The Black Widow

Mary Ann Cotton: The Black widow

Mary Ann Cotton was born 1832, she was accused and convicted of over 23 murders. She was called the black widow

She was attractive, man found her very attractive, which explains why she killed four of her husbands. And several of her children and step children.

But lets begining at the beginning. Mary Ann Robson was born to a coal mining family in Low moorsley, England. When she was ten her father died in a mining accident. When her step father moves in after she turns 16, she moves out.

At age sixteen she goes to work as a domestic woman in a small house. Where she would clean and cooked and took care of the 12 children. Perhaps it is here when she begins to hate children so.

Finally she marries and is taken away to cornwell where her husband works in a railway shanty town. She has five or six children, but none survived….is this the beginning of her life as a serial killer or is the moment when she turns cold due to life being so cruel to her.

Her husband moves her to another town, where she finds herself as a mining’s workers wife.  She then begins to have children, one after another. Two of them die right away.

She knows how dangerous the mining business is. So she makes her husband take out an insurance on himself. 6 months later, she becomes a widow when her husband dies in a mining accident. And she collects 35 dollars.

She moves away, but then her last son dies, and so she cannot deal with her last daughter and sends her away to live with her grandmother.

She then marries another man, but he dies only 14 months later he also dies.

She takes a job helping a widower care for his sickly child, but only a week after she has the job the child dies.

Days later she is called to help her mother who is very sick, only two days later she is burying her mother.

But she doesn't stop there. Her daughter who had been safe until the grandmother dies, is found to be sick, and later dies only a month after coming into contact with Mary Ann. As well as two of the remaining step children from her third husband. She then get pregnant again, and only three months after giving birth to her 8^th child, the child also dies.

George Robinson, the last of the children she would have as the wife of James Robison (her third husband) is born only months later.It is then that James Robinson finds out that Mary ann had been altering his business books and had stolen 50 pounds (A year's wage at the time) and had placed him into debt for over 70 ponds. His business is ruined, and so the marriage was over.

So how is she killing all of these people?

Arsenic, a tasteless poison is readily available to kill vermin and other common pests. By giving her children and family small doses the poison, the eleven members of her family had no chance. The poison would have eaten them from the inside out, making the illusion of the children simply having a sickness and not being poisoned slowly.

Once she had gotten rid of her third husband, she decides to start again in a new town, this time she chooses Durham.

Margaret cotton had been a friend there, and so Mary Ann moved in her for three weeks, but then Margaret she dies after telling Mary ann that she had saved 70 pounds. Soon after Mary ann begins to sleep with Fredrick cotton (Margaret widow) and soon becomes pregnant. Fredrick does the Honourable thing, and marries her. Of course Mary ann does not tell him that the child could also be Joseph Natras, a family friend. She also forgets to mention that she is still married to George Robinson.

After their child is born, the cotton family has three children, only one is Mary ann’s child by blood. The other two are from her friend (whom she killed) Margaret.

A year and two days after his marriage to Mary Ann, Joseph cotton does of typhoid fever.

After three months of waiting, Mary Ann moves in her lover Joseph. But soon she gets bored of the situation.  She gets a job in a local hospital where she meets Quick manning, who is a vary eligible bachelor.

Within one month the cotton children die and then Joseph Natrass also dies from typhoid fever. Only boy Charles cotton is left from the cotton family. She offers the boy to the work house, but is denied. However when she tells the workhouse local named Riley that he is sickly and will go the same way as the rest of the family, he becomes suspicious. And he looks into all of the deaths that have happened around her.

A week later the boy Charles cotton dies of typhoid fever. He would be the last to die by her hands.  When she asks for the death certificate she finds that Riley has given his suspicious to the police, and so an enquiry is made. It is then that the doctor realises that arsenic is present and she is sent to jail.

Mary Ann was one of the first know serial killers, making her total of 16 or 22 murders of her own, mother, husband and even children.

When she was awaiting trial she was discovered to be pregnant and so the trial had to wait, and it was in this wait where she told almost all of her story to the press.

On the seventh of January the last of her children where born, two weeks later she is executed. 

Mary Ann Cotton,

Dead and forgotten

She lies in her bed,

With her eyes wide open

Sing, sing, oh, what can I sing,

Mary Ann Cotton is tied up with string

Where, where? Up in the air

Sellin' black puddens a penny a pair.