Female Executions: Martyrs, Murderesses and Madwomen

by Abbott, Geoffrey

  Perhaps Martha could have gone on insuring everyone she met and reaping the rewards without ever being detected, but she changed her tactics and instead insured the many valuable pictures in the house. She then sold many of them to art dealers and subsequently claimed to the insurers that they had been stolen. The insurance firm, by now suspicious, called in the police, whose success after circulating details of the paintings throughout the art world spelt the end for Martha Marek. Even worse was to follow, for further suspicions were now raised concerning the other insurance claims she had made; highly alarmed, the government authorised the exhumation not only of the lodger Frau Kittenberg, but also of Martha’s aunt Susanne Lowenstein, her daughter Ingeborg, and even her husband Emil. Post-mortems revealed that all had died of thallium poisoning, a soft, white, highly toxic metallic element which brought death, first by slow paralysis of the limbs and eventually of the internal organs. Any defence Martha may have made by accusing others of administering the thallium was nullified when the chemist who had sold her the poison was traced.

  On 6 December 1938 mass-murderer Martha Marek mounted the scaffold in Vienna and knelt over the block. She had insured her victims before they died, and the executioner ensured that his victim also died, achieving it much more accurately than she had done – with but one blow of the axe.

  Another pact between partners that went wrong involved Ginette Vidal and Gerard Osselin. Although both were married, with families of their own, in 1972 they fell in love and, settling down together in a little French town, they agreed that, to prove their devotion and loyalty towards each other, should either of them double-cross their partner, the betrayed one was entitled to kill the deceiver. Whether Gerard did not really believe in their pact, or thought he could get away with it, is not known, but when Ginette found a note written in Gerard’s wife’s handwriting, she did not hesitate; she shot him through the head.

  Ginette made no attempt to report what had happened; on the contrary she stayed in the house with her lover’s corpse, cooking for them both as if nothing had happened. Eventually Gerard’s family raised the alarm and the body was discovered by the gendarmes. When questioned, Ginette was surprised at their accusations; she explained she had acted in accordance with their agreement, and as evidence she produced the document each had signed. Unfortunately the visiting magistrate did not see it that way, and she went to prison for ten years.

  Masset, Louise (England)

  The victim in this case was not a husband or a rival, but a son; the weapon was not poison or a blunt instrument, but a heavy piece of stone; and the motive was illicit love.

  Louise, a Frenchwoman, had an illegitimate child while in France. Louise, a highly intelligent, 36-year-old woman, then became a governess in London and, to avoid the inevitable gossip, arranged for her son Manfred to be cared for by a Miss Gentle. All went well; Louise was a loving mother and frequently visited her son, but she became acquainted with Eudore Lucas, a young French clerk who lived nearby, a friendship which rapidly matured into an intense love affair.

  Varied accounts were given as to what happened next. According to the confession she made while in the condemned cell to Miss Ellen Hayes, Inspector of Prisons, she was so deeply concerned about the derogatory names which would be aimed at Manfred as he grew older – she averred that he had already been a target of abuse – that she killed him out of mercy and compassion. Yet this was decidedly at odds with the other account – that she wanted to marry Eudore and so cold-heartedly decided to free herself of any baggage, human or otherwise.

  What was indisputable was the fact that on 27 October 1899 a woman walked into the ladies’ toilets at Broad Green Station and found a boy’s body lying there, wrapped only in a black shawl, and nearby was a large piece of stone. A post-mortem revealed that he had been stunned by a single blow, then strangled to death.

  The corpse was identified by Miss Gentle as that of Manfred Masset, and Louise was arrested and charged with murder. In court, evidence was given that she had informed Miss Gentle that she would be collecting her son on that particular day to take him to his father in France. She also told her lover that she would meet him in Brighton on the following day. Among the witnesses called was Miss Gentle who stated that when collected, the little boy had been dressed in a blue serge tunic – and that his mother had wrapped him in a black shawl to keep him warm during the Channel crossing. Other witnesses stated they had later seen the couple in the refreshment room on London Bridge Station.

