In March 1873 a jury at the Durham Assizes retired to consider the case of Mary Ann Cotton, a former nurse from the Durham coalfield, charged with poisoning her seven-year-old stepson, Charles Edward Cotton, with arsenic at West Auckland the summer before. The jurors were out for 50 minutes. When they came back, the Durham Chronicle reported on March 8, their foreman told the court they were agreed: guilty of murder. The judge put on the black cap. On March 24, 1873, William Calcraft hanged her at Durham County Gaol.
Charles was the only death for which she ever stood trial. Yet the figure that follows her name is not one. It is 21, and it comes from no court. Behind it lies a familiar division of labor: prosecutors charge what they can prove, juries decide what they are asked, and everything else passes to the police file, the newspaper, the museum and, often enough, the defendant’s own boasting. Eleven cases, from Victorian Durham to Kenya in 2021, show how wide that gap can open.
By the time of her arrest in July 1872, Mary Ann Cotton had been married four times, the last time bigamously, and had moved from pit village to shipbuilding town across the North East of England. Husbands, children, stepchildren, her mother, a sister-in-law and a lover had died around her, many of them insured, according to Durham University Library. Several of those deaths had been certified at the time as natural illness, gastric fever among them.
The suspicion that finally reached the police began with a parish official. Thomas Riley, the assistant overseer at West Auckland, asked her to nurse a smallpox patient that summer; she said she could not, because of her stepson, and remarked that she would not be troubled with the boy for long. About a week later Charles was dead, and Riley went to the police. A first inquest returned natural causes. The doctor who had examined the child kept testing, and his tests showed arsenic.
She was charged with four murders: Charles, her lodger Joseph Nattrass, her stepson Frederick Cotton junior and her own son Robert Robson Cotton. She denied them all. The Crown went to trial on Charles alone. Before the trial began, the prosecution itself became a dispute among lawyers: on March 4, 1873, the member of Parliament William Wheelhouse asked Prime Minister Gladstone in the House of Commons whether the law officers of the County Palatine of Durham would be restored to their place in the prosecution of the Queen against Cotton. Gladstone declined to intervene.
The counts that went untried never came back. Beamish, the open-air museum of the North East, says she may have had as many as 21 victims, among them three of her four husbands and 11 of her 13 children. Durham University Library writes that 21 people close to her died. Joanne Pearman, reviewing the criminologist David Wilson’s study of the case in the law journal feminists@law, put it more carefully: the total is unknown, and 21 is the highest figure anyone has suggested.
In 1851, in the Breton city of Rennes, the law had drawn the same line in a different place. Hélène Jégado, a cook from Morbihan, was arrested on July 1, 1851, at the house of the law professor Théophile Bidard, on the day a third servant died in households where she had worked. Chemists reported arsenic. The investigating judge, Hippolyte Vannier, traced her back through some 18 years of service in presbyteries and private homes.
What he assembled was far larger than anything the prosecution could put to a jury. The Archives départementales d’Ille-et-Vilaine record the court’s own estimate: 37 people poisoned, 23 of whom died. But French law put crimes more than ten years old beyond prosecution. None of the deaths in Morbihan could be charged, although, in the curators' words, the facts were known and weighed against her.
The indictment that went to trial in December 1851 had 18 counts: three murders, those of the servants Pérotte Macé, Rose Tessier and Rosalie Sarrazin, four attempted murders, and 11 thefts. The prosecution called witnesses from Morbihan anyway, to speak to her character and her past. She denied every poisoning. Her lawyer, the republican Magloire Dorange, asked the jury for mitigating circumstances and called her a "phénomène." On December 14, 1851, the jury convicted her on all 18 counts and allowed no mitigation. The Cour de cassation rejected her appeal on January 16, 1852; Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte refused a pardon on February 22; she went to the guillotine at Rennes on the morning of February 26, 1852.
On the eve of her execution she was said to have confessed before witnesses. The archives note that historians doubt the text’s wording, which runs far beyond her education. One sentence from it has outlived the doubts: "La justice n’a pas connu tous mes forfaits." The courts had not known all her crimes. In October 2019 the Rennes court of appeal staged a reenactment of her trial, with working judges in the roles, and called her the greatest poisoner in France.
