and married him. Ward died 14 months after the wedding, according to Durham University Library. The reports do not give his cause of death.
About a month after Ward's death she became housekeeper to James Robinson, a widowed shipyard foreman in Sunderland with young children. A week after she started, Robinson's ten-month-old son died. The cause was recorded as gastric fever, the library says, though the child had suffered convulsions.
Early in 1867 two more of Robinson's children died, and so did the last surviving child of Mary Ann's first marriage. So did her own mother. Mary Ann and James Robinson married. They had two children, and one of them died before its first birthday.
The marriage was unhappy. She ran up debts and argued with her husband, and at one point she suggested that he take out insurance on his own life. He refused, and she left, in the library's account. Robinson outlived her. The Northern Echo called him her third husband in its report of the execution, and said that in her last weeks she had written to him three times, asking him to visit and to organize a petition to save her life. He did not come.
In 1870 Margaret Cotton introduced Mary Ann to her brother Frederick, a widower whose wife had died of consumption and who had lost two sons to typhus, according to Durham University Library. Margaret Cotton died soon afterward of severe stomach pains.
In September 1870, while pregnant, Mary Ann married Frederick Cotton. The marriage was bigamous, because she was still legally married to James Robinson. A week after the wedding, the library says, she insured Frederick and his two surviving sons. Her son by Frederick was Robert Robson Cotton.
The family moved to West Auckland, in County Durham. Beamish says she was living there by 1871 and is believed to have been a regular at the Sun Inn on Bondgate in Bishop Auckland. A little over a year after the wedding, Frederick Cotton fell ill and died.
After Frederick's death, Joseph Nattrass, described in the Durham University note as her lover, moved into the house. Mary Ann also took work nursing an excise officer who had smallpox. She began a relationship with him and became pregnant. Within weeks, the library says, her stepson Frederick Cotton junior, her son Robert Robson Cotton and Joseph Nattrass had all died. The excise officer would not marry her. She took in lodgers and extra work to get by. One of her lodgers at the time of her arrest was a Mr. Lowrey, according to Beamish, whose archive holds a copy of a letter she later wrote to him from Durham.
That left Charles Edward Cotton, Frederick's last surviving son, then seven years old.
In the summer of 1872 Thomas Riley, the assistant overseer at West Auckland, asked Mary Ann Cotton to nurse another smallpox patient. She said she could not, because she had her stepson Charles to look after. She asked whether the boy could be taken into the workhouse without her. Riley told her he could not. She then made a remark suggesting that she would not be troubled with Charles for long, according to Durham University Library.
Charles died about a week later. Riley was alarmed enough by the timing and by what she had said that he went to the police.
The first inquest into Charles's death returned a verdict of natural causes. The doctor who had carried out the post-mortem examination did not leave the matter there. He ran further tests on the stomach and other organs, and they showed arsenic. Mary Ann Cotton was arrested in July 1872. Beamish says she was held at the police station on Bondgate in Bishop Auckland, and that her committal hearings took place in the Bondgate court before she was sent for trial at the Durham Spring Assizes.
The arrest led the authorities back to the earlier deaths in the house. The remains of Joseph Nattrass, Frederick Cotton junior and Robert Robson Cotton were exhumed. Durham University Library says arsenic was found in all of them.
The chemical work was done in Leeds by Thomas Scattergood, a Leeds analyst whose casebook is now held by the University of Leeds as part of its Special Collections. His Medical Case Histories, Volume 1, catalogued as MS 534/1, records the West Auckland arsenic poisoning cases on pages 179 to 206, in entries dated from July 26 to October 16, 1872. The cases recorded there are those of Charles Edward Cotton, Joseph Nattrass, Robert Robson Cotton and Frederick Cotton junior. A cutting from the British Medical Journal of December 14, 1872, by R. T. Manson, about the bodies of two children exhumed at St. Helen's Auckland, is kept with the volume. The catalogue description does not give the results of Scattergood's tests; the finding that arsenic was present in the exhumed remains comes from Durham University Library's summary.
