Loose Lips Sink Ships & Serial Killers
The relationship of Mary Ann and Nattrass didn’t last very long. He died in 1872 from gastric fever soon after amending his will in Mary Ann’s favor. By now, she had become pregnant with a child by an excise officer named Richard Quick Mann. Originally, it was believed she had become impregnated by a John Quick-Manning, but there are no records to suggest such a person even existed.
By the time Nattrass was dead, Mary Ann had poisoned Robert, her infant son with Cotton, and Frederick Jr., her stepson. Despite all the deaths, there was still no evidence against Mary Ann, and she was completely free from suspicion. That is until she grew overconfident and made a remarkable blunder. As Nattrass had very few possessions, she was once again in financial difficulty. She apparently complained to a parish official named Thomas Riley that her stepson, Charles Edward Cotton, was preventing her from marrying Quick Mann. She asked Riley if he could commit Cotton to a workhouse and when that suggestion was rebuffed, she said this to Riley: “I won’t be troubled long. He’ll go like all the rest of the Cottons.”
Within a few days, Charles Edward had died, and when Riley found out, he urged the doctor to avoid writing the death certificate until the cause of death was fully investigated. An examination of the body revealed arsenic in his stomach, and further exhumations on the bodies of two other Cotton children and Nattrass found traces of the poison. Mary Ann Cotton had finally been caught.
Trial & Execution
She was charged with the murder of Charles Edward Cotton, and her trial began in March 1873. Her attorney tried to argue that the boy’s death came as a result of accidental inhalation of arsenic from the wallpaper. However, the judge allowed the prosecutor to use evidence from the deaths of Nattrass and two of the Cotton children and ultimately, the overwhelming evidence sealed Mary Ann’s fate. She was found guilty and sentenced to die.
She was hanged at Durham County Gaol on March 24, 1873, but it was a bungled execution. The trap door wasn’t placed high enough to break her neck. She only fell two feet, so the executioner had to push down on her shoulders. After three minutes, she died of strangulation.
Mary Ann Cotton did not confess to a single murder, and while the number of victims is unknown, most sources believed she killed up to 21 people. She got away with it so long because arsenic was extremely hard to detect as symptoms were often confused with those associated with gastric ailments. She probably would have got away with it for longer had she not been so keen to murder Charles Edward or at least not been so open about her desire to see him die.
Although she is often said to be Britain’s first female serial killer, this is a false claim. Betty Eccles was suspected of multiple murders and was hanged in 1843. Sarah Chesham killed four people and was executed in 1851; both used arsenic. By the middle of the nineteenth century, there was almost an epidemic of poisoning so who knows how many murders were committed?