Female Executions: Martyrs, Murderesses and Madwomen

by Abbott, Geoffrey

  All Amy’s old feelings returned and, unable to love John, she clandestinely resumed her intimacy with – well, we’d better call him George, since the Newgate records do not name him. John, suspecting his wife’s cold attitude towards him was due to her first love, became jealous and, taking to drink, resorted to force, frequently beating her. Inflamed with passion for ‘George’, Amy continued her close relationship with him, so close that eventually she wanted to be with him all the time, and so she decided to get rid of John.

  To do this, she purchased some arsenic, widely available in the eighteenth century for domestic and indeed, some cosmetic purposes, and when John happened to complain of suffering from the ague, she gave him a tankard of ale, having first added some of the poison. Then, under the pretext of going shopping, she went to tell her lover what she had done to ensure their happy future. Far from being horrified, George told her to give John another dose in case the first one was not strong enough! But that turned out to be unnecessary, John dying by dinnertime of the same day, and buried shortly afterwards.

  The day after the funeral, George promptly visited Amy, his continued presence in her house giving rise to so much scandalised gossip among the neighbours that the authorities were alerted. Amy was arrested, John’s corpse exhumed, and the discovery of arsenic traces in his body spelled the end of Amy’s romance, and ultimately her life.

  After being tried and convicted of murder, she confessed and acknowledged the enormity of her crime. Willing to make atonement, she left a paper with the clergyman who attended her in her last moments, on which she had written the following advice to other susceptible young ladies:

  First, to warn all young women to acquaint their friends when any addresses [advances] are made to them; and, above all, if any base or immodest man dare to insult you with any thing shocking to chaste ears.

  Secondly, that they should never leave the person they are engaged to, in a pet [moment of anger], nor wed another to whom they are indifferent, in spite; for, if they come together without affection, the smallest matter will separate them.

  Thirdly, that, being married, all persons should mutually love, forgive and forbear; and afford no room for busy meddlers to raise and foment jealousy between two who should be as one.

  On 7 November 1750, for her sins, Amy was burnt and strangled at Ely.

  It would certainly seem that in the seventeenth century, Barnsley, in Gloucestershire, was probably the village that most strictly observed the Lord’s Day, for not only were little children forbidden to walk or play out, but in 1652 it was reported that:

  Two women, who had been at Church both before and after the hour of noon, did but walk in the fields for their recreation, and were then charged with having indulged in profane walking. They were given the choice either to be fined sixpence, or to be secured for one hour in the stocks. The peevish, wilful women, even though they were able enough to pay, in order to save their money, chose the latter and sat one hour locked in the stocks, a warning to all.

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  Jaffrey, Elizabeth (Scotland)

  Why Mrs Jaffrey should want to poison her lodger Ann Carole in October 1837 with arsenic allegedly bought to kill rats is not known, although it was suspected that she owed some money to her other lodger, Hugh Munro, but wanted to see how effective the dosage was by first testing it out on the girl. It certainly worked with Ann, who succumbed to a fatal cocktail of meal, arsenic and whisky, but Hugh was evidently made of sterner stuff, for he ate his arsenic-laced porridge with apparently no ill effects. However, Elizabeth increased the amount she stirred into his rhubarb, and to her satisfaction was no longer in his debt.

  Although she refused to admit her guilt, the jury thought otherwise, and she was hanged from the Glasgow gallows on 21 May 1838. For her final public appearance she wore a shawl in the Rob Roy plaid, a decision which resulted in that particular pattern going out of fashion for many years afterwards.

  It could have been a music-hall joke when Tilly Klimek, on being measured for a mourning dress and asked when her husband had died, replied, ‘In ten days time.’ However, the results were deadly serious, for when the police were informed they discovered that husband Anton was indeed in peril of his life, arsenic having been administered to him. Further investigation revealed that her four previous husbands had died in a similar fashion. Sometimes it just doesn’t pay to make facetious remarks.

  Jegado, Helene (France)

  To be able to control precisely one’s lachrymal glands, to cry on demand, is a great advantage after having poisoned someone. This ability was used to the full by French peasant Helene Jegado when, as repeatedly happened, members of the families of her various employers for whom she worked as a cook, unexpectedly died. Seemingly overcome with grief, she would leave, taking with her the bottles of wine and sundry valuable articles she had stolen, and gain similar employment elsewhere, with the same deadly results.

  In 1830 she took a job in the household of Professor Bidard at Rennes. Unaccountably another maid fell ill, and Helene devoted all her spare time to nursing her friend, but all to no avail, for her patient died. Again the crocodile tears flowed, but it wasn’t long before she made a new friend, Rosalie Sarrazin, who had filled the now vacant post. A rift soon appeared in their relationship, for Rosalie was better educated than Helene and so she was put in charge of the household accounts, but fate remedied the situation – the remedy being arsenic powder – and within months poor Rosalie complained of stomach pains. The complaints did not last long, however, and neither did the new maid.

