AT 6am on August 2, 1875 – 150 years ago next summer – three convicted murders were roused from their cells in Durham jail and taken to meet their dreadful fate.
"All three, in the prime of life, united by a common bond of guilt, meet for the first and last time in life beneath the gallows, to be abruptly hurled into the unseen world," said The Northern Echo that morning. "It is most horrible."
By 8.03am it was all over. A black flag was hoisted outside the jail to inform the large crowd that had gathered outside that the three – a female poisoner from Gainford, a drunk from Barnard Castle and an Irishman from Darlington – had been executed.
Or, as the Echo said: “the Durham summer murder crop had been reaped”.
These are the stories of the three murderers whose lives were harvested that day in the name of justice…
“MRS Pearson was the first executed," reported The Northern Echo on Tuesday, August 3, 1875. "After the rope and the cap had been adjusted, the bolt was withdrawn, the woman dropped in the air, and died without a struggle.
"Such was the end of the Gainford poisoner."
Of the 33 people hanged at Durham Gaol during the 19th Century, only two were female.
The first was Mary Ann Cotton, the mass-murderess, of West Auckland, in 1873. The second was the Gainford poisoner, Elizabeth Pearson, two years later.
READ MORE: THE FULL STORY OF MARY ANN COTTON
OR: MARY ANN COTTON AND THE TEAPOTS OF TERROR
The two cases share several similarities. Mary Ann Cotton poisoned anything up to 21 people – her mother, her husbands, her lovers, her children – and callously claimed their insurance policies.
Lizzie Pearson only poisoned one – the man she regarded as her father – but after she had killed him, she callously stripped his house of everything so there was barely a sheet left to cover his corpse.
Or so the prosecution alleged.
Aunt Jane, too, had married in Gainford. In 1865 she took a widower called James Watson as her husband, and Lizzie came to regard him as a surrogate father. He was a groom by trade, and was well-regarded by the village big-wigs for whom he worked.
In 1874 Jane died, so James took a lodger, George Smith, to help cover his annual rent of £7 for a house that still stands in Church Row.
In early 1875, 74-year-old James fell ill with pneumonia.
Twenty-eight-year-old Lizzie dropped everything to nurse him. In fact, she shut up her own home and moved in with him, bringing her husband and a one-year-old girl (it isn't clear if this was her infant) with her.
Lizzie was a fine nurse. The prosecutor at her trial said: "The old man, I believe, was very fond of Lizzie; and he said he was never better waited upon in his life."
So fine a nurse was Lizzie that James started to recover.
Indeed, when Dr Francis Homfray visited on March 15, there was talk of the patient being sufficiently strong to come downstairs for the first time in months.
But four hours after the doctor departed, James was dead.
"His death to him (Homfray) was quite a matter of surprise," the Echo said in its report of the inquest held in the Lord Nelson Inn on March 19.
This could, said the doctor, have been caused by drinking an overhot cup of tea.
But something else played on his mind. He remembered the conversation he had had with Lizzie four hours before the old man's death.
"His niece said his bowels were not acting sufficiently," he told the inquest. "I said I will make him a mild pill. She said, no, can't you send him a powder instead? I had never given him a powder. She, however, preferred one and I made him one up."
Why had Lizzie been so insistent on a powder? Why could the doctor find no cause of death at all from his examinations? What was the strange fluid in the stomach?
Deputy coroner Thomas Dean ordered further investigation and adjourned the inquest.
Dr Homfray placed the stomach, intestine and liver in a glass jar, pushed the cork stopper down, sealed it in three places with his own crest, and gave it to Superintendent Isaac Thompson, of Barnard Castle police, for onward transmission to Thomas Scattergood, an eminent medical man in Leeds, whose evidence had condemned Mary Ann Cotton to the gallows two years earlier.
What Mr Scattergood discovered scandalised the inquest when it re-convened in the Lord Nelson on April 16.
After making his sensational discovery, Mr Scattergood had asked Supt Thompson to scout round the village.
Then Ann Hall was called to give evidence. She had lived a couple of doors down in Church Row and been called by the lodger when James had had a trembling fit.
In the bedroom she found Lizzie holding the patient's wrists. "He gave a groan and said he could not tremble it out," said Ann. "He went quite still, his teeth set, his eyes fixed for death and his hands were folded over his chest."