Mary Ann Cotton was charged with four murders: those of Charles Edward Cotton, Joseph Nattrass, Frederick Cotton junior and Robert Robson Cotton. She denied them. She was tried only for Charles's death.
Joanne Pearman, reviewing the criminologist David Wilson's book on the case in the University of Kent law journal feminists@law, noted that Wilson calls arsenic the poison of choice of the period and that its symptoms could be mistaken for gastric fever, cholera or typhoid. That matters to the case, because several of the earlier deaths linked to Mary Ann Cotton were certified at the time as natural illness. Wilson, as summarized by Pearman, sees her motives as a mix of money from insurance policies taken out on the lives of those who died and the removal of people who stood in her way.
While she waited for trial in Durham she was pregnant by the excise officer. She gave birth to a daughter in the gaol in January 1873, according to Durham University Library. Beamish says the child was adopted before the sentence was carried out, and Pearman's review notes that the baby was taken from her before her execution. The birth did not prevent the trial from going ahead or the sentence from being carried out.
Beamish holds photocopies of letters that appear to have been written by her on County Gaol, Durham, notepaper while she awaited trial. The museum says the copies were sent to it anonymously and that the originals were reportedly sold by a North Yorkshire auction house to a dealer in 2013. One letter, to her former lodger Mr. Lowrey, asks for money for clothes for the child to go out in.
The prosecution itself caused a dispute among lawyers before the trial began. On March 4, 1873, William Wheelhouse asked the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, in the House of Commons whether he had seen a resolution of the Northern Circuit about the way the prosecution of the Queen against Cotton was being conducted at the Durham Assizes. Wheelhouse also asked whether steps would be taken to restore the Attorney General and Solicitor General of the County Palatine of Durham to what he called their rightful place, as officers appointed by the Crown, in that prosecution.
Gladstone said he had received notice of the questions at about two o'clock that day and could not see what the matter had to do with him. As he understood it, the point was one of legal practice: whether a certain person had the right to lead for the prosecution in a certain case, and whether the Attorney General could set that right aside and make the arrangement himself. He would not interfere between the Attorney General and another law officer, he said, unless some official duty required it, and the question should have been put to the Attorney General. Wheelhouse replied that he thought the head of the Government ought to have stepped in between the two attorneys general. The Hansard record does not name the barristers concerned.
The trial was held at the Durham Assizes in March 1873 before a judge whom the GENUKI list of Durham executions names as Justice Archibold. The charge was the murder of Charles Edward Cotton. Her counsel, the judge later said, had urged everything that could be urged in her defense.
The Durham Chronicle's report of the close of the trial survives in the collections of Durham University Library, and it records what happened when the jury came back. They had been out for 50 minutes. The foreman told the court that they were agreed and that they found Mary Ann Cotton guilty of murder.
Asked whether she had anything to say before sentence was passed, she said she was not guilty.
The judge put on the black cap, and silence was called. He told her that she had been found guilty after a patient and careful trial, and that she had had the help of counsel who had said everything that could be said for her. She had poisoned her stepson, a child she ought to have cared for. He suggested that she had shared a delusion common among weak-minded people, the belief that such crimes could be committed without being found out. Poisoning, he said, was one of the most deadly and detestable of crimes, and it left traces that led to punishment. The sentence was meant as a warning to others. He told her that he could hold out no hope, and he urged her to seek the only mercy left to her, mercy from above.
She appeared overcome. She sank back into her chair and seemed unable to move, and the warders lifted her and led her from the dock. The court rose at five o'clock.
Durham University Library's background note gives March 8, 1873, as the date she was found guilty; that is also the date of the Durham Chronicle issue in which the verdict was reported. The exact day is not otherwise confirmed.
The Northern Echo's account of her final weeks, published the day after her execution, described a woman sometimes deeply depressed. She wrote to friends urging them to seek a reprieve. She valued the visits of the prison chaplain, the Reverend J. C. Low, and of a Wesleyan minister, the Reverend W. Stevinson, whom she had asked to see. In the week before the execution, Stevinson came twice a day and lent her his own Wesleyan hymn book. The paper described her manner as stolid and said she resented some of the witnesses who had spoken against her.
