The Invention of Murder (56 page)

In May 1872 Mrs Cotton was living with Cotton’s remaining son, Charles Edward, and receiving 1s.6d. a week from the parish for his upkeep. The parish overseer asked her if she was planning to marry Quick-Manning, and later said she had replied, ‘It might be so. But the boy is in the way. Perhaps it won’t matter, as I won’t be troubled long. He’ll go like all the rest of the Cotton family.’ A week later Charles Edward was dead. The overseer reported the conversation to the police and the doctor. The doctor refused to give a death certificate, and the insurance company withheld the child’s burial money. At the inquest the next day, however, the finding was death by natural causes.

But the newspapers did not drop the story, and pushed the authorities into ordering an analysis of the viscera (the doctor had reported without a scientific analysis at the inquest, old-style). Traces of arsenic were found in Charles Edward, and on 18 July, six days after his death, Mary Ann Cotton was arrested. A neighbour reported that Mrs Cotton had asked her to buy arsenic, to kill bedbugs, and that she had helped clean the bedstead, in which, she gossiped, she had seen no bugs (she had seen bugs in the mattress, but that made a less good story). Now Nattrass was exhumed – he had signed a will in Mrs Cotton’s favour, leaving her £10 in savings, plus 15s. in sick pay, a watch and his clothes. Poison was found in his body. Two Cotton children were exhumed, and more arsenic was found. Frederick Cotton’s body could not be located: he and the children had probably been buried on the parish, and paupers’ graves were not marked. A dozen coffins had been uncovered before the ones with the children’s names painted on the lids were finally found, and it was decided to look no further for Cotton. Likewise, the authorities decided that they would not investigate the earlier Mowbray, Ward and Robinson deaths.

Mrs Cotton was seven months pregnant with Quick-Manning’s child, and the trial was accordingly postponed. In February 1873, the murders of Nattrass and two Cotton children were added to the charges. In March, at the Durham Assizes, Mary Ann Cotton came to trial. To say that the defendant had legal representation would be a gross overstatement. G.F. Smith, a solicitor’s clerk from Bishop Auckland, had offered to act for her, but what he seems to have been particularly adept at was collecting money for the goods Mrs Cotton arranged to sell in order to pay his fees. She wrote to a neighbour, ‘Smith had lead me rong. He told me not to speake A single Worde [at the committal hearings before the magistrates] if i Was Asked Ever so hard or Ever so mutch … [But] He has never brote forth Won Witness fore me. I do not Want nothing but the trouth of Every Won then ie Would have A Chance fore my Life. if it had not been for smith ie should make 5 or 6 of them stand With thar toungs tyde.’
*

When the court received a letter from a local man offering to pay for a barrister, Smith said he had already briefed counsel, although none ever appeared. At the end of February the
Northern Echo
announced that a fund to pay for Mrs Cotton’s defence had been established. Two days before the trial opened, when no one had come forward, the judge appointed a barrister, who had only minimal time to discuss the matter with his client, and no time or money at his disposal to gather witnesses. (How little Mrs Cotton understood of what was going on can be seen by a letter she wrote after the trial: Smith had assured her that ‘Mr Blackwell And greenhow Would be thare to defende mee When ie Went in to the docke’ – Greenhow was in fact the lawyer for the prosecution.)

This was two decades after the Palmer case had established the right to move jurisdiction in the case of local prejudice, but there was neither the time nor the money for such niceties. Prejudice, however, there was no lack of. The
North Wales Chronicle
gave Mrs Cotton fifteen children, all murdered, and added an extra lodger to her tally. Long before the police court hearings, much less the trial, the
Yorkshire Post
listed nineteen deaths attributable to her. In November 1872, the
Illustrated Police News
began an article with two sentences that almost guaranteed that its report would be filled with wild rumours: ‘At present it would be unjust to speculate upon the probable issue of this long-pending inquiry. The law … justly holds every person to be innocent until proved guilty by the clearest evidence.’ Then comes the key word: ‘Nevertheless’. Mrs Cotton, the article continued, ‘a woman whose life is one long chapter of crime’, had carried out acts that would have made Burke and Hare ‘pale in horror’. It credited her with five recent murders, and then added an additional nineteen – not saying she was responsible for them, but that they had taken place ‘under her roof, all of which she had some [financial] interest in’. The Home Office, although aware of the newspaper reporting, shrugged off responsibility: ‘The Secretary of State cannot prevent the publication of such paragraphs.’

