Britain's most notorious murderer who was from Bishop Auckland

Crowds gathered to jeer and hiss at Mary Ann Cotton; mothers grabbed their young children and hid them in their skirts so they could not see the face of this bigamist bogeywoman.

“Prisoner, a fresh-looking woman, about 38 years of age, is a widow, having had three husbands and lost by death several children and a lodger,” said The Northern Echo on August 22, 1872, after the first day of the hearing in the high-ceilinged courtroom above the police station in Bondgate.

Mary Ann had spent her first nights in captivity in a cell in that police station following her arrest, on July 18, 1872, at her home of 13, Front Street, West Auckland, on suspicion of murdering her seven-year-old stepson, Charles Edward Cotton, there on July 12, 1872.

She had then been transferred to Durham jail as the community became convulsed by gossip and horror as the stories of what she had done grew ever more lurid: the murder of up to 21 of her children, husbands and lovers in order to get her hands on insurance money or because they stood in the way of her moving on to a new partner and a better life.

An Edwardian postcard of High Bondgate, courtesy of Tom Hutchinson, looking towards the Market Place. The police station and courtroom were on the right but were demolished in the 1970s

The new buildings on the right are where the police station and courtroom in Bishop Auckland used to be and the site of the hearing 150 years ago. Picture: Google StreetView

The committal hearing that was held 150 years ago this week was the first chance for the Bishop Auckland police to lay out the evidence against her, although most of the public thought they already knew her story – and her guilt.

She was born Mary Ann Robson in 1832 in Low Moorsley, near Hetton-le-Hole. Her father, Michael, was killed in 1842 falling down the shaft at Murton colliery while repairing a pulley wheel.

She married her first husband, miner William Mowbray, on July 18, 1852. Their search for work took them to Plymouth and Cornwall, but they returned to east Durham in 1860, where William, 39, died of typhus fever on January 15, 1865. In their eight years of marriage, Mary Ann had had at least seven children, but at the time of William’s death, only two were alive – and, a couple of months later, Mary Jane, aged three, died of typhus. Mary Ann gave the only survivor, Isabella, seven, to her mother in Seaham Harbour and went to work as a “nurse” at the Old Sunderland Infirmary.

Mary Ann Cotton, played by Joanne Froggatt in ITV's 2016 Dark Angel version of the story, with her first husband, William Mowbray 

There she met steam tug driver George Ward, whom she married in August 1865.

But he died, aged 33, of cholera in October 1866.

This enabled Mary Ann to take a post as housekeeper to respectable shipwright James Robinson, of Pallion in Sunderland, whose wife had just passed away leaving him with five children under 10. Mary Ann started with him on December 20, 1866, and the following day his infant, John, died.

Mary Ann, who had a strange – indeed fatal – attraction for men, began to console Mr Robinson, but as their relationship began to develop, she was called to Seaham Harbour where her mother had fallen ill. Mary Ann nursed her until she died on March 15, 1867. This was disastrous for Mary Ann as she had to resume to care for her daughter Isabella, now nine.

She took Isabella back to Pallion with her, where there was suddenly a sad run of deaths in the Robinson household: in nine April days, two young Robinsons died of gastric fever, followed by Isabella.

Mary Ann was by now pregnant by Mr Robinson whom she married on August 11, 1867. The following February, she gave birth to a daughter, who only lived a fortnight before she succumbed to convulsions.

In 1869, Mr Robinson began to suspect that Mary Ann was stealing from him and the marriage broke up with Mary Ann running away. She worked briefly for a Spennymoor doctor, Dr Hefferman in Whitworth Terrace, who became suspicious both of her light-fingeredness and her apparent pregnancy, so she fled to her new lover, Frederick Cotton, of Walbottle, who was himself a widower with two children.

They married – bigamously, as Mary Ann was still married to Mr Robinson – in September 1870, and five months later, Robert Robson Cotton was born.

In April 1871, the Cotton family – Frederick, Mary Ann, two stepchildren plus the baby – moved to West Auckland as Frederick had got a job as a hewer at Pease and Partners’ South Durham Colliery.

But, he suddenly fell ill at the pit and, aged 39, on September 20, 1871, he died of typhoid fever in the family home in Johnson Terrace (off Darlington Road, now demolished).

This enabled Mary Ann to move in her lover, Joseph Nattrass, as her “lodger”, but then she suffered another run of tragedy: in March 1872, her ten-year-old stepson, Frederick, died of gastric fever followed by her ten-month-old baby, Robert, who died of teething convulsions, followed by Mr Nattrass, 36, who died of stomach-grinding pain. For the boys, Mary Ann got £7 insurance each, and for Mr Nattrass, she received £15 from the Shildon Friendly Burial Society for his funeral and inherited clothing and a good watch worth £30.

