Mary Wilson was 68 when she was found guilty in 1958 of murdering two of her husbands, Oliver Leonard and Ernest Wilson, by poisoning them. The two men were 75 and 76 when she married them. Because the two killings were committed on different occasions, the Homicide Act 1957 required a sentence of death. She was the last woman in England and Wales to be sentenced to death, in the words of the criminologist Lizzie Seal, who has studied the Home Office files on the case.
She was not hanged. Her appeal failed, but the Home Secretary, R. A. Butler, reprieved her. He condemned the crime in strong terms, yet decided that mercy was the right course for a woman of her age, and he judged that executing her would be a shock to public opinion. Her sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The reprieve drew letters from across the country, for and against, and those letters, kept by the Home Office, became the basis of Seal's 2008 study of how ordinary people argued about the death penalty in the years before it was abolished.
Mary was born in 1890, according to Seal, and went into domestic service. In 1914 she married John Knowles, a chimney sweep. They had six children. Two of them died in childhood; the other four were grown by the time their mother stood trial.
The marriage did not hold together, though the household did. In 1945 she and Knowles were legally separated, yet they went on living in the same house. From the Second World War onward she also worked as a daily housekeeper for John Russell, a painter and decorator.
John Knowles died in August 1955. John Russell died in January 1956, at the age of 65.
On September 20, 1956, Mary married Oliver Leonard, who was 75. He died on October 3, 1956. She inherited some money from him. The amount is uncertain: Seal gives it as between £45 and £70, and adds that the exact figure appears to be unknown.
On October 28, 1957, Mary married Ernest Wilson, who was 76. He died on November 12, 1957. She was paid from his life insurance policies, and she also tried, without success, to withdraw £100 from his account with the Co-operative Society. Taken together, the money she received from her two last husbands came to roughly £1,500 to £2,000 in 2008 values, by Seal's estimate.
On November 29, 1957, the bodies of Oliver Leonard and Ernest Wilson were exhumed. The pathologist found traces of poison in both men. The prosecution case rested on that finding: that the two men had been poisoned, and that Mary had given them the poison.
The bodies of John Knowles and John Russell were exhumed as well. No poison was found in either of them. The pathologist nonetheless believed that their deaths had been caused by "some noxious substance," as Seal summarizes his report. Mary was never tried over either death, and the case against her went to trial on the two husbands alone.
The prosecution papers and the pathologist's summary are held by the National Archives at Kew.
Mary was charged with the murders of Oliver Leonard and Ernest Wilson. She did not give evidence at her trial, and in 1958 she was found guilty of both murders.
The verdicts carried a mandatory sentence of death because of a law that had come into force only the year before. Until 1957, every murder conviction in England and Wales carried the death sentence, although many of those sentenced were reprieved. The Homicide Act 1957 ended that rule for most murders but kept death as the penalty for a small group of "capital murders," among them murders committed with a gun or an explosion and murders done in the course of theft.
Section 6 of the Act added one more category: repeated murder. A person convicted of murder who had already been convicted of another murder committed on a different occasion in Great Britain faced the death penalty as before. The section also allowed two or more murder charges to be joined in one indictment and tried together, and it provided that when someone was convicted of two such murders at the same trial, the rule applied as though one conviction had come first. Mary Wilson was sentenced to death under this section, Seal writes, because she had committed murder on two separate occasions.
Seal points out that this category went beyond what the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment had proposed. The commission, which sat from 1949 to 1953, had been barred by its terms of reference from considering abolition, and its 1953 report recommended that murder should not always carry death.
Mary appealed on two grounds. The first was that the prosecution had not proved that the two men did not die of natural causes. The second was that the trial judge had commented improperly on her decision not to give evidence. The appeal court rejected both arguments, and the convictions stood.
With the appeal lost, the decision passed to the Home Secretary. R. A. Butler, known as Rab, recorded in the file that, grave as the crime was, a reprieve was the merciful course. Her age and her sex weighed with him, and he felt that hanging a woman of 68 would shock public opinion. He commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.
