Female Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  Mary Ann Cotton

  No sooner had Catherine Wilson been executed than Mary Ann Cotton apparently began her killing. An ordinary-looking former Sunday school teacher and one-time nurse in her late thirties, Cotton reputedly murdered between fifteen and twenty victims in an eight-year period from 1864 to 1872. Killing those in her care, she is believed to have murdered eleven of her own children, five stepchildren, three husbands, a sister-in-law, a lodger, and her own mother. Using arsenic, Cotton easily circumvented the Sale of Arsenic Act by extracting it from rat poison, the sale of which was not controlled. Moving from town to town and remarrying, sometimes bigamously, Mary Ann changed names and identities as she left corpses in her wake. She killed almost mindlessly to relieve herself of the burden of her children or for inheritance. Because she changed jurisdictions so frequently, authorities did not notice a pattern of similar deaths around her—most attributed to “gastric fever.”

  Mary Ann Cotton was only caught because she tried to unload one of her dying victims into a workhouse. When the victim died, the suspicious workhouse doctor detected arsenic poison and Cotton was arrested on July 18, 1872. Because she was pregnant, her trial was delayed. But after the birth of a daughter in jail, it began on March 5, 1873. Cotton was convicted for one murder and executed on March 24.

  Cotton became legendary with even a children’s rhyme celebrating her notoriety:

  Mary Ann Cotton

  She’s dead and she’s rotton

  She lies in her bed

  With her eyes wide oppen. [sic]

  After Mary Ann Cotton, burial insurance regulation, improved testing for poison, and the control of arsenic sales on a retail level contributed to a decline in what we might call desperate amateur poisoning. But it did not stop women who were coldly determined to kill.

  Catherine Flannagan and Margaret Higgins

  In 1884 in Liverpool, two sisters, 55-year-old Catherine Flannagan and 41-year-old Margaret Higgins, were jointly convicted of the murder of Thomas Higgins, Margaret’s husband. The two had managed to insure him with five different burial clubs to the tune of £108. Then they cleverly soaked arsenic flypaper, the sale of which was not regulated, until they extracted sufficient arsenic for a lethal dose. Higgins’s brother apparently had been aware that his sister-in-laws had been profiteering from insuring people in their slum neighborhood who all seemed to have had untimely but profitable deaths for the two sisters. After his brother’s death, he alerted authorities and the sisters fled, after Flannagan instructed her daughter to remove and destroy a photograph of her framed in her house. After their capture, investigators charged that the two sisters had murdered eight people in addition to Thomas Higgins, including Mary Higgins, Margaret’s stepdaughter, John Flannagan, Catherine’s husband, and a woman and her father who had lodged with Flannagan. They were tried and executed, however, only for the death of Thomas.

  Another form of serial murder was connected to “baby farming” and “baby sweating.” For small fees women informally accepted and promised to care for babies that mothers could not afford to keep. Numerous cases arose where the baby farmers simply murdered the infants or allowed them to die from starvation and neglect, while still collecting the fees. “Baby sweating” involved the murder of infants with the knowledge of the mother, often arranged for while the mother was still pregnant. The newly born infant would be taken away by the baby sweater and never seen again.

  The next generation of female poisoners differed from their sisters of the Hungry 40s. The 1850s are divided between past and present by the career of the nurse Florence Nightingale, who became the most famous woman in Victorian Britain after Queen Victoria herself. Nightingale shaped the cottage industry of female nursing into a new disciplined and highly respectable profession, especially after her heroic nursing mission during the Crimean War in 1854–57 when she and a staff of 38 volunteer female nurses reduced British casualties significantly.

  The nurse became a new identity and profession for independent women in Victorian society, despite the strict rules and regulations of nursing orders. That mantle of respectability and admiration that nurses garnered was also adopted by late nineteenth-century female serial killers, many of whom were either trained as nurses or pretended to be nurses. This new generation of murdering women was not the class of uneducated, peasant, quasi-medieval, downtrodden female casualties of industrialization, but modern women with professional caregiving status. When Catherine Wilson was arrested, Britain’s medical journal Lancet commented that her crimes were especially troubling because she posed as a nurse as she killed, a shocking perversion of the ethical principles of medical care and nursing. The “angel of death” female serial killer came to us in the wake of Florence Nightingale and has been with us right up into the twenty-first century.