  Helene might have been good at crying, but not at being able to control her guilty conscience, for when the police came to the house to investigate the sudden death, Helene opened the door and, on seeing them, exclaimed, ‘I am innocent!’ To which the officer replied, ‘What of? Nobody has accused you of anything!’

  Helene Jegado was tried at Rennes in December 1831 on three charges of murder and a similar number of attempted murders. No poison was found in her possession, and because no doubt she had sold all the valuables she had stolen, no apparent motive was found. But when her employment record was checked and found to coincide with nearly two dozen mysterious deaths, the court came to but one conclusion, and in 1832 Madamoiselle Jegado kept an appointment with Madame Guillotine but did not keep her head.

  In England most of the clothes belonging to his victims were the perquisite of the executioner, but not in France during the Revolution. Most garments were cut into pieces and used for the cleaning of the scaffold, which rapidly became soaked with blood and fragments of flesh. But what of the hair, shorn from the necks of those about to be guillotined? It was reported at the time that:

  A new sect has lately been formed in Paris; in their zeal to associate themselves with the counter-revolutionaries by every possible means, the initiates, who are animated by a pious respect and tender devotion to the guillotine, have the same desires, the same sentiments, and in these days, the same hair; toothless women are eager to buy the locks of any golden-haired young spark who has been guillotined, and to wear such tresses on their heads. It is a new branch of commerce, and a perfectly new kind of devotion too, so let us respect these blonde locks; our late aristocrats will at least have been of some use – their hair will hide the bald heads of a few women!

  Jones, Mary (England)

  The annals of Tyburn contain no more poignantly tragic account than that of Mary Jones. Young and attractive, with thick tresses of auburn hair, she was happily married until the day her husband was caught by the press-gang (seized without warning by government recruiting men and forced on board short-staffed naval vessels to serve abroad). In order to raise money for sustenance she sold the furniture and finally her home, the records reporting how she had ‘neither bed to lie on, nor food to give her two young children, who were almost naked.’ In sheer desperation she stole some lengths of muslin from a draper’s shop on Ludgate Hill, and was arrested.

  The record continued:

&n
bsp; At her trial she said, ‘I have been a very honest woman in my lifetime. I have two children; I work very hard to maintain my two children since my husband was pressed.’ Her beauty and poverty proved Mary’s averment that she had been a very honest woman, but when the jury gave in a verdict of guilty, Mary cursed the judge and jury, for [being] a lot of ‘old fogrums’. It was really for this that she died on the gallows. The theft had not been completed; she was arrested in the shop and gave up the goods. It was her first offence. Her neighbours in Red Lion Street, Whitechapel, presented a petition on her behalf, but there was against her the record of her ‘indecent behaviour’ in court. One of the two children was at her breast when, on 16 October 1771, she set out in the cart on the journey from Newgate to Tyburn. Her petulance had gone, and she met her death with amazing fortitude.

  One of the victims of English hangman James Berry (1884–1892) was, coincidentally, a woman having the same surname – a woman he had also met socially some years earlier. As can be imagined, it was with great difficulty that he managed to keep the situation on the essentially impersonal level, and so perhaps he can be excused for his actions when, having executed her with as little delay as possible, he then cut a lock of her long auburn hair to keep as a memento. But as time passed he felt that it was having a baleful influence on him, one that affected him so adversely that he eventually disposed of the macabre souvenir.

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  Kidden, Frances (England)

  On 2 April 1868 William Calcraft, who, by the time he retired in 1874, would have served 45 years on the scaffold (more than any other in his profession), achieved the distinction of being the last executioner to hang a woman in public. His victim was Frances Kidden, an attractive young woman whose happily married existence was marred only by the fact that she and her husband had not been able to have a baby. Her outraged reaction upon discovering that her husband had had a child by another woman can therefore be well imagined, a reaction that drove her to kill the man she loved, the man who had so cruelly deceived her. And so, on that day in April, she stood silently on the drop in the marketplace in Maidstone, Kent, resigned to her fate, as Calcraft, much as he hated having to execute a woman, hooded and noosed her; then, having deprived her unfaithful husband of his life, she forfeited her own.

  Lest it be thought that only men could be so hard-hearted as to execute their fellow human beings, at least one woman wielded the whip and tightened the noose. Known as ‘Lady Betty’, she was described in the Dublin University Magazine of January 1850 as a middle-aged, stout-made, swarthy-complexioned but by no means forbidding-looking woman, well-educated though possessing a violent temper. She was the mother of a boy and had treated him so harshly in his youth that he ran away from home and joined the army. After overseas service he had come home but, recalling his mother’s fiery temperament, disguised himself, and when she opened the door he asked for lodgings for the night. She showed him to a room and later, while he was asleep, she murdered him for his savings.

  She was sentenced to death with other criminals, but there was no hangman available and, as the Magazine sarcastically reported, ‘time was pressing, and as the sheriff and his deputy, being men of refinement, education, humanity and sensibility, who could not be expected to fulfil the office which they had undertaken, and for which at least one of them was paid, this wretched woman, being the only one who could be found to perform the office of executioner, consented!’

