“THE story of her career, up to the terrible denouement now impending, is one of the most ghastly and revolting character,” said The Northern Echo 150 years ago today as the news broke that the Home Office had given permission for three more recently buried bodies to be exhumed from the churchyard of St Helen Auckland as the search for victims of Mary Ann Cotton (below) was widened.
“Never was there any chapter of horrors more awful than that which we have heard attributed to this Murton Colliery girl,” said the Echo. “Her path from the altar, thrice visited, to the gaol is strewn with deaths – deaths which is it is almost irrational to expect can be explained, and which it is yet almost equally a tax upon human credulity to believe can have been the work of one wretched human being, however lost.”
From a distance of 150 years, we are following how the story of Mrs Cotton was revealed to the astonished people of the Auckland area. We’ve already seen how she was arrested at her home of 13, Front Street, West Auckland, on July 13, 1872, for the suspected murder, by poisoning, of her seven-year-old stepson, and how she’d appeared before Bishop Auckland magistrates for the first time on August 21, 1872. She was sent to Durham Gaol to await trial for murder.
READ MORE: MARY ANN COTTON ARRESTED 150 YEARS AGO
READ MORE: MARY ANN COTTON IN COURT FOR THE FIRST TIME
With the neighbourhood already convinced of her guilt for killing up to 17 of those closest to her, on September 14, 1872, the body of her late lover, Joseph Nattrass, was exhumed from the churchyard. He had died, aged 35, of “grinding” stomach pain, in Mary Ann’s house on April 1, 1872.
The churchyard in St Helen Auckland where the exhumations took place
Seven graves were opened until the right one was found, and the Echo reported that although Nattrass’s body had begun to decompose, “those who knew the deceased during life recognised him very easily”.
His body was taken to Mr Nellist’s farm nearby for a post mortem, and samples from his organs were sent to the eminent toxicologist Dr Thomas Scattergood, of the Leeds School of Medicine. Dr Scattergood quickly discovered “a large quantity of arsenic” in them.
This prompted Bishop Auckland police to request Home Office permission to exhume the bodies of Mary Ann’s late husband, Frederick, who had died on September 20, 1871, of her 10-year-old stepson, Frederick Jnr, and her 14-month-old baby, Robert Robson Cotton, both of whom had died in March 1872.
In her 41 years, Mary Ann had moved around the Durham coalfield with her various husbands, and she was now in jail where she was pregnant with her 13th child.
“It is said that no less than 17 deaths have taken place in her house, including three husbands,” said the Echo. “In most of these deaths, if not in all, it is rumoured that the prisoner had a pecuniary interest, either by insurance or otherwise.”
The Echo said the exhumations would take place shortly in secret – although when they did take place, the paper would have a reporter present to capture with chilling detail exactly what took place, as we shall see in a couple of weeks’ time.
“From what has transpired of the facts in possession of the police in this extraordinary case, it appears to certain that Mary Ann Cotton, now a prisoner in the County Gaol, has pursued a course unexampled in the annals of modern crime,” finished the Echo article 150 years ago – even though, of course, Mrs Cotton had still not been convicted of a single crime.
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