  In her defence Louise agreed that she had indeed gone to that railway station to buy Manfred something to eat, but the main object of her being there was to give the boy into the care of two sisters named Browning who had previously promised to bring him up in an infant school they ran, for a fee of £12 a year. But when she was asked by the prosecution how she could explain the discovery of Manfred’s clothes in the waiting room at Brighton Station, she remained silent. And when the police stated that they had found no trace of the Brownings or the alleged infant school, and Louise was unable to produce a receipt for the alleged payment she had made, the members of the jury were in no doubt as to her guilt.

  In the condemned cell Louise Masset said calmly, ‘I can only win peace by meeting my death bravely.’ On 9 January 1900 she was hanged on the Newgate scaffold. Later, Miss Hayes, the Prisons Inspector, declared: ‘Louise had done her best to face, with becoming courage, that fate from which the very bravest might shrink.’

  Violette Noziere, found guilty of murdering her father, listened calmly as the French judge sentenced her to be taken to the place of execution, barefoot and wearing only a chemise, there to be publicly beheaded by the sword. As she was being escorted by warders from the court room, Violette, eternally feminine no matter what the circumstances, suddenly stopped and exclaimed, ‘Wait – I must have left my handbag in the dock. It’s got my powder and rouge in it – let me get it!’ At a later appeal against her sentence, the court, impressed by her unconcerned attitude towards her fate and with the traditional French chivalry towards the fair sex, showed clemency, and reduced her sentence to one of life imprisonment.

  Masson, Margaret (Scotland)

  To wax cynical, it was surely merciful of the court, on finding Margaret pregnant, to wait until she had given birth five months later – and then hang her! But the law in 1806 was harsh and unrelenting, and when Margaret, in company with her lover, John Skinner, the father of her unborn baby, was charged with poisoning her husband John with arsenic on 9 May, a panel of midwives in Edinburgh’s High Court certified that she was indeed with child. Sentence was postponed for five months, and in November, as she stood at the bar with her child in her arms, she was sentenced to be hanged, her execution being carried out shortly afterwards. And her fellow murderer and lover John Skinner? He absconded from the city and was never caught.

  A bill of indictment was found against Elizabeth Carr of Brampton, Cumberland (now Cumbria), for stealing 2½ pence from the pocket of Margaret Hepworth. Although Elizabeth pleaded not guilty the jury thought otherwise ‘and she, being with child, was only ordered to strip to the waist by the Common Beadle, to have four lashes, and then to be turned out of the town by the Mill Bridge’.

  Meteyard, Sarah (England)

  Like the brutal maltreatment of young servants inflicted by Elizabeth Brownrigg, described elsewhere, Sarah Meteyard was arrested for exactly the same appalling offences. Sarah employed girls aged between eight and thirteen years old in her millinery shop in Bruton Street, London; girls provided by the local Poor Law authorities, who were only too pleased to reduce their maintenance costs. These children were kept in atrocious conditions, ill-fed and ill-treated both by Sarah and her daughter Sally, but in 1758 things started to go badly wrong for the evil pair. One of the ‘apprentices’, Ann Naylor, managed to escape into the street where, on meeting a milkman, she beseeched him to help her to get away, saying that if she had to go back she would be severely punished. But Sally Meteyard, suddenly aware of the
girl’s absence, rushed out and, grabbing the girl by the neck, dragged her back into the shop. Taking her to an upstairs room, she then held Ann down while Sarah beat her with a broom handle before tying her hands behind her and fastening her to the door with another rope around her waist so that she could neither sit nor lie down.

  The other apprentices were not allowed near the room until, several days later, one happened to go in to find Ann Naylor slumped against the door, her whole weight taken by the ropes; her frantic shouts were answered by Sally Meteyard, who exclaimed, ‘If she won’t move, I will make her move!’ and then proceeded to take off one of her shoes and beat the motionless girl over the head with it. On seeing no signs of life she summoned her mother and, cutting Ann down, they attempted to revive her – alas, too late, for the girl was already dead.