Yet by the time of her committal hearing, in February 1873, there were only sixteen reporters present, six of them local.The local papers continued to cover the story comprehensively, but even those national papers that lived on crime had dropped it.
Lloyd’s, Reynolds’s
and the
Daily News
had only eight or nine stories each over the eight months between the arrest and trial, some only a few lines long (the
Leeds Mercury,
by contrast, ran twenty-three). Even
The Times
carried only nine stories, although they were longer than most. The
Illustrated Police News
gave the case no coverage between November 1872 and March 1873, not even reporting the trial. It was only after the verdict that it returned to the subject, with illustrations of ‘Last Hours of the Condemned’, ‘The Execution’ and ‘Hoisting the Black Flag’. The accompanying article was just over a column long, and the following week there was not even any text, only pictures: ‘Strange Spectre Appearances of the Poisoned Victims of Mary Ann Cotton’ showed a cemetery where a feeble spectre waggled its arms at two even more feeble innocents. For Constance Kent, more pressing international news had driven her story off the pages. This was not the case here. Mary Ann Cotton, supposed poisoner of twenty-odd, was replaced in the press by a ‘Fatal Fall from a Ladder’.

The trial itself was a foregone conclusion: a working-class woman with no effective legal representation, accused of mass murder among family members. In a replay of the earlier poison panic, Mary Ann Cotton was an outsider, sexually promiscuous, with too many children, at least some of whom were maintained by local taxes. The prosecution’s case was that she had killed her stepson because he was ill, which prevented her from working; that the insured child was ‘worth’ £8 in burial money; that she was the only person who fed him, and the analysis suggested that he had been given repeated doses of arsenic, rather than one large one, which ruled out accidental death. (How this was deduced is not clear: today’s tests, which measure the appearance of arsenic along the nail or hair shaft, were not then possible.) There was also a constant refrain regarding the ‘prevalence’ of child-murder and burial clubs, and repeated mentions of the succession of deaths among Mrs Cotton’s family. The judge overruled her counsel’s objections: the prosecution was ‘entitled to show the history of others in the house when under the same circumstances they had died of poisoning’, despite there being no evidence at all that anyone
had
died of poisoning.

The defence case was strong. Mrs Cotton’s barrister pointed out that there was nothing to show that she had been the one to administer poison, and there was no evidence, despite the many newspaper reports, that any other family members had been murdered. The proof that anyone had been deliberately poisoned was weak, given the prevalence of arsenic in household goods at that time. Mrs Cotton, the jury was reminded, relied on her lodgers for much of her income. Nattrass had not only been her lodger, he was planning to marry her – two very good reasons to want him alive. Local gossip claimed she had brutalized her children; her counsel pointed out that this ‘rested mainly on the evidence of three or four gossiping women, every one of whom, it appeared. had a belt, a whip, or a “taws”, which they used to [sic] their own children’. The prosecution had produced a chemist who swore that Mrs Cotton had bought arsenic from him in 1869, but under cross-examination it became evident that the police had shown him her photograph before they took him to the gaol to identify her. However, the defence overlooked the prosecution’s charge that when Nattrass was ill Mrs Cotton had refused to bury her dead child, saying that if she waited the two could be buried together, which suggested she expected Nattrass to die shortly. In fact the baby had died on a Thursday, and was buried on Sunday, while Nattrass had died the day after the baby’s funeral. With proper defence, much of the prosecution’s evidence could probably have been shown to be similarly a mass of hearsay, hysteria and spite. No matter. The judge dismissed the defence’s case in his summing-up. Considerations of motive, or its lack, he told the jury, had no place in their deliberations; the law was concerned only with the ‘moral certainty’ that a ‘reasonable man’ could have. The jury came back with a guilty verdict.

Despite a petition for clemency signed by her employers at the Sunderland Infirmary, despite the stress on the prejudicial nature of the newspaper reports and her lack of proper legal representation, Mary Ann Cotton’s execution went ahead. The last execution of a woman in Durham had been in 1799. Then the rope had snapped, and the execution was rescheduled, the woman being hanged twice in an hour. Mrs Cotton was no luckier. Calcraft still used the old-fashioned short drop, and her death was reported to have been slow and painful.