In the poor quarters of Leiden she was Goeie Mie, Good Mie, a washerwoman known for nursing the sick and helping her neighbors. Leiden University, in a 2015 account of her life, writes that she was born in the city in 1839 and that from about 1880 she took out burial insurance policies on other people’s lives, naming herself as beneficiary. The deaths came to light in Leiden in December 1883, when she was arrested. In May 1885, the university writes, she was sentenced at The Hague to life in a house of correction. She died in the house of correction at Gorkum in 1915.
The counts on which she was convicted have not been reported, and the totals attached to her have never agreed. The university’s 2015 account gives more than 100 neighbors poisoned and 27 dead. DutchNews.nl, writing in October 2019, gave 65 poisoned between 1864 and 1883 and at least 23 dead, the figure of the biographer Stefan Glasbergen, who said it rested on the police investigation and the trial, and that her own trial lawyer had used it in court. The same report said a 1936 biography had mistakenly put her victims at no fewer than 100, and that rumors at the time had inflated the count. Two months earlier the same outlet had noted that she appears in the Guinness Book of Records as the most prolific poisoner of all time.
In September 2022 Leiden University’s Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology tried a modernized version of her case before a public audience acting as judges. Most of them voted to acquit. The evidence, they decided, left too much room for doubt.
Margaret Waters went on trial at the Old Bailey from September 21 to 23, 1870, on five counts of wilful murder, with further counts of neglect and conspiracy, according to Capital Punishment UK’s history of the case. The inquiry had been led by a police sergeant, Richard Relf, who looked into the deaths of 18 infants connected with a newspaper notice placed by a woman calling herself Mrs. Oliver. The jury convicted her of one murder, that of John Walter Cowen, a baby born on May 14, 1870. A second woman tried with her was convicted only of obtaining money by false pretenses and given 18 months. Waters was hanged at Horsemonger Lane Gaol on October 11, 1870. Capital Punishment UK’s list of executions gives her age as 35.
Her name did its real work afterward. In March 1872, opening the second reading of a bill to license people who took in infants for payment, the member who had brought it in reminded the House of Commons that the public "were familiar with the case of Margaret Waters, the Brixton baby-farmer." Three months later, in a debate on the bastardy laws, he credited "Mr. Serjeant Relf" with bringing her to justice. The bill passed that year as the Infant Life Protection Act 1872.
The figure that later attached to her is larger still and no more tested. The law professor Kristin Kalsem, writing on The Victorian Web in 2024, states that Waters was suspected in the deaths of some forty other children. None of those deaths was tried against her.
In November 1988 the deaths of tenants at a boardinghouse in downtown Sacramento came to light, and its landlady, Dorothea Puente, was arrested in Los Angeles several days later. Prosecutors charged her with killing nine tenants to collect their Social Security and other government checks, United Press International reported.
Pretrial publicity in Sacramento was so heavy that the trial moved to Monterey County. Jury selection alone took three months. A jury of eight men and four women heard scores of witnesses over five months, examined some 3,100 exhibits, and deliberated for 24 days before convicting her of killing three of the tenants. On the other six murder charges it could not agree.
The penalty phase broke down the same way. After three days the jurors were split seven to five, most of them favoring life imprisonment, and in October 1993 Judge Michael Virga declared a mistrial. Prosecutors chose not to try the penalty again, which left one sentence available: life without the possibility of parole. Afterward the judge invited the jurors into his chambers for lemonade and cookies.
Puente was 64 when the trial ended. She died in custody in 2011, Capitol Weekly reported, with three convictions against her name and six charges that no jury had been able to decide.
Max Gufler sold washing machines and vacuum cleaners out of St. Pölten, in Lower Austria, and courted women as a polite, well-spoken suitor. He was arrested on November 2, 1958, on a warrant from the regional court at Klagenfurt. Within days he was being called a mass murderer in the Austrian parliament, where deputies questioned the justice minister about his custody in St. Pölten and named four of the women whose deaths were under investigation: Kammleitner, Robas, Nass and Meystrzik.
