Any prize for sheer composure prior to being executed would surely have been won by serial killer Louise Peete, sentenced to death in the gas chamber in 1947. When informed that she was prepared to be interviewed by the press, the reporters who expected to see a broken-spirited or possibly panic-stricken woman, were taken aback at the charm offensive which greeted them, for Louise not only flattered them outrageously but even opened a gold-wrapped box of chocolates and, as if at a party, invited them all to partake of the delicacies!
Corday, Charlotte (France)
Her full name was Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Aumont, but she was generally known as Charlotte. On 9 July 1793 she left her home in Caen with the firm intention of killing Jean-Paul Marat, a revolutionary leader who believed that only by the use of force could the necessary changes be brought about in France’s fortunes. Far from being a royalist, Charlotte supported the Girondists, a political group dedicated to a more moderate approach to the country’s dire problems, and she was filled with Republican fervour so intense that she regarded the assassination of Marat as the only solution.
She walked the two hundred miles to Paris, and, on arriving there, stayed at the Inn de la Providence on the Rue des Vieux Augustins. There she wrote a note and sent it to her quarry, requesting an interview. While awaiting a reply, she went to a cutler’s shop on the Palais Royal where, for two francs, she bought a large sheath knife with an ebony handle. No reply having arrived, she dressed in her finest clothes, a pink silk scarf draped over her muslin gown, and an elegant hat adorned with a cockade and green ribbons, and visited Marat’s house, 20 Rue des Cordeliéres, but was turned away. Determined to carry out her self-imposed mission, she returned to the hotel from where she posted a message to Marat in which she stated that she knew the names of those in Caen who were plotting against the Revolution and was prepared to reveal them to him.
A few hours later she returned, and although Marat’s mistress Simone attempted to refuse her admittance, Marat heard the voices and bade Charlotte to enter. The famous revolutionary had been ill for some time. During his earlier revolutionary days he had twice had to flee to London, and once even had to take refuge from the French authorities by hiding in the Paris sewers. In those noisome and pestilential tunnels he had contracted a virulent and incurable disease which covered his body in a rash so devastating that only almost continual immersion in a sulphur bath brought him any relief. Accordingly he spent most of his time in a slipper bath, decency being preserved by having a cloth draped over it, and with the aid of a board placed across it he was able to write his notes and keep up with his correspondence. He also suffered excruciating headaches, which he sought to relieve by wrapping his head in a bandanna soaked in vinegar.
Charlotte Corday entered the room and approached her prey. As he started to query the reason for her visit, without warning she suddenly leant over and plunged the knife into his body with all the force she could muster. So violent was the blow that according to the post-mortem the blade entered his chest between the first and second ribs, piercing the upper part of the right lung and aorta, and penetrated the heart, blood gushing copiously into the bath water.
Having achieved her purpose, the young girl made no attempt to escape but stood calmly by the window where, attracted by Marat’s dying screams, she was found by an assistant, Laurent Bas who, together with Simone and her sister Catherine, had rushed into the room. Faced with the spectacle of his employer submerged in a bath of blood, Bas promptly picked up a chair and knocked Charlotte to the ground; as she attempted to get to her feet, he felled her again, holding her there until members of the national guard and a surgeon arrived. The body of the murdered man was lifted out and placed on a bed. Charlotte, calm and dignified, her hands tied behind her, was taken to the Prison de l’Abbaye for interrogation and subsequent trial before the Revolutionary Council. In court she admitted everything, calling Marat a monster who had hypnotised the French peasants. ‘I killed one man in order to save a hundred thousand,’ she proclaimed vehemently. The verdict and sentence were foregone conclusions, death by the guillotine being the only possible penalty.
In her cell in the Conciergerie Prison a painter, Hauer, was working on a sketch of her when, on 17 July 1793, the executioner Charles-Henri Sanson arrived to prepare and collect his victim. On entering the room he found her seemingly cool and entirely composed, sitting on a chair in the middle of the cell and guarded by a gendarme. As he approached she looked up and, removing her cap, sat still while he cropped her luxurious black hair. When he had finished she picked up a lock or two of the hair and gave some of it to the artist and the rest to the gaoler, asking that it be given to his wife who had befriended her.
Charles-Henri, marvelling at her serenity, handed her the red chemise she was to wear and turned away while she obediently put it on. He then started to bind her hands, whereupon she asked whether she might keep her gloves on because, she declared, her previous captors had bound her wrists so tightly that the cords had chafed her tender flesh. With kind reassurance the executioner agreed to her request, adding that even if she did not don them, he would make sure the cords did not cause her any discomfort. Charlotte smiled at him, ‘To be sure, you ought to know how to do it,’ she exclaimed and held out her bare hands for him to secure her.
He then led her out to where their conveyance waited. When she declined the offer to sit down in the tumbril, Sanson agreed, pointing out that the jolting of the cart over the rough cobbles was less trying when standing, and the procession set off through the already crowded streets.