Early in that last week, the Echo reported, a piece of soap went missing from her cell and was found up her sleeve when she was searched. The paper repeated a rumor about what she had meant to do with it, but said the rumor could not be confirmed.
On the Sunday before her execution, prayers were offered in Durham Cathedral for a person at the point of death, and the Echo said the preacher, the Bishop of Dover, made plain whom he meant. Three female warders stayed with her day and night, and she prayed with them. Until the Sunday evening, the paper said, she continued to insist that she was innocent of the murder of Charles Edward Cotton.
The Northern Echo's editorial of March 24, 1873, written as she waited to die, described her letters from the condemned cell as badly written, desperate pleas to be allowed to live, and said that at first she had refused to believe that the sentence would be carried out.
She went to bed at half past ten on the Sunday night, slept for about three hours, got up at half past three and took only a cup of tea at half past five, according to the Northern Echo. Three ministers, named by the paper as Mountford, Stevenson and Bennett, were with her from about six o'clock.
A little after six, the Echo reported, the Reverend Mr. Mountford urged on her the importance of making a full confession. She told him, he said, that she had been the poisoner of the child, but not intentionally. When she was pressed for more, she would say nothing further. Mountford told the paper that she wept bitterly about her baby, that she was upset that Robinson had refused to visit her after three letters, and that by the end she was quite resigned.
More than 20 reporters had gathered at the gaol by half past seven. The scaffold stood on the same site that had been used for the execution of the Spennymoor murderers, beside the ground used for shot drill, and the pit beneath the drop had been left as it was since January 13. The GENUKI list records the execution at Durham on January 13, 1873, of Hugh Slane and John Hayes for the murder of Joseph Wain at Spennymoor, with the same executioner, William Calcraft.
Calcraft was hostile to the press, the Echo reported, and ordered the door shut to keep the reporters out. Admission was strictly limited, and the pinioning was carried out in private. A chair had been made ready in case she fainted. She submitted without resistance.
The prison bell began to toll at ten minutes to eight. The under-sheriff, J. R. Bowser, led the procession. Mary Ann Cotton walked between two male warders, with Calcraft, his assistant and two female warders behind. As she left her cell, the Echo reported, she said, "Heaven is my home."
At the drop Calcraft put a white cap over her face and adjusted the rope, and her legs were strapped. She said, "Lord, have mercy on my soul," and the bolt was drawn on the hour. The body fell about three feet. The paper reported that her head dropped to one side, and it described the heaving of the chest and twitching of the hands that followed as the involuntary action of the muscles. The under-sheriff fainted.
A black flag was raised over the gaol, and a large crowd watched it from outside the gates. After the usual interval the body was cut down. An inquest was held, and she was buried within the gaol. The Echo did not report the inquest's finding.
That afternoon Calcraft and his assistant left Durham by train for the south. Sightseers gathered at Durham station, and at Darlington, where the train was due at five past three, a crowd rushed his carriage. He pulled down the blinds.
The Northern Echo's editorial on the day of the execution reflected the view of the case taken in the North East at the time. It said she had poisoned husbands and children with arsenic and turned them into insurance money, and that society could give only one answer to her pleas. It also recalled that a Parliament under King Henry had once made poisoning a form of high treason punishable by boiling, and called hanging merciful by comparison. The editorial did not give a number of victims.
David Wilson, as summarized in Pearman's review, argues that the case was not a cause célèbre in its own time, that Victorian journalists struggled to make sense of a woman who killed in this way, and that her story later turned into melodrama. Her memory has stayed strongest in the region where she lived. Durham University Library notes that she is still widely known in the North East, partly through a children's skipping rhyme.
Several objects linked to her are in the collection at Beamish. A small black Wedgwood teapot was given to the museum in 1972. Its origin was unknown at the time, but a 1989 letter from the donor's daughter traced it to West Auckland: an elderly local woman gave it to the wife of a West Auckland doctor, and it came down through that family. Beamish repeats the local belief that she used a small teapot kept for the purpose. A three-legged wooden stool, given in the early 1970s, is said to have belonged to her while she waited for trial and execution in Durham gaol. The museum's archive also holds the photocopied letters.