The middle-class response was muted, but an older working-class form of commemoration returned: broadsides had almost completely vanished from the market, but for Mrs Cotton the genre briefly revived. One repeated the story of her waiting for the death of Nattrass before burying her baby, another told how ‘She applied for coffins for her victims,/Before their limbs were cold’. Some broadside writers appear to have lost the facility for catchy verse that their predecessors had had – one rejoiced, ‘How happy is it that seldom we hear/Of women poisoning their children so dear.’ This one was surmounted, in the old style, with an unrelated image, of a woman wearing a Scotch bonnet and plaid, who may originally have been Flora Macdonald. Some, though, were more up-to-date: one broadside replaced the old image of the scaffold with one of the gaol with a black flag raised, the new sign of a private execution accomplished.

There appear to have been no melodramas about Mrs Cotton, although the year of her arrest saw a new touring version of
The Red Barn.
This new version may offer some explanation. In it there were no heartless seducers, no prides of the village. The revised story was much more like a detective novel, with motivations and reasons for the villain’s descent to crime. Perhaps Mrs Cotton was too much a melodrama villainess for the new detective dramas. Madame Tussaud’s had only a mild interest in the woman it catalogued as ‘Mary Anna Cotton’. It advertised her model for a couple of months after her execution, but although it continued to be displayed into the 1890s, it was never the main attraction. A makeshift show at a colliery near Thornley in County Durham had a model of her in the year following her death, but we know of it today only because a newspaper reported the destruction of the exhibition in a freak storm. There may have been other penny-shows like this one that were below the radar even of the local press. A few traces can be found: ‘a great moral drama – The Life and Death of Mary Ann Cotton’ was staged at the New Gaiety Theatre of Varieties in West Hartlepool almost immediately after the execution. A greyhound named Mary Ann Cotton ran in competition in Northumberland the following year. And, finally, a children’s skipping rhyme survived into our own century:

*&*&*&

No one turned Alfred Monson into a nursery rhyme, but no one took him very seriously either. Monson came from an upper-middle-class family, although he had done his best to neutralize any benefits that might have brought him. His uncle had been the British ambassador in Paris, he himself had been a civil servant in South Africa, but by the late 1880s he had descended to the not very glorious position of tutor to young men who were cramming for army entrance exams, living well beyond his very scanty means, with a large house, horses and servants. In 1889 he had been introduced by a man named Tottenham to a Major Dudley Hambrough, who had a life interest in estates that produced £4,000 a year. Hambrough had borrowed so heavily against his income that he had been forced to mortgage this interest to an insurance company, and the company had foreclosed. Tottenham was supporting him, and attempting to work out a way to return the life interest to Major Hambrough. Meanwhile Tottenham arranged for Monson to tutor the Major’s son Cecil. Just as some sort of dubious scheme was behind Tottenham’s support of the Major, so too some sort of dubious arrangement had been made between Tottenham and Monson – Monson didn’t even pretend to tutor the young man.

Over the next year or so, convoluted financial arrangements were repeatedly put in place and then collapsed, as Monson finagled to become the ‘owner’ of the Major’s life interest, even as he himself received handouts from Tottenham, who was in turn attempting the same financial arrangements. No one was honest. In 1892 Monson rented Ardlamont House in Scotland. He was not able to sign a lease himself, as he had recently been made bankrupt; as a minor, Cecil Hambrough could not sign either; so ‘Mr Jerningham’, his ‘guardian and trustee’, was sent to sign. When the household moved to Ardlamont (rent £450 per annum), Monson was so hard up he had to borrow the train fare from Tottenham, and his wife left their linen behind because there was no money to pay the laundress. In July, Monson attempted to insure Hambrough’s life in Mrs Monson’s favour, but insurance companies were by now chary of legatees who had no obvious connection to the insured person’s life. A week later he tried another company, and failed again. In early August he told the Mutual Assurance Co. of New York that Hambrough was the heir to a £200,000 fortune that he would inherit the following year, when he turned twenty-one, that the young man wanted to purchase Ardlamont, and that Mrs Monson was going to advance the money until he was of age and inherited; the insurance was to cover the period in between, in case he died before he could repay the loan. Somehow, only a month after not being able to pay his laundress, Monson had enough cash for the first premium, £194. The policy was confirmed on 7 August. On 10 August, Cecil Hambrough was dead.