  England would soon become obsessed with Jack the Ripper. But in the U.S. the focus would remain on female serial killers. Although in the usual American way, they put a spin to their crimes uniquely their own.

  FEMALE SERIAL KILLERS IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY U.S.

  One social critic observed that the American Western was really about serial killing all along.128 And indeed, we encounter some of the first female serial killers in the rural frontier society of the U.S. Kate Bender and her murderous family in Kansas are probably the most famous. The Benders consisted of the 60-year-old father, John, his wife, who was about 50, their 25-year old son, John Jr., along with 24-year-old Kate. Nobody knew where the Benders had come from other than they spoke with a German accent. Upon their arrival in the small railway town of Cherryvale, Kansas, in 1871 they erected a crude cabin measuring 20 by 16 feet. One side of the cabin functioned as their living quarters, while the other side, separated by a canvas sheet, functioned as general store, restaurant, and cheap hotel.

  The young Kate Bender appeared to be the pivotal member of the family. She was attractive and claimed to be a psychic and healer, traveling around the towns in the area giving public lectures and séances as Professor Miss Katie Bender. Some of her handbills still survive, which claim that she could “heal all sorts of diseases, can cure blindness, fits, deafness and all such diseases, also deaf and dumbness.” The father and mother stayed mostly in the background, while John Jr., it was reported, was an imbecile. Between 1871 and 1873, the Benders murdered numerous travelers stopping to eat or stay at their cabin. Kate would sit them with their backs to the canvas sheet and, while distracting them with her charm, one of the Bender men would come from behind the sheet and smash the victim in the head with a sledgehammer. Kate would then throw herself on the unconscious victim and slit his throat. A specially dug pit and chute in the back allowed them to quickly dispose of a body before another traveler would come in.

  Things went wrong when they murdered William York in March 9, 1873, who was returning home from visiting his brother nearby and told him before he left that he planned to stop and have lunch at the Benders’ cabin. When William failed to return home, his brother and a posse retraced his journey several weeks later. His trail appeared to go cold at the Bender cabin. After the posse visited the cabin and inquired about the missing man, the Benders packed their things, stripped the cabin bare, and vanished on May 5, 1873.

  By then all sorts of suspicious stories were circulating about the Benders and how the men would melt away behind the canvas curtain when customers came in to eat. Several reported that Kate was abusive when they declined to sit against the canvas curtain and took their meals at the counter instead. Another recalled a gust of wind blowing Kate’s apron open, revealing her gripping a knife beneath it.

  Upon receiving news that the Benders had fled, the posse returned to the cabin and searched it. They immediately discovered the pit and detected a powerful smell of blood rising from it. A search of the grounds around the pit revealed ten or twelve bodies, depending upon the account. The bodies were all male except for one woman and a child. It was estimated that the Benders had robbed their victims of somewhere betwe
en $5,000 and $10,000.

  The fate of the Benders remains a mystery. It is believed that the posse successfully caught up with them and murdered them, splitting the loot among themselves. The wagon in which the Benders had escaped was later found bullet-ridden. Two members of the posse, one in 1909 and another in 1910, made deathbed confessions that they had killed the family and buried their bodies at the bottom of a twenty-foot dried-out well, although despite attempts, the well could not be found.

  Another lesser-known frontier-age female serial killer was Patty Cannon, who between 1802 and 1829 murdered at least twenty-five victims in Delaware, many of them slave traders, whose slaves she’d take and resell for a profit.

