150 years since the ghoulish exhumations of Mary Ann Cotton's victims

“The gate of the main entrance to the churchyard had been opened, (and) over the hoar-frosted grass, the trails of recent footmarks were visible.

“It was a dull, cold, misty grey morning…

“Some four men were at work, by candlelight, when our reporter arrived at the scene of these apparently clandestine operations, the only other witnesses being a medical man, two police officers, and a silent crowd of crows, which were not long silent, but which at that early hour blackened the leafless boughs of the neighbouring trees.”

The reader must feel that something deeply unsettling is going on in this country churchyard…

“The men thus disturbing the last resting places of the dead were legalised resurrectionists. They were, in obedience to an order from Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Home Department, seeking for the mortal remains of three persons, suspected of having been consigned to untimely graves by ‘murder, most foul and unnatural’.”

It was 4am on October 15, 1872. Sgt Thomas Hutchinson of Bishop Auckland police was leading three gravediggers as they tried to unearth the bodies of Frederick Cotton Snr, 40, and his sons, Frederick, 10, and Robert, 14 months. Frederick Snr had died on September 20, 1871, shortly after moving into West Auckland and finding work at the pit; Frederick Jnr had died on March 10, 1872, and had been followed to the grave by his half-brother, Robert, on March 28, 1872.

It was now suspected they had been poisoned by Mary Ann Cotton – Frederick Snr’s wife, who was the stepmother of younger Frederick and mother of infant Robert.

As previous Memories have told, Mrs Cotton was in Durham jail, facing charges of poisoning her seven-year-old stepson, Charles Edward Cotton, who had died at their home in Front Street, West Auckland, on July 12, 1872.

READ MORE: MARY ANN COTTON ARRESTED

MARY ANN COTTON IN THE DOCK FOR THE FIRST TIME

THE EXHUMATIONS BEGIN IN THE SEARCH FOR EVIDENCE

The body of her lover, Joseph Nattrass, 36, had already been exhumed. He had died on April 1, 1872, shortly after moving in with Mary Ann. The eminent toxicologist, Dr Thomas Scattergood, of Leeds had found traces of arsenic in Joseph’s body and now the police were seeking to discover similar evidence by exhuming three more bodies from St Helen’s churchyard.

But, 116 people had been buried in the graveyard in the ten months of 1872 as smallpox and fever – and mass murder – had swept through the district.

“No memorial had been erected over these humble graves,” wrote the Echo’s reporter, who we feel was the paper’s famous editor, WT Stead. Stead only had a very small staff, and was a great writer who could turn a memorable phrase. The report from 150 years ago this week is full of memorable phrases, and it contains an echo of a story that today’s editor has been covering in 2022.

“A bewildering range of grassy mounds covers that portion of the churchyard in which the explorers were at work,” said the report. “Strange to say, there is not even in the possession of the church or parochial authorities any plan denoting the last resting places of the dead interred in this crowded God’s acre.

The church of St Helen's Auckland where the exhumations took place

“Here and hereabouts lie interred all that was mortal of successive generations, who were born, and lived, and died in this and the adjacent hamlets, of hundreds of whom, who have been carried to their last home, ever since the days of burial boards and public cemeteries. No man can say where they have been laid.”

With the help of the 72-year-old sexton and gravedigger Joey Drummond, Sgt Thomas Hutchinson, who was described as “a diligent and anxious officer” was “working by candlelight in the grey morning, exploring the mazy mounds of the dead”.

At 6.45am, after nearly three hours of forking around in the darkness, the resurrectionists found two graves that seemed to be the ones they were after.

“The coffins were speedily raised by means of long rods of iron, and were silently borne into an empty cottage adjoining the graveyard,” said the report. “They were small coffins, of unequal size… In gaudy yellow paint, on a thin tinned shield, you could read on the lid of the larger one: ‘Frederick Cotton, died March 10th 1872, aged 10 years’.”

To see such detail, the reporter must have been peering into the grave as the coffin was removed.