Newspapers at the time reported her age as 66, Seal writes, although she was 68. At least one letter writer referred to a planned execution date of June 4.
The case came three years after the hanging of Ruth Ellis in 1955, which had drawn petitions and a crowd outside the prison and had revived the argument over whether women should be executed at all. The hangings of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley earlier in the decade had already fed the abolitionist campaign. The last executions in England and Wales took place in August 1964.
Members of the public wrote to Butler about the case. The Home Office file holds about 68 letters asking for mercy, some of them from people writing again to thank him for the reprieve, about 21 letters complaining that she had been spared, and a petition with 31 signatures opposing the reprieve. Many were handwritten and some were anonymous or hard to read. Seal cautions that the writers were probably better educated than the population at large and cannot be taken as a sample of public opinion.
She found seven overlapping lines of argument in them, three for execution and four for mercy.
Those who wanted Mary hanged argued, first, from retribution: death was the fitting punishment, and her age, sex and poverty were no reason for mercy. Some described her in the language of feminine evil. One writer pointed out to Butler that the jury had made no recommendation to mercy. A second group argued from deterrence and national decline, warning that sparing her would encourage murder; one wrote that hanging should be brought back before more innocent people were killed, and some letters tied the theme to hostility toward immigration. A third group wrote as Conservatives. They treated capital punishment as part of their party's identity, attacked Butler's reputation as a liberal, and warned that the reprieve would cost the party votes, especially among women.
Those who supported the reprieve wrote, in the main, from Christian humanitarianism, asking for mercy and for God's mercy on her soul. Others argued that execution was barbaric and a relic of the past, and that hanging an old woman was out of place in a modern country. A third set of letters argued from fairness between the sexes and the classes: men, or richer defendants, would have fared better, and some writers compared her case with that of Ruth Ellis. Three women signed one letter saying they wanted no favorites on the grounds of sex or class. A few correspondents wrongly believed that capital punishment had already been abolished.
The last group, most of them women, wrote from sympathy. They identified with her loneliness, her lack of money and her old age, and with her as a mother and grandmother. One woman told Butler she had cried all weekend with relief when the reprieve was announced.
Seal concludes that the letters contained many of the arguments heard in later American debates about the death penalty, but nothing about the rights of victims and nothing about human rights. She found that the appeals to fairness most resembled modern abolitionist arguments about error and inequality, and that personal identification with the condemned woman was a strong force behind calls for leniency.
Four men in Mary Wilson's life died between August 1955 and November 1957. The courts dealt with two of them. For John Knowles and John Russell, the record holds only the exhumations: no poison was found, and the pathologist's opinion that a noxious substance had caused their deaths was never tested in court. She was not charged with either death, and nothing in the record shows that the authorities attributed them to her in any formal finding.
1890: Mary is born, according to Seal; she later goes into domestic service.
1914: she marries John Knowles, a chimney sweep; they have six children, two of whom die in childhood.
Second World War onward: she works as a daily housekeeper for John Russell, a painter and decorator.
1945: she and Knowles are legally separated but go on sharing a house.
August 1955: John Knowles dies.
January 1956: John Russell dies, aged 65.
September 20, 1956: she marries Oliver Leonard, 75.
October 3, 1956: Oliver Leonard dies.
October 28, 1957: she marries Ernest Wilson, 76.
November 12, 1957: Ernest Wilson dies.
November 29, 1957: the bodies of Oliver Leonard and Ernest Wilson are exhumed; poison is found. Knowles and Russell are also exhumed; none is found.
1958: she is convicted of both murders and sentenced to death under section 6 of the Homicide Act 1957; her appeal is dismissed.
1958: Home Secretary R. A. Butler reprieves her, and the sentence is commuted to life imprisonment; about 68 letters for mercy, 21 against the reprieve and a 31-signature petition reach the Home Office.
August 1964: the last executions in England and Wales.