  Lydia Sherman—American Borgia

  While the number of female serial killers flagged in frequency in Britain after the introduction of the Sale of Arsenic Act, in the U.S., where no such legislation was enacted, the 1860s bore witness to the phenomenon that had swept the U.K. One of the first cases garnering major notoriety was that of Lydia Sherman in the 1860s. Lydia would become known as the “American Borgia” in reference to Lucrezia Borgia, a Renaissance-era Italian papal aristocrat reputed to have poisoned several victims in her family’s struggles for power. (Although it was never definitively determined to what extent she was complicit in the poisonings.)

  Lydia was born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1824 and was orphaned at 9. She and her brother were raised by an uncle in a devout Methodist upbringing. When Lydia was 16 the family moved to New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she worked as a seamstress and faithfully attended the local Methodist Church. It was in church that she met 38-year-old Edward Struck, a widower with six children who worked as a carriage blacksmith. Lydia was 19 when she married Struck in 1843.

  Despite the age difference, the marriage appeared to work. In the ensuing years, Lydia had seven children of her own in addition to the six that Edward had from his previous marriage. With thirteen children to support, Lydia and Edward did what many do in their search for fortune—they moved to New York City, eventually settling on 125th Street in Harlem, which was, in that period, a white middle-class neighborhood.

  In 1857, Edward, then aged 53, managed to enlist in the New York Police Department, a secure job with additional lucrative opportunities if the officer also happened to be corrupt. Edward apparently was not—to the consternation of his corrupt fellow officers at his precinct—and in his six years of service on the NYPD, he remained honest. This could have been the motive behind his sudden dismissal for cowardice in the autumn of 1863 when Edward was accused of not responding to a barroom fight on his beat. Edward had argued that the fight had been over by the time he arrived, but the dismissal stood.129

  Edward and Lydia had been married for twenty uneventful years. Seven of their children, six of whom were from Edward’s previous marriage, were now adults living on their own, but the couple still had six sons and daughters to care for, the youngest of which, an infant boy named William, had just been born a few months earlier.

  Edward was devastated and shamed by the charges of cowardice. At the age of 59, after a lifetime of an up-and-down struggle as a carriage blacksmith, Edward had expected the regular work on the NYPD to cushion the late years of his life. There might even have been a municipal pension in the end. But now that it was suddenly torn from him, Edward could not imagine starting over. Over the winter Edward sunk into a deep depression, unable to seek new work or even leave the family’s first-floor apartment. At one point he took a pistol and threatened to commit suicide. By the spring of 1864 he had stopped getting out of bed, washing, dressing, or feeding himself.

  Lydia, his faithful wife of twenty years, did her best to help her husband. She took in sewing work at home to make ends meet and cared for him and the children. Eventually she went to see Edward’s superior at the police department, Precinct Captain Hart, who had opposed Edward’s dismissal, hoping to get him to help her to somehow have her husband reinstated on the force. There was not much Hart could do, and when Lydia described Edward’s desperate mental state and the burden he had become to her, Hart suggested that Edward be hospitalized. As he put it, according to Lydia’s later testimony, Hart advised that Edward be “put out of the way.”

  Lydia testified that her husband “caused me at this time a great deal of trouble.” After twenty years of marriage, or perhaps precisely because of it, Lydia went to a local pharmacy and purchased an ounce of white arsenic for ten cents. The pharmacist never questioned her purchase of the commonly used household substance—it could have been purchased as easily for poisoning rats as for preventing pimples. The next morning, on May 23, 1864, she fixed Edward a bowl of porridge, mixed a thimbleful of arsenic into it, and gently propping up her husband on a pillow, spoon-fed him the arsenic meal. By the afternoon Edward was in the throes of poisoning, vomiting and suffering from agonizing abdominal pain. As the night wore on Edward was soaked in fetid perspiration while Lydia fed him more poisoned gruel and sat by his bedside wiping his brow and watching her husband curled up in pain. As Lydia explained it, it was the most merciful thing she could do for her husband, for he “would never be any good to me or to himself again.”