In the empty cottage, a whole tribe of eminent local medical men had gathered but, having seen the coffins arrive, rather than begin the post mortems at that early hour, they went either to their homes or to nearby “places of hospitality” for a spot of breakfast.

Fortified, they returned to dissect.

“We witnessed these examinations,” wrote the Echo’s reporter, who had moved from the yawning grave to the dissecting room.” We have no wish to venture upon a description of the modus operandi. The dissecting room is not a place for minute narrative. Graphic description would be an outrage against the common sensibilities of our readers.”

Having said that he could not give a graphic description of what he saw because it was too horrific, the reporter then gives a graphic description of what he saw, and it was horrific…

“There is no more sickening, no more humbling, spectacle than the process of decay,” he wrote. “To every sense, it is ghastly, hideous. The bodies were both externally and internally, though not equally so, in an advanced state of decomposition.

“In the case of poor little Frederick Cotton, there was on his head the velvet Glengarry cap which he had worn in life and which he had begged might be buried with him.”

The Cottons' house in Johnson Terrace, West Auckland, where Frederick died 150 years ago. The terrace was demolished in the 1960s and is now a grassed area

A Glengarry cap is a traditional Scottish piece of headwear and Frederick, gripped with terrible stomach pains as he died, had asked Sarah Smith, who lived next door in West Auckland and had come round to nurse him, if he could take his favourite item with him into the next world.

It was “a request with which the kind-hearted woman (with the concurrence of the boy’s mother, now strangely suspected of being his murderer) complied”, said the Echo.

The presence of the cap, and the story of how it came to be on the corpse’s head, of course also proved beyond any doubt that this really was the body of one of Mary Ann’s boys, and the reporter then watched as bits of “viscera”, organs, were removed, placed into clean glass bottles and sealed. Sgt Hutchinson’s next job was deliver the specimens in the bottles to Dr Scattergood in Leeds for analysis, but the reporter knew what that analysis would show.

“The appearances strongly resembled those previously presented in the remains of Joseph Nattrass and Charles Edward Cotton, in which arsenic in large quantities had already been found,” he said. “The examination yielded strong presumptive evidence that they were killed by arsenical poisoning.”

Why bother to call in a toxicologist when you have an expert journalist on hand?

“The bodies, having been re-coffined, were decently reinterred in their respective graves,” said the reporter.

West Auckland in December 1966, looking across to Mary Ann Cotton's last house in Front Street, which is immediately to the left of the road sign

But back out in the churchyard, the resurrectionists were still digging around searching for the body of Frederick Snr. Four people who had been present at his funeral 13 months earlier had directed them to four different parts of the churchyard with the result that they had already opened up nine graves in which some other poor soul was sleeping.

A conference took place mid-graveyard involving the overseer of the poor in West Auckland, Thomas Riley, “who is everywhere in this neighbourhood credited with having been the first to direct an intelligent suspicion upon proceedings which are now regarded as unprecedented in English criminal annals”, and the head of Bishop Auckland police, Superintendent John Henderson.

With more innocent graves likely to be cracked open in the search for Frederick Snr, they concluded “that great injury would be done to the feelings of the parishioners by pursuing the fruitless excavations further”, and so the search was called off.

The prosecution, it was felt, had found enough evidence. Mary Ann was being implicated in the deaths of about a dozen of her family members and friends, with reports emanating from Sunderland, where she had lived her early married years, that graveyards were going to be dug up there in search of more possible victims which could take the total towards 20.

Joanne Froggatt, right, as Mary Ann Cotton in the ITV adaption of her story called Dark Angel

The evidence was expected to be put to Mary Ann when her trial for murder began in November at the Durham Winter Assizes, although the accused had one last biological card to play that caused the trial to be delayed, as we shall see in future weeks.

The Echo concluded its report of the extraordinary scenes in a south Durham churchyard 150 years ago this week by saying: “Early in the afternoon, under as bright a sunshine as ever lighted up St Helen’s Auckland in October, the resurrections begun in the chill grey morning were brought to a close.”