NANNIE DOSS: LONELY HEARTS LADY LOVED HER MAN TO DEATH
The Trial of the Green Wallpapers
In late spring of 1872, Mary Ann sent Charles to a local chemist to purchase a small quantity of arsenic. The chemist refused to sell the poison to anyone under the age of 21, as was the law. Undeterred, Mary Ann asked a neighbor to purchase the substance and in July Charles died of gastric fever.
But Mary Ann had either been in the West Aukland area too long — or the neighbors were more readily skeptical — because suspicions were immediately aroused in neighbors and physicians.
dark and full of people
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The first person Mary Ann told about Charles’s death was Thomas Riley, a minor government official that she had consulted previously about the possibility of sending Charles into a workhouse. Riley had said that it would only be possible if she went with him, which she declined. She told Riley that the boy was “in the way” of a marriage with Quick-Manning, and predicted that, “I won’t be troubled long. He’ll go like all the rest of the Cotton family.” Riley said the boy appeared completely healthy, and so he was surprised when Mary Ann stopped him only five days later to say that young Charles had died.
Riley went to the village police office and to a doctor and outlined his growing suspicions. The doctor was similarly surprised to hear of the news, as he and his assistant had tended to Charles five times during the previous week and had detected nothing dire, let alone life threatening, in the young boy. Riley convinced the doctor to delay writing a death certificate until he could look into the situation further.
Mary Ann, instead of going to fetch the doctor after the boy’s death, hurried to the insurance office to collect on Charles’s policy. She learned that they would not issue the money until they had a death certificate, so she returned home to get the document from the doctor. Instead of receiving the certificate, Mary Ann received the startling news that she would not be receiving a signed death certificate until after a formal inquest was held.
A brief inquest was held and initial evidence did not indicate death by unnatural causes. Angry at Riley for initiating the investigation, Mary Ann told him that he could be responsible for the costs of Charles’s burial.
The young boy’s internment would most likely not have been the end of the story, and Mary Ann would have gone on with her plan to marry Quick-Manning and probably continue obtaining insurance monies from other gastric fever victims — but the local newspapers latched onto the story. They reported on the inquest but also alluded to the neighborhood gossip that Mary Ann was an active poisoner. These reports fanned the fires of rumors and hearsay and the feeling toward Mary Ann within West Aukland became bitter and suspicious. Quick-Manning was appalled by this type of gossip about his intended, and was apparently distressed enough to sever all connections with Mary Ann.
Mary Ann began preparations to leave the area, although her friends warned her that it would look suspicious if she did. Unknown to her, however, suspicions were already building and were about to close in around her. A doctor from the inquiry had kept samples of Charles’s stomach so that he could test them later in his lab. He did so, and the samples tested positive for arsenic. The doctor went to the authorities, who arrested Mary Ann and ordered Charles’s body exhumed and fully tested. The body of Joseph Nattrass was also dug up (after six exhumations of other corpses — the elderly sexton of the church couldn’t remember exactly where Nattrass was buried) and tested positive for the presence of arsenic. There was debate and talk of further exhumations, but it was decided to proceed with the single murder charge of young Charles Cotton — although the trial was delayed until after the delivery of the daughter fathered by John Quick-Manning.
Her trial began in March of 1873. The prosecution brought forth numerous witnesses who testified about Mary Ann's purchases of arsenic, the long list of gastric fever victims in her past, and about her statements regarding Charles being an obstacle to her marrying Quick-Manning.
The defense claimed that Charles may have obtained the arsenic that killed him from inhaling loose airborne particles of arsenic that was used as a dye in the green wallpaper of the Cotton home. The judge dismissed this theory and the jury retired for only 90 minutes before finding Mary Ann guilty of the murder of Charles Cotton.
Mary Ann continued to proclaim her innocence and wrote numerous letters to her friends and supporters. A letter to her estranged husband, James Robinson, asked him to bring her child and two stepchildren to visit her in prison. She went on to beg Robinson “if you have one spark of kindness in you — get my life spared...you know yourself there has been...most dreadful lies told about me. I must tell you: you are the cause of all my trouble. If you had not (abandoned me). I was left to wander the streets with my baby in my arms...no place to lay my head.”
Robinson ignored her letter, so she wrote him again and asked him to visit her. Robinson sent his brother-in-law to the prison in his stead. Mary Ann was upset that Robinson did not come himself, but asked the man about the children and requested that a petition be circulated in her support. Petitions were eventually created and signed by Mary Ann’s former employers, ministers, and other supporters. As her execution date neared, she was cheered by a letter from the couple who had adopted the infant she and Quick-Manning had conceived. She replied to the letter, asking the couple to “kiss my babe for me.”
On March 24, 1873, Mary Ann was led to the scaffold where the elderly hangman misjudged the logistics of the execution — so instead of dying quickly, Mary Ann struggled after the trapdoor was released, and it took at least three minutes for her to be slowly and painfully strangled by the noose.
Chances are, some of Mary Ann's alleged victims died from natural causes or reasons other than poisoning by her hands. Later researchers of the case would estimate her victims as numbering anywhere from 15 to the full count of 21 people who died while living with or near Mary Ann: ten of her children by various husbands, three of those husbands, five stepchildren, her mother, Cotton’s sister Margaret, and her lover Nattrass. Theories of motive range from the collection of insurance money to the desire to rid herself of people that she felt were “obstacles” — or a combination of both.
Because she maintained her innocence to the end, it will never be known for sure how many victims Mary Ann claimed in her endless quest for the money that made her feel secure. Her notoriety continues with her fame as Britain's first female serial killer and in a popular children's rhyme:
Mary Ann Cotton —
She's dead and she's rotten!
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 — selling black puddings a penny a pair."