Under questioning he told each officer a different story, a former investigator recalled to the St. Pölten magazine MFG in 2025. He confessed and withdrew his confessions again and again, and the prosecution later called it a tactic. He was charged with the murders of seven women, and his jury trial began at the Vienna regional criminal court in April 1961. "I may well be a swindler, but I did not commit murder," he told the court, as MFG quoted him.
The jury held four murders and two attempted murders proved. The four, the Argentine newspaper La Capital reported in 2023, were Maria Robas, Juliana Nass, Josefine Kammleitner and Emilie Meystrzik. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with a day in a darkened cell on each anniversary of the killings. La Capital also reported that investigators suspected him of 18 killings, and named four more women whose deaths the authorities had also suspected him of; one of those deaths, in Tyrol in 1952, had been recorded at the time as natural. He died of stomach cancer in Stein prison, on the Danube near Krems, in 1966, still denying the murders.
Donald Leroy Evans was a 34-year-old drifter and Texas parole violator when a sheriff’s deputy in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, arrested him on August 5, 1991, for kidnapping a 10-year-old girl, Beatrice Louise Routh, from Gulfport, Mississippi. Beatrice was homeless, traveling with her mother, her brothers and sisters and another family who had come to the Gulf Coast looking for work. Evans confessed to killing her.
Within days his lawyer was telling reporters a far larger story: more than 60 killings, most of them women, in at least 20 states, between Evans’s discharge from the Marines in 1977 and his imprisonment in Texas in 1987. Time reported that police were skeptical from the start, and the FBI and local officials formed a task force to check the claims. Gulfport’s police chief, George Payne Jr., told Newsweek that they meant to avoid a repeat of the Henry Lee Lucas affair, in which unchecked confessions were later withdrawn.
The claims never reached a courtroom. By June 1993, the Associated Press reported, Evans was boasting of 72 killings, yet he had been charged in only two: the Gulfport case and a 1985 killing in Fort Lauderdale. He pleaded guilty in federal court to the kidnapping in August 1991 and was sentenced to life. In September 1993 a Harrison County jury, chosen in Adams County because of the coverage on the coast, convicted him of capital murder, with other charges, and sentenced him to death. The Supreme Court of Mississippi affirmed on September 11, 1997, noting his claim to have killed "in excess of sixty people."
He did not live to exhaust his appeals. Another death row inmate, Jimmie Mack, killed him at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, the Associated Press reported on January 5, 1999. The agency described him as a drifter who had falsely claimed to have killed dozens of people in 22 states.
Jake Bird, a transient laborer born in Louisiana in 1901, was arrested by two Tacoma patrol officers in the early hours of October 30, 1947. Bertha Kludt and her 17-year-old daughter, Beverly June Kludt, had been killed in Tacoma that night. Bird was charged with one count of first-degree murder, for the death of the mother, and a Pierce County jury convicted him on November 26, 1947. Judge Edward D. Hodge sentenced him to death on December 6.
On death row he began to talk. He told officials he could clear up at least 44 murders that he had committed or taken part in over two decades on the road, mostly of women, in states from Florida to South Dakota. On January 15, 1948, the day before his scheduled execution, Governor Monrad C. Wallgren granted a 60-day reprieve so that police could hear him out. Investigators from several states came to Walla Walla or checked their open files against what he said.
The historian Daryl C. McClary, writing for HistoryLink, reports that only 11 of the claims were substantiated, though Bird knew enough about others to be treated as a prime suspect, and police in several states used his statements to close unsolved cases. McClary does not name the 11, and none of the claimed killings was ever tried. The Washington Supreme Court denied Bird’s petition on November 30, 1948. He was hanged at the Washington State Penitentiary at Walla Walla at 12:20 a.m. on July 15, 1949, on the strength of his one conviction from Tacoma.
Stephen Wayne Anderson was a Utah prisoner at large in May 1980 when Elizabeth Lyman, 81, a retired piano teacher who lived alone, was shot during a burglary of her home in Bloomington, in San Bernardino County, California. Deputies arrested him at the house. A San Bernardino County jury convicted him in 1981 of first-degree murder and burglary and sentenced him to death.