Charles-Henri later admitted to being unable to take his eyes off his prisoner. He wrote:
The more I saw of her, the more I wished to see. It was not on account of her personal beauty, great as that was, but I thought that it was impossible that she could remain as calm and courageous as I saw her; yet what I had hitherto considered as beyond the strength of human nerve actually happened. During the two hours I spent in her company I could detect no sign of anger or indignation on her face. She did not speak; she looked not at those who insulted her, but at the citizens who were at the windows of their houses. The crowd was so dense that our cart advanced very slowly. As I heard her sigh, I said, ‘You find the way very long, I fear?’ She replied, ‘No matter; we are sure to reach the scaffold sooner or later.’
On arrival Sanson dismounted. On doing so, he noticed that some of the spectators had mingled with his assistants and as he and the gendarmes were clearing the area, Charlotte left the tumbril and unhesitatingly mounted the scaffold steps. As she reached the platform, Fermin, one of Charles-Henri’s assistants, removed her scarf and, without any prompting, she approached the guillotine and positioned herself in front of the bascule, the hinged plank. The executioner, not wanting to prolong the girl’s ordeal longer than absolutely necessary, quickly bound her to it, then swung the board horizontal; instantly he signalled to Fermin to pull the rope. The weighted blade descended and, as the executioner confessed afterwards, the waiting basket received the head of one of the bravest women he had ever met.
Even as he stood there, a carpenter named Francois le Gros picked up the severed head and showed it to the crowd. Sanson admitted afterwards that ‘although I was used to that occurrence, this time I could not help turning my head away. It was then, by the murmurs of the crowd, that I became aware that the rascal had also slapped the cheeks, the face turning red as if insulted. I struck the man and ordered him off the scaffold, the police taking him away. He was later arrested by the Tribunal and severely punished.’
Throughout history there have been many accounts of life apparently continuing after decapitation, and during the execution of Charlotte Corday, scores of spectators swore that when le Gros smacked her cheek, the other cheek also blushed, as if with annoyance. Could there really be sufficient blood flowing within the brain to sustain consciousness for a certain number of seconds after decapitation? After all, organs transplanted for surgical purposes remain ‘
alive’ after being removed from the donor, and as the brain is an organ...
Charlotte’s headless body was buried with others in the Madeleine Cemetery. Her skull reportedly passed into the ownership of the Princess Marie Bonaparte and was described as ‘being of dirty yellow, glistening, shiny and smooth, evidence that it was never interred’.
Cotton, Mary Ann (England)
Mary Ann Cotton was no ordinary, spur-of-the-moment killer; her murderous instincts were alleged to have resulted in the deaths of fifteen, perhaps even twenty people, including four husbands and eight children, and she gained the evil reputation of being the greatest mass murderess of all time.
By the age of forty she had married three times. Her first husband, whom she had married in 1852, was a young miner named William Mowbray, by whom she had four children. All of them just happened to die young, reportedly from gastric fever. William Mowbray also succumbed to illness, experiencing severe sickness and diarrhoea, and died in agony.
Mary, now seemingly grief-stricken at the loss of her husband and children, drew solace from her friends and cash from the insurance company. Realising that hospital work as a nurse would be the source not only of supplies of the poison she needed, but also of meeting further vulnerable and susceptible victims, she joined the staff of Sunderland Infirmary where, among others, she tended a patient named George Ward. So devoted were her ministrations that when he recovered he proposed marriage, her subsequent promise ‘in sickness and in health’ only applying to half the phrase, for fourteen months later, in 1866, he too shuffled off this mortal coil, but not before he had endowed all his worldly goods to her.
Not long afterwards, still in her widow’s weeds, she met James Robinson, a widower with three children. They were married in May 1867, and by December of that year regrettable coincidences also overwhelmed that family. Not only did James’ two young sons and daughter, plus William Mowbray’s nineyear-old daughter fall victim to gastric fever, but a later baby born to Mary and James joined its stepbrothers and sisters in the local cemetery. James himself had cause to thank his guardian angel when Mary incensed him so much by selling some of his possessions that he ejected her from the house.
The fact that her husband was still alive did not deter Mary from starting an intimate liaison with her next prey, Frederick Cotton, a man who already had two young sons from a former marriage. When he proposed to her, she bigamously married him, and, being a prudent wife who had to take care of her future, she took out three insurance policies, just in case. The number of children in their family became three when she had a little boy by Frederick, called Robert, the number of policies thereby increasing accordingly. )Early in 1872 a James Nattrass attracted her attention. This complicated matters, Frederick Cotton immediately becoming surplus to requirements – but not for long. Almost without warning he fell seriously ill, but by the time a doctor had arrived he was past all medical aid. Frederick’s 10-year-old son was not long in following his father to the grave, and Mary’s child, Robert, never reached puberty.
James now became her lover, but affection wasn’t everything, and eventually Mary decided that £30, the sum for which he had been insured, was preferable to the man himself, and so another coffin received an occupant and another grave was dug.
