Middlesbrough & Stockton Gazette and General Advertiser. — 1872-10-17 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

THE GREAT POISONING CASES AT BISHOP  AUCKLAND.  Instructions have at length been received from the Home Office, and the local magistrates at their meeting, on Monday, resolved that the exhume.. tion of the bodies of Frederick Cotton, the prisoner's late husband, Frederick Cotton, his eldest, and Robert Cotton, his youugest son, should be Proceeded with as early as possible. The exhumations have since been arranged to take place at an early hour next morning. The bodies of Charles Edward Cotton, and the lodger, Joseph Nattrass, have been already disinterred, and an examination of a portion of the viscera, of each by Dr Scattergood, the emineut toxicologist, of Leeds, ahows the presence of white arsenic in considerable quantities. From what has come to light during the past few days, we f.ar we have not heard the whole history. The death of four persons (Cotton's wife, two children, and a sister) is reported to have occurred under suspicious circumstances at the village of Walbettle, near Newcastle-on-Tyne, shortly before the prisoner became housekeeper to Cotton. Cotton married the prisoner in the early part of October 1870, under the name of Mary Ann Mewbray. They lived a quiet and apparently peaceful life for some four or five months, when Cotton took ill and died within a few days, his death being followed by that of his eldest son and youngest son, both of whom showed similar symptons. After the death of her husband Cotton, Nattrass went to lodge at her house, and was with her three or four months, when he took ill and died, after suffering great agony, about a week afterwards. The poor fellow evidently suspected that all was not right, and, on being visited by one of his friends, ho remarked, "If I was only better, I will be out of this." The day before his death, he told his medical man, Dr Richardson, who had been treating him for gastric fever, that he had no fever upon him, and that, if it was not for that grinding pain in his stomach, he had nothing to complain of. He also said be believed it was cowed by the medicine he had been receiving, and he would take no more of it. On the 12th of July, the remaining child, Charles Edward Cotton, died. An inquest was held, and a verdict was returned to the effect that the boy had died from natural causes. The decision of the jury gave the greatest dissatisfaction in the neighbourhood, and a few days after Dr Kilburn was induced in consequence of what he had been informed by Mr Chalmers, his assistant, to make another examination, and on submitting a portion of the contents of the stomach, which he had buried in his garden, to Reinch's process for the detection of poison, he discovered indications of the presence of arsenic. The prinoner was apprehended the next day by the police. An ordet was obtained from the Home Secretary for the exhumation of the body, and on portions of the viscera being sent to Mr Scattergood, of Leeds, that gentleman found the system completely saturated with arsenic. As already intimated, the prisoner stands cotnmitted for trial on the charge of having murdered her stepson, Charles Edward cotton.