Dark Angel: the gruesome true story of Mary Ann Cotton, Britain's first serial killer
Channel: The idea of welding
Date: 2016-10-31

Britain’s first serial killer ended her 20-year poisoning spree in 1873, thrashing around at the end of a hangman’s rope in Durham Jail. When the gallows trapdoor opened, Mary Ann Cotton dropped just two feet, a fall insufficient to break her neck. The hangman leant over and pushed down on her shoulders to hasten strangulation. She took several minutes to die.

There was little sympathy for Cotton. Convicted of the murder of her seven-year old stepson, she was suspected of killing with arsenic as many as 20 others – including her mother, several of her children and stepchildren, three husbands, a lover and a friend.

Now her story has been turned into an ITV television drama, entitled Dark Angel, starring Joanne Froggatt (best known as the maid Anna Bates in Downton Abbey).Cotton’s life is so packed with incident that it is hard to summarise, the events unfurling like one of those sensation novels which were popular in mid-Victorian society – lurid tales with titles such as Lady Audley’s Secret and Passages in the Life of a Fast Young Lady. But Cotton’s dark deeds did not occur due to some sort of compulsion to kill. She was a working-class woman whose perpetrations were almost certainly motivated by money.

Cotton was born on October 31, 1832, in a village near Sunderland. Her father, a miner, was killed in an accident when she was just nine. She was employed in various jobs, including Sunday school teacher and nurse, was married four times (once bigamously, with three of them dying suddenly) and had 13 children (11 didn’t survive). Many of these family deaths resulted in Cotton receiving insurance payments.The body count in this tale beggars belief. Even more astonishing, to modern eyes, is that nobody connected the deaths for so long. Yet you have to look at the case in the context of Victorian England. Policing was still in its infancy, and although there was forensic testing for arsenic poisoning, it was incredibly hard to detect, symptoms often being misdiagnosed as gastric ailments.

However, Cotton’s murder spree did finally catch up with her. In May 1872, she was living with Charles Edward, the son of her fourth husband. A parish official asked if she planned to marry John Quick-Manning, the man that she had started a relationship with. She reportedly replied: “It might be so but the boy is in the way. Perhaps it won’t matter as I won’t be troubled long.”Indeed, the boy died a week later and the parish official reported the conversation to the police. An examination of Charles Edward’s body, as well as Cotton’s former lover, Joseph Nattrass – who had left her money in his will – revealed traces of arsenic. She was arrested and at the trial – postponed until she had given birth to Quick-Manning’s child – she was found guilty of the murder of Charles Edward and sentenced to death.

Cotton is regarded by some as the first British serial killer, but there are other female candidates. Linda Stratmann, author of the book The Secret Poisoner: A Century of Murder, says: “Mary Ann Cotton may have been the most prolific poisoner of the period but she wasn’t unique.

“Betty Eccles, suspected of several murders by arsenic, was hanged in 1843. Sarah Chesham murdered four people. She was executed in 1851. In the middle of the century there was even a panic, somewhat whipped up by the press, that there was an epidemic of poisoning.“The historical records simply don’t bear that out, but it is certain that some murders by poisoning went undetected because the deaths were attributed to natural causes.”

How was Cotton able to get away with it for so long? Professional considerations aside, there were also the social implications. The Victorians would have been reluctant to acknowledge that a woman – a member of the “gentle sex” – was capable of such evil.

Of course, the contemporary fascination with female killers suggests that there is still something shocking about women who commit murder. Yet for all the nastiness of her crimes, Mary Ann Cotton is capable of arousing our sympathy. Gwyneth Hughes, who has written Dark Angel, says: “If a modern British woman were to ask Mary Ann what she wanted, I believe she would reply: 'Contraception. Independence. Hot and cold running water.'"


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