  It would seem that, unlike other hangmen who disguised themselves with false beards and wooden humps on their backs to avoid recognition and retribution, Lady Betty deigned not to do so. She thoroughly enjoyed her new role, flogging and hanging with gusto whenever the occasion demanded. After she had hanged a felon she would cut down the body, load it into a cart and accompany it to the town square of Roscommon; there, helped by the gaolers, she would hoist the corpse, its arms outspread gibbet-fashion, to the two high poles erected there. Local parents would warn their disobedient children to behave themselves by saying ‘Huggath á Pooká! – here comes Lady Betty!’

  King, Jessie (Scotland)

  In the nineteenth century life was hard, social conditions appalling, the lower classes poverty-stricken, and as there was no such thing as birth control, families became bigger and, in many cases, unaffordable. Women, single or married, having illegitimate children, were stigmatised and virtually outcast by society; all this gave rise to the flourishing and lucrative cottage industry of baby farming, women such as Amelia Dyer, previously described, adopting babies at a price, then getting rid of them by strangulation or drowning.

  In Scotland 28-year-old Jessie King was one of that murderous breed of women. On 18 February 1889, before the High Court of Edinburgh, she was found guilty of murdering two children committed to her charge, although she was suspected of many similar crimes. Suspicion had led to investigation and bodies were found wrapped in sacking in her landlord’s house. This evidence, together with the testimony given against her by her elderly lover Thomas Pearson, was sufficient, and Jessie King was arrested. It was not even necessary to prove that the ‘football’ kicked around by small boys a year earlier, which turned out to be a baby’s body wrapped in an old coat, was her handiwork, although the finger of suspicion certainly pointed in her direction.

  The jury took less than an hour to reach their verdict, and when it was read out in court Jessie screamed and moaned hysterically, eventually collapsing in a fainting fit. She was carried from the dock by two policemen to the cells, from where she was taken to the condemned cell in Calton Gaol.

  While awaiting execution, which had been appointed to take place on 11 March, she attempted to commit suicide on two occasions, first by using a long pin, which she had probably concealed in her hair and with which she might have opened a vein and bled to death had it not been discovered by a wardress; another time she was found in possession of a length of rope, intending to hang herself before the executioner could.

  Throughout her long sojourn in the prison she hoped she would escape the scaffold, a belief borne out by the number of petitions raised on her behalf and delivered to the Home Secretary, signatures perhaps obtained because she would be the first woman in Scotland to receive the death penalty in nearly 40 years, rather than for belief in her innocence. When the death penalty was confirmed, she was overcome, but surprisingly she met her end with fortitude, walking without faltering to where the Bradford hangman James Berry waited. After being cut down, her corpse was interred within the grounds of Calton Gaol. Fame of a kind resulted from her infamy, in that she was the last woman to be hanged in Scotland.

  Women awaiting execution in Britain wore prison dress and were confined to the condemned cell, constantly guarded by two prison officers who stayed in the cell day and night. After the executions their bodies were placed in coffins and lime was then poured over them before burial took place within the confines of the prison. Although the locations of the burials were not marked in any way, they were easily identifiable, for the soil gradually sank lower than the surrounding earth and had to be periodically ‘topped up’ by prisoners on outdoor working parties.

  Kurschnerin, Marie (Germany)

  Master Franz Schmidt, executioner of Nuremburg 1571–1617, related in his Diary how, on 10 January 1583, ‘Maria Kurschnerin of Nuremburg, also known as “Silly Mary”, a prostitute, who was a musketeer’s daughter, and a handsome young creature who thieved considerably, was here pilloried and afterwards flogged out of town.’ It subsequently transpired that she had her ears cropped, but had obviously not learned her lesson, for the executioner’s entry for 11 February 1584 reported that ‘the thief and whore Marie Kurschnerin, together with thievish youths and fellows, had climbed and broken into citizens’ houses and stole a mighty quantity of things. It was an unheard of thing for a woman to be hanged in this city and it had never happened before. Such a dreadful crowd ran out to see this, that several people were crushed to death.’

  Nor did Margaret Brompton learn her less
on. She was whipped in Leeds on 7 August 1641, at a cost to the council of fourpence, and before the weals had properly healed up, she was back fifteen days later for a second dose, when she was again whipped by the beadle – and another fourpence came out of the rates!

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  Lee, Jean (Australia)

  Jean Lee, deservedly described as a gorgeous redhead, was a much sought after prostitute in Australia in the 1940s who, not content with the payment handed over by clients, thought up a scheme whereby she could obtain everything else of value the punters might have in their possession. Accordingly she teamed up with a minor criminal named David Clayton and embarked on what, in the jargon of the Victorian criminal underworld, was known as the ‘buttock and file’ game; she would lure a man into a highly compromising situation and Clayton, purporting to be her husband, would ‘surprise’ them. Under the threat of humiliating exposure to the press and the authorities, the victim would hand over his wallet and valuables. Any necessary reinforcement was provided by Norman Andrews, the heavy member of the villainous trio, who was endowed with particularly persuasive fists.