Thomas Scattergood's casebook is held in Leeds with the rest of his medico-legal notes, and its pages on the West Auckland cases have been digitized by the University of Leeds Digital Library.
Several books have been written about the case. Pearman's review discusses two: Simon Webb and Miranda Brown's Mary Ann Cotton, Victorian Serial Killer (Langley Press, 2012) and David Wilson's Mary Ann Cotton: Britain's First Female Serial Killer. Pearman's review says Wilson drew on contemporary newspaper reports, official papers at The National Archives and Scattergood's papers at Leeds, which in her reading gave more certainty to the guilty verdict. The ITV drama Dark Angel told her story on television, according to Beamish.
Proven by a court: the murder of Charles Edward Cotton, by arsenic, at West Auckland in 1872. That is the only verdict.
Charged but never tried: the deaths of Joseph Nattrass, Frederick Cotton junior and Robert Robson Cotton. Their remains were exhumed and examined by Thomas Scattergood, and Durham University Library's summary says arsenic was found in each. No jury ever heard those cases.
Suspected, never charged: the deaths of her husbands William Mowbray, George Ward and Frederick Cotton senior; her mother; Margaret Cotton; the children of her marriages to Mowbray and Robinson; and James Robinson's children who died while she kept house for him. These deaths were certified as natural at the time, several as gastric fever, and no inquest finding of poisoning in any of them has been reported.
The numbers vary. Beamish gives as many as 21 victims, including three of her four husbands and 11 of her 13 children. Durham University Library says 21 people close to her died, many probably from arsenic. Pearman's review says the total is unknown, with 21 as the highest suggested figure. The number of children born in the south during the Mowbray marriage, and where the family lived there, differ between Durham University Library (Devon, five children) and other accounts.
Her own last statement, as reported by the Reverend Mr. Mountford, was that she had poisoned the child, but not intentionally. She had denied the charge until the night before.
1832: Mary Ann Robson is born in County Durham (Low Moorsley, according to Britannica, which gives October 31 with the day marked as uncertain).
About age 20: marries William Mowbray; the couple move to the south of England.
About five years later: the Mowbrays return to County Durham; four children have died.
Sunderland years: three more Mowbray children die; William Mowbray dies; she collects 35 pounds in insurance.
Next: works as a nurse at the Sunderland Infirmary; marries George Ward, a patient; he dies 14 months after the wedding.
About a month after Ward's death: becomes housekeeper to James Robinson; his infant son dies a week later.
Early 1867: two more Robinson children, her last child by Mowbray, and her mother die.
Afterward: marries James Robinson; one of their two children dies in infancy; the marriage breaks down.
1870: introduced to Frederick Cotton by his sister Margaret, who dies soon after.
September 1870: marries Frederick Cotton bigamously; insures him and his two sons a week later.
1871: living at West Auckland; Frederick Cotton dies a little over a year after the wedding.
1872: Frederick Cotton junior, Robert Robson Cotton and Joseph Nattrass die within weeks of one another.
Summer 1872: Thomas Riley asks her to nurse a smallpox patient; Charles Edward Cotton dies about a week later; Riley goes to the police.
July 1872: first inquest returns natural causes; further tests show arsenic; she is arrested.
July 26 to October 16, 1872: Thomas Scattergood's recorded tests on Charles Edward Cotton, Joseph Nattrass, Robert Robson Cotton and Frederick Cotton junior.
December 14, 1872: British Medical Journal article by R. T. Manson on two children exhumed at St. Helen's Auckland.
January 1873: gives birth to a daughter in Durham gaol.
January 13, 1873: Hugh Slane and John Hayes are hanged at Durham for the Spennymoor murder.
March 4, 1873: the conduct of the prosecution is raised in the House of Commons.
March 1873: tried at the Durham Assizes for the murder of Charles Edward Cotton; the jury returns a guilty verdict after 50 minutes; sentenced to death (the Durham Chronicle report is dated March 8).
March 24, 1873: hanged at Durham County Gaol by William Calcraft; buried within the gaol.