Two days after his arrest he gave a Salt Lake County sheriff’s detective, Sergeant Jerry Thompson, confessions to two killings in Utah: that of Robert Blundell, a fellow inmate at the Utah State Prison, in 1977, and that of Timothy Glashien in Millcreek Canyon in February 1980. He also made what the California Supreme Court called vague statements about other killings in Las Vegas. Thompson testified that he doubted the Las Vegas account and that no officer he contacted gave it any credit.
The Utah killings followed Anderson through the courts without ever being charged. In February 1985 the California Supreme Court upheld the guilty verdict but set aside the special circumstance and the death sentence. At the penalty retrial in 1985 and 1986 the prosecution put both Utah killings before the new jury as unadjudicated crimes. Anderson testified that he had killed Blundell in self-defense and disputed the Glashien killing. The jury returned death again. The California Supreme Court affirmed in December 1990, the Ninth Circuit upheld the denial of federal relief in November 2000, and Anderson was executed at San Quentin in January 2002.
In June 2015, the Deseret News reported, Utah police announced that they had closed the Glashien case and named Anderson. Prosecutors said there would have been grounds to charge him had he lived. He had died convicted of one killing.
In the case of Charles Sobhraj, frontiers did the dividing. Sobhraj, a French citizen born in Saigon in 1944, was arrested in New Delhi in July 1976 after a group of French tourists was poisoned there. Al Jazeera, reporting his release in December 2022, wrote that he was suspected of murdering more than 20 backpackers and that his true number of victims is unknown. Police in Thailand linked him in the mid-1970s to the deaths of young travelers around Bangkok and Pattaya. In late 1985, Agence France-Presse has reported, India agreed to a Thai request to extradite him over two of those deaths. He was in an Indian prison when the time limit on the Thai case ran out, and no court ever ruled on any of the Thai deaths.
India held him until 1997 and then sent him to France, where he lived openly in Paris and gave paid interviews. In 2003 he traveled to Kathmandu, where an American traveler, Connie Jo Bronzich, and a Canadian, Laurent Carrière, had been killed in December 1975. He was arrested in a casino in September. On August 12, 2004, the Kathmandu District Court convicted him of Bronzich’s murder and sentenced him to life, which in Nepal means 20 years. In 2014 a Nepali court convicted him of Carrière’s murder. In 2010 the UN Human Rights Committee concluded that the Bronzich proceedings had violated his right to a fair trial; Nepal rejected the finding, and the conviction stood.
On December 21, 2022, Nepal’s Supreme Court ordered him freed, applying a rule that allows prisoners over 65 a remission of up to 75 percent of their sentence for good conduct. He walked out of prison on December 23, after 19 years, three months and seven days, The Kathmandu Post reported, and was flown out of the country that evening, barred from returning for ten years. In August 2023, in a Paris hotel, he told Al Jazeera: "I have never killed anybody in my life." Two convictions stand against him, in a country where, he has said, he never set foot before 2003.
The last case has no conviction at all. In July 2021 detectives arrested Masten Wanjala, 20, at Kitengela, in Kajiado County, over the deaths of two Nairobi schoolboys. On July 14 the Directorate of Criminal Investigations announced that he had confessed to killing at least 10 children over about five years, Kenyans.co.ke reported. The next day a Nairobi court allowed police to hold him for 30 days while they investigated.
The figure moved as the weeks went on. In October the Associated Press reported that police said he had confessed to killing 12 children in Nairobi, Machakos and Bungoma counties. Kenyans.co.ke reported that he faced 13 murder counts. The Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions said he was to be charged with the murders of three children while investigations into others continued, and the Nation reported that the detectives and the prosecutors had disagreed over the number.
His plea was set for Wednesday, October 13, 2021. That morning he was no longer in custody at Jogoo Road police station in Nairobi. Two days later, on October 15, a crowd killed him at Mukhweya village in Bungoma County, Citizen Digital reported. He had never entered a plea, never been charged with murder and never been tried. Relatives in Bungoma disowned him and refused to bury him at the family home, saying he should have faced a court so the children’s families could have justice.
The only criminal case his disappearance produced was against the three police officers on duty that night. On October 22, 2021, they were charged with aiding a remandee to escape lawful custody and with neglecting to prevent it. They denied both counts. Through their lawyer they told the court that the station had lost power that night.