Mary Ann Cotton's home of 13 Front Street, West Auckland, still stands. Here she murdered her final victim, Charles Edward Cotton, aged seven, and here she was arrested 150 years ago

The tragedies enabled Mary Ann to move to 13, Front Street, a narrow three-storey house overlooking West Auckland green, where she took in lodgers. The house had a single room on each floor, with ladders rather than stairs, and the downstairs was decorated with green coloured wallpaper.

Now nearing 40, Mary Ann had had at least 12 children but she was only responsible for a stepson, seven-year-old Charles Edward Cotton. His inconvenient existence meant she couldn’t squeeze a further paying lodger into the house, and threatened to jeopardise her chances of landing another husband because she was, once more, pregnant.

Mary Ann Cotton's home of 13 Front Street, West Auckland, still stands. Here she murdered her final victim, Charles Edward Cotton, aged seven, and here she was arrested 150 years ago

The identity of the father was a matter of great conjecture. It could have been the late Nattrass, although Mary Ann encouraged gossip linking her to a chap known as either John Mann or Richard Quick-Manning. He was an excise officer connected to West Auckland Brewery, and the gossip said that, although he was ten years her junior, he was prepared to become her fourth legal – or fifth illegal – husband.

But would he want to take seven-year-old Charles, another man’s child?

Mary Ann tried to offload the youngster onto his uncle in Ipswich, but when this was unsuccessful she approached Thomas Riley, a grocer and draper in West Auckland who was also the Assistant Overseer of the Poor, to place the lad in the workhouse.

Mr Riley remembered a conversation with Mary Ann on July 6, 1872, in which he told her application was unlikely to be be successful. She then said the boy, despite his apparent health, “will go like the rest” of the Cottons.

At 6am on July 12, Mr Riley was in Front Street where he found Mary Ann in a state of great distress. “She said her boy was dead,” Mr Riley later said in evidence. “I was considerably shocked.

“I said ‘you don’t mean to say the little fellow I saw on Saturday night is dead?’.

“I afterwards went to the police and gave information of the boy’s death.”

The only picture of Mary Ann Cotton

This information led to Mary Ann’s arrest on July 18 (see Memories 586) and then, as suspicions grew, the exhumation of the boy’s body from its grave in St Helen’s Auckland churchyard on July 26 (Mems 587). Samples from the body were sent to the most eminent toxicologist in the north, Dr Thomas Scattergood of the Leeds School of Medicine, and 150 years ago this week, on the second day of the committal hearing, he was in the courtroom in Bishop Auckland to deliver his verdict.

Mary Ann is said to have been composed throughout the proceedings, although it is also said that she continuously clutched a white handkerchief to the side of her face.

Although she had spent all the money Mr Nattrass had left her on a defence solicitor, she was unrepresented as Dr Scattergood told the court: “I found arsenic in the contents of the stomach and in the contents of the bowel, in the substance of the stomach and liver, the lungs, the heart, the kidneys. I did not find any in the spleen. There were brown stains of faeces upon a napkin and in there I also found arsenic.

“I am of opinion the death resulted from poison by arsenic.”

This was devastating.

The Northern Echo concluded its report on August 24, 1872, by saying: “Prisoner was then cautioned in the usual form, and asked if she had anything to say. On replying in a subdued tone in the negative, she was then formally committed for trial at the next assizes at Durham on the charge of wilful murder.”

Mary Ann, whose pregnancy was beginning to show, was then escorted through the streets to the railway station, with the eyes and insults of the town burning into her, to be returned to Durham jail.

Joanne Froggatt as Mary Ann Cotton in typical shawl and bonnet - although such was Durham women's disgust for her that these fashions changed almost over night once she was seen wearing them

It is said that she walked with a black and white shawl over her black dress, which was very much the fashion of the day. Because of the connection to the most notorious woman in the county, no woman in the coalfield was ever again seen wearing such a combination again.

There were plenty more twists, and one birth, to come before Mary Ann's trial, including more grisly exhumations of partly decomposed bodies from St Helen Auckland churchyard, as we shall see in future weeks…

READ MORE: MARY ANN COTTON ARRESTED 150 YEARS AGO 

READ MORE: SHOCK AS COTTON'S STEPSON'S BODY EXHUMED

The Sun Inn was directly beside the police station in High Bondgate. When the station was demolished, the Sun Inn was dismantled brick by brick and taken to Beamish museum, where it still sells beer. The landlord of the Sun, John Leng, organised a fund to pay for Mary Ann Cotton's defence, but much of the money disappeared