Barrister

[GUT]

Maybe the forthcoming BBC drama about Mary Ann Cotton will give us more details on her motives. The summary I read said it was sometimes for money, sometimes for convenience (getting rid of her twin babies, for instance).

Thanks Dunny, didn't know there was one coming.

[Rosella]

Her motives were probably mixed. I think she was the centre of her own world and nobody else's needs and wants, even those of her own children, meant anything to her.

Incidentally, Mary Anne was supposed to be attractive. Even the hangman who executed her said so. However, if one judges by the only photo of her, taken in jail, with a thick check shawl around her, all I can say is standards of beauty were certainly different in the 1870's.

[Pcdunn]

Maybe the forthcoming BBC drama about Mary Ann Cotton will give us more details on her motives. The summary I read said it was sometimes for money, sometimes for convenience (getting rid of her twin babies, for instance).

[curious4]

There was a very prolific woman (poisoner) in the late 1800s or could be early 1900s who was from Bishop Auckland, North East England; not far from where I'm from. Mary Ann Cotton.

I think she got through more than her fair share of victims. Quite a few by most serial killer standards.

Can't remember how she was caught, but what is extremely unusual about this woman is that she murdered her Mother, four of her five husbands and some of her own children.

Was she the one who took out insurance policies on her victims ?

[HelenaWojtczak]

Late reply from me!

Why, my book, of course! :-)

[Stephen Lee]

Harold Schechters book about Jane Toppan is a great read, it's called Fatal.

[Fleetwood Mac]

19th Century poisoners
Colleagues,
I am looking for books about 19th century poisoners, both the killers, their methods and how they were caught. All suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

There was a very prolific woman (poisoner) in the late 1800s or could be early 1900s who was from Bishop Auckland, North East England; not far from where I'm from. Mary Ann Cotton.

I think she got through more than her fair share of victims. Quite a few by most serial killer standards.

Can't remember how she was caught, but what is extremely unusual about this woman is that she murdered her Mother, four of her five husbands and some of her own children.

[Bridewell]

The 1887 murder of Miriam Angel by Israel Lipski (that Lipski) comes right to mind. He killed her by the appalling method of forcing her to swallow nitric acid.

There are details of both Lipski and his victim in the London Hospital In-Patients' records (in their archives).

[GUT]

Never heard of him, so I will have to have a look. Thanks.

Who?

[Barrister]

Never heard of him, so I will have to have a look. Thanks.

[Barrister]

Thank you so much for the excellent suggestion. This sounds like exactly what I need. Best wishes for a lovely holiday.

[Pcdunn]

Women 19th century posioners

Harold Schechter's book The Serial Killer Files (New York: Ballantine, 2003) mentions the following female posioners of the 19th century:

Helene Jegado (Breton, c.1803-1851)-- a servant who murdered as many as twenty-seven people with arsenic, though she denied guilt in all of the cases. Executed by guillotine in 1851.

Mary Ann Cotton (English, 1832-1873)-- another arsenic poisoner, she murdered about twenty-three people over 12 years, most of them her own relatives. Hanged in 1873.

Sarah Jane Robinson (née Sarah Jane Tennant) (Irish, 1839-1905-- Emigrated to America at the age of 14 after becoming an orphan. In 1880, she "poisoned her husband, three of her eight children (including her infant twin sons) and the elderly landlord to whom she owed fifty dollars in back rent." In 1885, she murdered a string of relatives and was arrested in 1886. She was "known in the press as America's worst 'poison fiend.'" She was sentenced to hang, but ended up with a sentence of life in prison. [quoted sentences from Schechter, page 39.]

Jane Toppan (American, 1857-1938)-- born Honora Kelley to a poor Irish couple, she suffered for the first few years of her life as a motherless child raised by a drunken father, was placed in the Boston Female Asylum (an orphanage) by her father in 1863, and was soon signed out as a servant to Mrs. Abner Toppan while still a child. While not adopted formally, her name was changed to Jane Toppan. She seemed a cheerful person, but found nursing an ideal way to take out her desires to inflict suffering on other humans. She would use the appearance of tending to hospital patients to experiment on them with different doses of various poisons. "Eventually she settled on a lethal combination of atropine and morphine as the most satisfactory method." She may have murdered as many as a hundred people until 1901, when the speed with which a family of four under her care died within six weeks of each other led to her arrest. She confessed in the end to thirty-one murders, apparently simply due to her delight in watching people die. "She spent the remaining thirty-six years of her life in a state mental hospital, dying at age eighty- four in 1938." [quoted material from Schechter, pages 32-33.]

Schechter's book includes recommended reading lists; among the books he lists following the section these names were taken from are Murder Most Rare: the Female Serial Killer, by Michael and C. L. Kelleher (1998) and Women Serial and Mass Murderers: A Worldwide Reference, by Kerry Segrave (1990)

[Robert]

The Jonathan Balls poisonings in Happisburgh seem rather remarkable.

[Robert]

http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/do...137359308.0001

[Ginger]

The 1887 murder of Miriam Angel by Israel Lipski (that Lipski) comes right to mind. He killed her by the appalling method of forcing her to swallow nitric acid.

Belle Gunness, an American, was an infamous poisoner. She murdered at least 13 people, and possibly as many as 50 by some reckonings, over a period from the early 1880s to 1908. She didn't exclusively use poison - several people she clubbed, and at least one she killed with a meat cleaver. When she fell under suspicion, she faked her death in a house fire, murdering a stand-in to be found charred in the ruins, and her three children as well, just to make it more believable. By the time it was proven that the dead woman was not Guness, she had long fled and disappeared. She was never caught.

I have no book recommendations for either, having read none, but there's copious information about both murderers out there.