  Worse was to follow, for the two women carried the body into the attic, then told their staff that she had had a fit and was confined up there to stop her from running away again; to substantiate their story, Sally even took a plate of food upstairs to the room. Later, the pretence was furthered by mother and daughter putting the corpse in a box; then, leaving the attic door open, they announced that Ann had run away again.

  The body remained in the locked chest for two months when, the smell of the decomposing flesh becoming overwhelming, on Christmas Day the two women cut the corpse into pieces, tying the head and torso up in one large cloth and the limbs in another – excepting one hand, a finger of which had been amputated before death, which they burned later. They had originally intended to dispose of all the body parts in the same way, but, worried that the smoke and smell would attract unfavourable attention, they carried the makeshift parcels out of the house and dumped them by the common sewer in nearby Chick Lane. Some hours later the bundles were found by the watchman who, assuming they had been discarded by a hospital surgeon, had them buried locally.

  Four years passed, and had mother and daughter maintained a loving family relationship, the tragic death of Ann Naylor would have passed unavenged. However, quarrels developed, and after being subjected to beatings from Sarah, Sally walked out and went to live in the house of a neighbour, Mr Rooker. Sarah, however, refused to let the matter rest, and frequently visited the Rooker residence, abusing and cursing both of them. These occurrences became so frequent that eventually Mr Rooker and Sally, who by now had become his mistress, moved to another house in Ealing, only to be followed by Sally’s mother, bent on causing further trouble. Matters came to a head on 9 June 1762 when, on one visit, she thrashed her daughter so severely that Sally blurted, ‘Remember, mother, you are the Chick Lane Ghost!’ After Sarah had left, Mr Rooker urged Sally to explain her cryptic retort, whereupon Sally burst into tears and confessed everything to her lover. But the horrified Mr Rooker informed the authorities, and not only was Sarah Meteyard arrested, but further enquiries also led to Sally being taken into custody in the Gatehouse Prison.

  In court both sought to incriminate the other, both thereby incriminating themselves even further. Sally pleaded that she was pregnant, but the panel of matrons who examined her soon discounted that as being merely an excuse to avoid the gallows. They were both sentenced to death and their bodies to be handed over to Surgeons’ Hall for subsequent dissection (rather more skilfully than the manner in which they had carved up poor Ann Naylor).

  They were hanged side by side at Tyburn on 19 July 1768, the Newgate Calendar describing how, from the time of leaving Newgate for the scaffold, the daughter wept uncontrollably. As for her mother, it related how ‘Sarah Meteyard, being in a fit when she was put into the cart, lay at her length until she came to the place of execution, when she was raised up, and means were used for her recovery, but without effect, so that she departed this life in a state of insensibility’.

  When the nineteenth-century executioner William Marwood gave a lecture about his profession he waxed lyrical, saying how ‘the Wheel of Time is constantly casting people into Eternity’, but was somewhat disconcerted when a member of the more rowdy element of the audience shouted back, ‘Yes, and so’s the rope!’

  M’Lachlan, Margaret (Scotland)

  Why go to all the trouble of constructing a scaffold and gallows when rivers and the sea were available? In 1685, when Margaret M’Lachlan, aged 63, was charged with declaring that James VII of Scotland was not entitled to rule the Church in the manner in which he wanted to, the authorities simply took her to the River Bladnoch in Wigtown and there tied her to a stake. As the tidal waters slowly rose, had she agreed to support the King’s religious intentions, her life would have been spared, but true to her beliefs and principles, she refused and drowned.

  The Ducking Stool

  An ancient statute in Virginia, USA, decreed: ‘Whereas many brabling women often slander and scandalize their neighbours, for which their poore husbands are often brought into chargeable and vexacious law suits and cast in great damages, be it enacted that all women found guilty be sentenced to ducking.’

  Moders, Mary (England)

  A warrant dated 17 October 1670 to Sir William Morton, Justice of the King’s Bench, and the Recorder and Sheriffs of London, contained instructions ‘to reprieve Mary Moders alias Carleton alias Kirton alias Blacke, who has been a second time condemned to death for felony, and to cause her to be inserted in the next general transportation pardon for convicts of Newgate’.

