Mary Ann Cotton

A mother, wife and nursemaid, Mary Anne COTTON had all the credentials for a respectable place in Victorian society. Beneath her caring exterior, however, she was a cold, calculating serial killer.
COTTON’s victims were made up of twelve of her own children and stepchildren, three husbands, her best friend, and even her own mother. Born in 1832, COTTON is believed to have begun poisoning her victims in order to claim the burial insurance. Her technique was simple enough – she administered doses of arsenic to her targets – a common household substance at the time. Since infant mortality was especially high in Victorian England, the deaths went largely unquestioned. Gastric fever was blamed time and time again for COTTON’s „bereavements“. Police methods were in their infancy in the mid-Nineteenth Century and COTTON masked her disturbing behaviour with her constant moves around the North East of England. Of course, it was only a matter of time before somebody realised that regular requests for poison and close relatives dropping like flies was more than just a coincidence.
COTTON was arrested in July 1872 after the suspicious death of her son, Charles. The bodies of other family members were exhumed and toxicology tests showed positive traces of arsenic in all of them. Mary Anne COTTON was tried and subsequently hanged at Durham on March 24, 1873.