  Edward died the next morning. An attending physician decided that he had died of natural causes—of “consumption” (what tuberculosis was known as in those days). This was 1864 and it would not be until the 1880s that medical science would conclusively identify and understand the relationship between bacteria and certain diseases. Now in her forties, the unsuspected Lydia was a widow with six children, the youngest of whom were 9-month-old baby boy William, 4-year-old Edward Jr., and 6-year-old Martha. It took some five weeks for Lydia to grow despondent and conclude that the youngsters “could [do] nothing for me or for themselves.” After thinking about it for a day, in July 1864 she murdered her three youngest children one after the other. The 4-year-old Edward, she recalled, “was a beautiful boy, and did not complain during his illness. He was very patient.”

  All three children died painfully but there was no suspicion in their deaths. All were attributed to “remittent fever” and “bronchitis.” In the 1860s children died even more routinely than adults of a host of illnesses, none entirely understood by the medical science of the day.

  With three fewer mouths to feed, Lydia felt she could sustain the remaining three children in her family: 14-year-old George and two older girls, 12-year-old Ann and her 18-year-old namesake, Lydia. Moreover, after witnessing the tender care Lydia gave her three dying children, a neighborhood physician hired her as a full-time nurse. (No evidence was found later, however, that Lydia killed any patients during that period of employment.)

  Employed as a nurse, with her son George working as a painter’s assistant for $2.50 a week and her daughter Lydia clerking at a dry-goods store in Harlem, the family seemed to get along financially. But then George developed what was then known as “painter’s cholic”—a disabling disease resulting from lead poisoning from handling paint. Lydia nursed her son for a week, but when he failed to regain his health sufficiently fast enough to go back to work, she recalled that she became “discouraged.”

  Lydia confessed later, “I thought he would become a burden upon me, so I mixed up some arsenic in his tea. I think he died the next morning.”

  In the winter, little Ann became frequently sick with chills and fevers, requiring that her sister Lydia remain home from the dry-goods store to care for her while her mother worked as a nurse. Eventually, the sister had to leave her employment at the store and take on the much less-paying home job of sewing hat and bonnet frames. The mother later said, “I thought if I got rid of her that Lydia and myself could make a living.”

  Lydia went to a drugstore and bought some cold medicine, into which she then mixed arsenic. Ann began to vomit and suffer agonizing stomach pains as her mother attempted to “nurse” her. The physician who employed Lydia diagnosed her daughter as suffering from typhoid fever and gave Lydia time off work to stay at home to “care”
for her little girl. It took Ann four days to die her horrific death.

  Only the two Lydias remained. Mother and daughter moved into a smaller and cheaper apartment on upper Broadway, but in May the young Lydia came down suddenly with a fever. Despite her mother’s efforts to nurse her back to health, young Lydia was buried in a family plot in New York’s Trinity graveyard next to her father and five brothers and sisters. Despite the recollections of a pastor who witnessed the daughter’s convulsive death, the same physician diagnosed it as typhoid fever again. Lydia herself, while confessing to the other murders, insisted that she had nothing to do with the death of her eldest daughter.

  Lydia’s adult stepson was suspicious of his father’s death and the rapid demise of his stepbrothers and sisters. He urged the New York District Attorney’s office to exhume all seven bodies and conduct tests for arsenic. But it was too late. Lydia, totally free of any familial obligations for the first time in twenty-two years, had disappeared.

  In his study of American female poisoners, Harold Schechter writes that, “In her own grotesque way, the forty-two-year-old ex-wife and mother was authentically American: a true believer in the possibility of endless self-renewal, of leaving the past behind and reinventing her life.”130 Lydia had left her work as a nurse and moved back downtown, finding employment as a clerk in a sewing machine store on Canal Street. There she met and charmed a customer from Stratford, Connecticut, who was impressed with her lively personality and experience as a nurse, and hired her to take care of his invalid mother for room and board and eight dollars a week. Within weeks of arriving in Stratford, Lydia met a wealthy old farmer, Dennis Hurlburt, whose wife had recently died. Hurlburt was looking for a housekeeper and Lydia leapt at the opportunity. She later stated that she had been there only a few days when the old man wanted to marry her.