Trembling, stomach pains and sudden seizure, said Mr Scattergood, were consistent with strychnine poisoning.
Shop-keeper Corner told the inquest he had recently sold two packets of Battle's Vermin Killer to Jane Pearson.
"I gave it Lizzie Pearson, my daughter-in-law," said Mrs Pearson. "It was at her request that I obtained the powders. She told me that I had not to say anything to her husband, as he did not like poison about the house. There were some persons present when I gave her the poison, but I did not let them see it. She placed it in her breast, and told me I had to say nothing about it."
Lizzie had apparently been bothered with mice eating her feather bed.
The inquest in the pub sent her for trial at Durham Assizes on a charge of wilful murder.
"Elizabeth Pearson, who is a respectable-looking, middle-aged woman, heard the verdict with perfect composure, and stated that she would have some witnesses to call on her behalf," said the Echo.
Durham Assizes were held four times a year when the most serious cases in the county were tried.
The Grand Jury was sworn in on July 8 by Mr Justice Archibald – the judge who had heard the Cotton case just two years earlier.
In his opening remarks he gave a brief summary of the jury's workload. Of Lizzie's case, he said: "The depositions do not disclose anything in the shape of motive, but he thought they would find enough there to return a true bill."
What can the judge have meant? "A true bill"? How can he have formed any judgement before the jury had heard any of the evidence tested in court? This sounds very prejudicial to 21st Century ears.
Then Judge Archibald discovered that Lizzie had no one to represent her. "His lordship appointed Mr Ridley to defend her, " said the Echo.
Can Mr Ridley really have been fully briefed next morning to battle for his client's skin?
"The prisoner was dressed in a mauve gown, over which was thrown a black shawl; her bonnet was covered with black crape," said the Echo of the moment Lizzie appeared in court on her day of destiny. "She seemed very composed, and was accommodated with a chair."
The prosecution ran through the evidence heard at the inquest. Then it tried to address the deficiency of its case: a lack of a motive to explain why Lizzie should do such a terrible thing to the man she regarded as her father.
Into the witness box stepped Robert Watson, the stonemason son of the deceased who lived in Barnard Castle.
Robert said: "I wanted my father to give up his house and go to lodgings, or come to stop with me. My father said he would like to spend his time in Gainford. I said: 'If it is your wish to stop here, I'll allow you 4s or 5s a week; but you must sell off your furniture. We can't pay this rent'."
Poor James had been ill with pneumonia for months. He had no income, no pension – that’s why he had taken the lodger, George Smith, to help pay the rent.
So the son was advising the old man to sell off his best possessions to keep the wolf from the door and the roof over his head. "My father had a very nicely-furnished house for a labouring man," Robert told the Assizes.
Robert said nearly all the furniture had come from James' second wife – the woman, now dead, who was Lizzie's aunt and who had brought Lizzie up.
Here, at last, was the motive.
Lizzie felt she had a claim to her aunt's nice furniture, so decided to get it before Robert sold it off in front of her very eyes.
So, said the prosecution, she killed James and claimed what she felt was rightfully hers.
Robert told how he had received a telegraph in Barnard Castle telling him of his father's sudden demise. He had immediately travelled to Gainford.
"My father's body was in the house, laid on the bedstead bars, no bedding left, but only a pillow laid under his head."
Church Row neighbour Mary Brown was called to complete the prosecution case.
"The furniture was in the house in the morning," she said. "I saw a feather bed taken away before my window."
And it was all found at Lizzie's house.
The prosecution concluded that before the old man was even cold, callous Lizzie had made off with all of his valuables so that there wasn't even a mattress left on which to lie his corpse, nor a sheet with which to cover it.
Lizzie’s counsel, Mr Ridley, apparently on top of his brief after only a couple of hours reading, was called to present her defence.
Rather oddly, he did not cross-examine Robert Watson, the prosecution’s main witness, even though he had told the court his father had "signed" some furniture over to Lizzie – presumably in a will. This would have given Lizzie some cover when she removed the items.
But Mr Ridley did elicit from Supt Isaac Thompson, of Barnard Castle, two potentially crucial pieces of information.