  Mary Moders was nothing if not a colourful and fascinating character. Born in Canterbury on 22 January 1642, her father was a chorister in the cathedral in that city, but she was to claim her birthplace to be that of Cologne and her father of being Henry Van Wolway, ‘a Licentiate and Doctor of Civil Law, and Lord of Holmstein, a man esteemed for his services done to the City of Cologne in mediating their peace, security and neutrality, in the Swedish and German War’. Whether such a gentleman actually existed is not known; nevertheless, having ‘created’ him, she thereby claimed to be a German princess.

  When she was sixteen years of age Mary married Thomas Stedman, a cobbler, by whom she had two children, both dying in infancy. She lived with him for about three years but, getting bored with him, she left with what valuables he had, and eloped with a mate of a ship bound for the Barbados, but Thomas swore out a warrant against her, and she was arrested and imprisoned in Dover Castle. When eventually released, she went abroad for two years, on return marrying a surgeon, Mr Day. But having committed bigamy, she was tried, though for some reason acquitted. Off she went again, this time to the Continent, where she picked up a smattering of French and German, having employed her considerable charms in a brothel. Insisting on having her own personal boudoir, she consorted only with very rich clients, extracting fees appropriate to the regal services she had bestowed on them.

  She came back to England in 1662 and met a man named John Carleton, as much a charlatan as her, for she was pretending to be a German princess and he a gentleman of quality. They married on 21 April 1663, but he found out that she was already married and she found herself arrested for bigamy – again! Awaiting trial, she was committed to Newgate and, as quoted in Howel’s State Papers, ‘After she was arraigned and going to gaol, her husband told her he must now bid her adieu for ever, to which she replied, couplet-wise, “Nay, my Lord, ’tis not amiss, Before we part, to have a kiss.” And so saluted him, saying, “You cheated me and I cheated you; you told me you were a Lord, and I told you I was a Princess. And so I think I fitted you.” And so saluting each other, they parted.’

  Her case caused a great deal of interest, and for a time she was the talk of the metropolis. Samuel Pepys went to the prison on 29 May 1663, writing in his Diary: ‘Then with Creed, to see the German Princess at the Gate-House at Westminster.’ At the time, prisons were akin to present-day zoos, in that the public could satisfy their curiosity by viewing the inmates. After being acquitted for the second time, she appeared on the stage of London’s Duke’s Theatre, and once performed in a play bearing her own name, The German Princess, Pepys being in the audienc
e, not applauding but deploring her acting ability.

  More adventures followed. Mary pretended to be an innocent damsel newly arrived from the countryside, claiming to have a £1,000 dowry from an uncle. A Mr Woodson of Islington walked straight into her net, a useful catch, he having an income of £200 per annum and £500 in ready money; she assumed extreme coyness, but by guile and promises reduced his cash flow by £300 before changing her address to one in Houndsditch. There the records show that:

  She told the landlady that a Country Gentleman of her Acquaintance, happening to fall sick in an Alehouse in the City, died, and some friends of his, and her together, had thought it convenient to remove the Corpse to a House of more Credit, in order to arrange a handsome Burial. The landlady readily granted the use of her best Chamber, whither the ‘Corpse’ was brought, and an undertaker in Leadenhall Street laid hold of the Jobb, having received an unlimited Commission to perform the Funeral, that nothing should be lacking to make as complete as possible. Accordingly he provided a good Quantity of Old Plate for an Ornament to the Room, where the Body lay, these being two large Silver Candlesticks, a Silver Flagon, two Silver Bowls and several other pieces of Plate. But the night before the intended burial, Madam and her maid (a baggage as unscrupulous as she) handed out to the Comrades all the Man’s Plate, together with the velvet pall, and then got away by a Ladder that was placed to the Balcony. Upon opening the Coffin, which had been brought from the Alehouse ready nailed up, it was filled with nothing but Brickbats [pieces of brick].