Mary could have continued in this manner, unchecked and unsuspected, until her stock of arsenic, a poison little recognised or diagnosed at the time, ran out, but for some unaccountable reason, perhaps a rare, charitable thought, she spared the life of Charles Edward, the eight-year-old Cotton boy; instead she decided to hand him over to the workhouse. When told that such was not possible without the parents also being admitted, she retorted, ‘I could have married again but for the child. But there, he won’t live long, he’ll go the way of all the Cotton family.’ Nor did he. Dispensing with mercy, she dispensed arsenic instead, gastric fever again being diagnosed as the cause of death. But news of the child’s demise reached the ears of the workhouse master and, remembering the woman’s ominous rejoinder, he notified the authorities of his suspicions. The child’s body was exhumed and the amount of arsenic found within the viscera was unmistakable. And when the corpses of her other victims were disinterred and their post-mortems produced similar results, the game was up.
In March 1873 Mary Ann Cotton was charged at Durham with one murder, that of the young Charles Edward; so overwhelming was the evidence in that particular case that one charge was considered sufficient, and so it proved. Throughout the trial the woman in the dock remained composed and utterly self-assured; having borne a charmed life so far, she probably saw no reason why it should not continue. She pleaded not guilty and coolly explained that the arsenic in her possession was used to kill bedbugs in the house, but when the judge pronounced her guilty and sentenced her to be hanged, she fainted in the dock and had to be carried down to the cells.
If she had thought that because she was pregnant – she had wasted no time in taking a new lover, a local customs officer, following James’ funeral – she would escape the gallows, she was sadly mistaken: there was, of course, no question of executing her while heavy with child, but once the child was born, the law would take its course. After giving birth in gaol, she was deprived of her baby and arrangements were made for her to be deprived of her life in five days’ time.
The night before her execution she was heard by her warders to pray for salvation, a prayer which included James Robinson, her third husband and the only one to escape her homicidal proclivities. The customs man might also have congratulated himself on his lucky escape!
Feminine fashion at that time dictated that women wore dresses with long sleeves, plus a veil and gloves, and Mary Ann Cotton’s apparel on her execution day reflected this, for her veil was the white cap William Calcraft slipped over her head – nor did he omit the matching accessory, a hempen necklace. None of the watching officials saw him hesitate as he prepared his victim, nor did he waste a moment in operating the bolt. However, as usual, nearly three minutes elapsed before the twitching figure ceased rotating and finally hung deathly still.
Following removal from the scaffold, Mary’s body was taken back into the prison building where, in order to take a cast of her head to be studied by members of the West Hartlepool Phrenological Society, all her luxurious tresses were cut off close to her skull. It was later stated that, far from being kept as gruesome souvenirs, every severed strand of hair was deposited in the coffin with her body.
Such was the publicity surrounding the case that shock waves of disbelief and horror spread across the country when the prosecuting lawyer described the ghastly deaths of her other victims, and with the minimum of delay a wax model of her joined the macabre company already occupying Mme Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors, the museum publishing an updated catalogue which endorsed her execution as expiation ‘for crimes for which no punishment in history could atone. The child she rocked on her knee today was poisoned tomorrow. Most of her murders were committed for petty gains; and she killed off husbands and children with the unconcern of a farm-girl killing poultry’.
Murderous though eternally feminine, Mary Ann was determined to look her best even for William Calcraft. When the wardresses went to escort her from the condemned cell to the scaffold, they found her brushing her long black hair in front of the mirror. As they approached her she turned and said brightly, ‘Right – now I am ready!’
Creighton, Mary Frances (USA)
Mary’s problem was that she just could not accept that having got away with murder twice, she could not get away with it a third time! In 1933, short of money, Mary hit on the bright idea of poisoning her brother Raymond as a means of inheriting his legacy and claiming his life insurance as well. And although it became known to the court during her subsequent trial that she had indeed purchased arsenic, no one actually saw her administer it to Raymond, so the jury acquitted her.
Mary was obviously overwhelmed by her success, for within a short space of time her father- and mother-in-law bot
h died, the post-mortems revealing traces of arsenic – but this time, because the quantity in her mother-in-law’s body was not considered by the jury to be sufficiently lethal, the case was thrown out. And probably because the authorities assumed that the same amount of poison would be found present in the body of the dead woman’s husband and so be similarly rejected by a jury, they decided not to waste the court’s time in bringing further charges.
Despite his parents having been poisoned and the finger of blame having pointed at his wife, John Creighton did not leave Mary; instead they moved to Long Island with their young daughter Ruth, where they became friendly with another couple, Everett and Ada Appelgate, who after some time moved in with them. Allegations were later to be made, not only that Everett seduced 15-year-old Ruth Creighton and wanted to marry her, but that Ruth and Everett were having an affair. Whether either of these was the motive or not, sufficient to say that Mary reached for the poison bottle labelled ‘Rough on Rats’, and little by little supplemented Ada’s eggnogs with its contents until Everett found he had become a widower.
This time, however, Mary’s phenomenal luck had run out. Charged with murder, she stood trial and not only confessed to the crime, but also accused Appelgate of actually helping to administer the poison. After three hours’ deliberation by the jury, both were found guilty and sentenced to death.
Female Executions: Martyrs, Murderesses and Madwomen Page 6