Firstly, Supt Thompson confirmed: "I never charged the prisoner with robbing the house."
It took a month before Mr Scattergood's evidence came back from Leeds suggesting murder was afoot, so in the intervening period Lizzie should have been arrested for stealing the furniture – if she really had stolen it.
Unless, of course, she was appropriating – albeit with unseemly haste – what had been signed over to her and so it was rightfully hers.
And secondly, Mr Ridley asked about the lodger, George Smith.
He had shared James's house, had been present when the old man died, had attended the inquests in the Lord Nelson Inn, but had disappeared as soon as there was evidence of murder.
Supt Thompson said: "I saw George Smith at the inquest, but have never seen him since. I have tried to find him, and have sent all over for him, but he has not been found yet."
Mr Milvain, prosecuting, summed up his case "in an address of considerable length and emotion".
He said: "Although Smith was not to be found, that was no reason to assign the committal of this dastardly, cruel and heartless murder to a man – a razor-grinder – who could have no possible motive.
"There was a great deal of jealousy about the furniture. Before the deceased could sell his furniture, before the son could have become possessed of it, there was a motive for her (Lizzie) to possess herself of them first; and she accomplished that motive in the cruel, hard, cold manner in which she effected the death of her uncle."
Mr Ridley summed up the defence.
He said there was no proof that James had died of strychnine poisoning. If he had, there was no proof that Lizzie had administered the poison.
And if there had been any poisoning, he said, "Smith's flight caused it to be more likely that he, either by accident or otherwise, had poisoned the old man".
The jury retired for an hour.
When they returned, they pronounced Lizzie guilty.
"It is a crime of very deep dye – the poisoning of your uncle, who seems always to have treated you with affection.
“There is evidence from which the only conclusion one can draw is that you have made the most deliberate preparations for this crime, and carried it out to its accomplishment.
"Crimes of this character are undertaken and endeavoured to be carried out in secret; but it so happens in the order of Providence that, though the crime is secret, it may be said to write its own history in the traces it leaves, which science now enables us to decipher, and to read without doubt or uncertainty.
"You stand in a very serious position and, while your life is forfeited, let me earnestly urge you to seek the pardon of an offended God through the mercy of His Son Jesus Christ.
"It remains for me to pass the last sentence of the law upon you."
Done and dusted within the day, poor Lizzie was doomed.
The version of events in the Darlington and Stockton Times (D&ST) said: "Though cool and apparently collected whilst the sentence of death was being passed upon her, she seemed to realise her position when taken to the waiting room below the court, and burst into tears, and in this state she remained for some time.
"The unhappy woman was removed to the same cell which was occupied by Mary Ann Cotton, where she will remain until the sentence of the law is carried out."
Cotton, the mass-poisoner of West Auckland, had hanged on March 24, 1873.
The date set for the Gainford poisoner's execution was Monday, August 2 and executioner William Marwood was booked.
Initially, the people of Gainford were against their neighbourhood poisoner. But there was sympathy in Barnard Castle. A petition was got up.
As Lizzie's date with destiny drew near, the petition was signed "by all the doctors in Barnard Castle and the greatest portion of the inhabitants of both Barnard Castle, Gainford and Bishop Auckland".
The Home Office rejected it.
"The doom of the unfortunate woman was sealed on Friday when, in accordance with instructions from the Home Office, a medical examination was made proving that she was not in the condition she at the 11th hour had alleged, " said the D&ST.
There was a story in Gainford, still repeated to this day, that Lizzie gave birth while in prison, but there is no evidence to back this up and her rotund appearance would surely have been remarked upon at her trial less than a month earlier.
On Friday, July 30, she received her last visitors. "The woman Pearson was visited by her husband, who carried an infant child, a year-and-a-half old, in his arms, " said the D&ST.
"On the subject of the crime she said nothing, but blamed severely her husband's mother for alleged misconduct."
As her husband and the baby left her all alone in the condemned cell, she prepared herself for the fate she was to meet with two other convicted murderers…
READ PART 2 HERE: THE STORY OF WILLIAM McHUGH, THE BARNARD CASTLE WHISKEY DRINKER
Comments: Our rules
We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.
Please report any comments that break our rules.
Read the rules here