Set side by side, the eleven cases share one feature. In every one, the largest figure attached to the name came from somewhere other than a verdict: a museum’s tally, a court’s estimate of crimes the law no longer allowed it to try, a biographer’s count, a law professor’s essay, a defense lawyer talking to reporters, a condemned man’s claims from death row, a police announcement. The smaller figures came from juries and judges, who were asked a narrower question and answered only that.
Mary Ann Cotton’s jury in 1873 was asked about one boy and returned one verdict in 50 minutes. Everything else that is said about her, the 21 included, rests on deaths that no jury was asked to decide.
• July 1, 1851: Hélène Jégado is arrested in Rennes.
• December 14, 1851: The Ille-et-Vilaine assizes convict Jégado on all 18 counts; she is sentenced to death.
• February 26, 1852: Jégado is guillotined at Rennes.
• September 21 to 23, 1870: Margaret Waters is tried at the Old Bailey and convicted of the murder of John Walter Cowen.
• October 11, 1870: Waters is hanged at Horsemonger Lane Gaol.
• July 1872: Mary Ann Cotton is arrested at West Auckland, County Durham.
• March 4, 1873: The conduct of the Cotton prosecution is raised in the House of Commons.
• March 1873: A Durham jury convicts Cotton of the murder of Charles Edward Cotton after 50 minutes.
• March 24, 1873: Cotton is hanged at Durham County Gaol.
• December 1883: Maria Catharina Swanenburg is arrested in Leiden.
• May 1885: Swanenburg is sentenced at The Hague to life in a house of correction.
• 1915: Swanenburg dies at Gorkum.
• October 30, 1947: Jake Bird is arrested in Tacoma.
• November 26, 1947: A Pierce County jury convicts Bird of the first-degree murder of Bertha Kludt.
• January 15, 1948: Governor Wallgren grants Bird a 60-day reprieve so that police can hear his claims.
• July 15, 1949: Bird is hanged at Walla Walla.
• November 2, 1958: Max Gufler is arrested on a warrant from Klagenfurt.
• April 1961: Gufler’s trial opens in Vienna; the jury holds four murders and two attempted murders proved.
• 1966: Gufler dies in Stein prison.
• July 1976: Charles Sobhraj is arrested in New Delhi.
• May 1980: Stephen Wayne Anderson is arrested in Bloomington, California, and confesses to two Utah killings.
• 1981: Anderson is convicted of the first-degree murder of Elizabeth Lyman and sentenced to death.
• February 1985: The California Supreme Court upholds Anderson’s conviction but sets aside the death sentence.
• 1986: A second jury, told of the Utah killings, returns death again.
• November 1988: The deaths of tenants at Dorothea Puente’s Sacramento boardinghouse come to light; she is arrested in Los Angeles.
• August 5, 1991: Donald Leroy Evans is arrested in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana.
• June 1993: The Associated Press reports that Evans boasts of 72 killings but has been charged in two.
• September 1993: A Harrison County jury convicts Evans of capital murder, with other charges, and sentences him to death.
• October 1993: A mistrial is declared in Puente’s penalty phase; prosecutors do not retry it, leaving life without parole.
• 1997: Sobhraj leaves Indian custody for France.
• September 11, 1997: The Supreme Court of Mississippi affirms Evans’s conviction and sentence.
• January 1999: Evans is killed at Parchman; the Associated Press reports it on January 5.
• January 2002: Anderson is executed at San Quentin.
• September 2003: Sobhraj is arrested in Kathmandu.
• August 12, 2004: The Kathmandu District Court convicts Sobhraj of the murder of Connie Jo Bronzich.
• 2011: Puente dies in custody.
• 2014: A Nepali court convicts Sobhraj of the murder of Laurent Carrière.
• June 2015: Utah police announce that the Glashien case is closed and name Anderson.
• July 14, 2021: Kenyan detectives announce that Masten Wanjala has confessed to killing at least 10 children.
• October 13, 2021: Wanjala is due to take a plea and is no longer in custody at Jogoo Road police station.
• October 15, 2021: Wanjala is killed by a crowd at Mukhweya, Bungoma County.
• October 22, 2021: Three police officers are charged over his escape from custody.
• December 23, 2022: Sobhraj is released from prison in Nepal and deported to France.