22 Deadly Women Executed in Public and Prison: Their Crimes, Final Words and Last Moments

Some begged for mercy. Some proclaimed their innocence. Some never said a word. 22 women, five centuries,  22 executions. Case one. The charm was nailed to the door. People paid for it. They believed it would protect them. It was the thing destroying them. March 20th, 1809. York, England. Mary Bateman was 40 years old.

The city knew her as the Yorkshire witch, not as a warning, but as a title she had earned. Fortune teller, healer, the woman you went to when doctors had failed and desperation had not. She had been running cons since her teenage years, forged cures, invented prophecies, small thefts dressed as remedies.

 By the time William and Rebecca Perrigo came to her in 1806, she had turned the performance into a livelihood. Rebecca had been suffering from a fluttering sensation in her chest.  She believed she had been cursed by a neighbor. Mary told them she could help. The cure would require sealed charm packets, special paper envelopes sent regularly from Leeds to be placed around the house and never opened.

 She also prepared special food mixtures for them to consume. Follow every instruction, she said, and the curse would lift. Rebecca followed every instruction. Rebecca began to get sick. Each time she weakened, Mary sent a new packet, new instructions, and a higher fee. The family kept paying. Rebecca kept declining. When William finally tore one of the sealed packets open against Mary’s strict orders, he found a white powder inside  and had it tested.

 It was a mixture of arsenic and mercuric chloride. Mary had been folding it into every packet and mixing it into the food preparations, feeding Rebecca the poison through the very remedies Rebecca trusted with her life. Rebecca Perigo died in May 1808. William had consumed less of the treated food. His survival was the only reason Mary Bateman was ever caught.

 She was hanged at York Castle on March 20th, 1809. 5,000 people lined the route and filled the yard. Her body was taken to Leeds General Infirmary  where hospital staff charged visitors three pence each to view her corpse. 2,700 people paid. A portion of her skeleton remained on public display in Leeds for nearly two centuries.

The next woman gave the crowd something different, not a skeleton, a memory. A 16-year-old boy standing in that crowd spent the next 35 years trying to put it somewhere he could not see it anymore. Case two. Thomas Hardy was 16 years old and standing in the rain outside Dorchester Prison.

 He would become one of England’s most celebrated novelists. He later wrote that he was ashamed to have been there. He went back to it anyway for 35 years. August 9th, 1856, Dorchester, England. Elizabeth Martha Brown was approximately 45 years old. She had been described throughout her trial as composed, emotionless some said.

 Her composure unsettled the courtroom. She sat through the proceedings with a remarkable calmness, giving the jury and spectators little to read. She offered none of the emotion they seemed be waiting for. She had married a man named John Brown 20 years younger than her and drawn to the bottle and to other women in roughly equal measure.

 The marriage had been tempestuous from the beginning. John had taken up with a younger woman named Mary Davis who ran a nearby shop. Neighbors knew the pattern. He drank, he came home late. What followed between them was not peaceful. On the night of July 5th, 1856,  John returned home drunk after 2:00 a.m.

 demanding a supper she had made hours earlier. She confronted him about Mary Davis. He struck her a severe blow to the head. She picked up a hatchet. She struck him. He died from the blow. At trial, she initially claimed he had been kicked by a horse. She eventually confessed two days before her execution. The jury convicted her.

The detail history remembered was not the verdict. It was the rope. It had been raining all morning. The wet hemp caused the rope to tighten unevenly after the drop. Her body moved and turned visibly for some time. She was wearing a long black silk dress. The crowd of between 3,000 and 4,000 people stood in the misty rain and watched.

Hardy stood among them. He was 16. He wrote about it nearly 70 years later. “I saw they had put a cloth over her face. How as the cloth got wet, her features came through it.” He described what a fine figure she made against the gray sky. He wrote that he was ashamed to have been there.

 He never stopped being haunted by it. His 1891 novel, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, ends with a public execution. He told people it was her. The next woman left no novelist behind. Only a dead child and a law that arrived too late to save her, but changed England permanently after. Case three. She had to be helped to the gallows.

 She did not go calmly. She went in a state of near collapse, and a crowd of approximately 2,000 people watched it happen. April 2, 1868,  Maidstone, England. Frances Kidder was 25 years old. Her stepdaughter Louisa Kidder Staples was 11. Neighbors had heard Francis beat the child when her husband was away from home.

 They had heard it for months. No one had intervened. Francis had married William Kidder in 1865, not knowing he had two children from a previous relationship. Louisa, the older girl, came to live with them. From the beginning, the treatment Louisa received was described by those nearby as deliberate cruelty, not occasional anger, but a sustained and consistent unkindness that had gone on long enough to become a pattern.

 In August 1867, Francis took Louisa on a walk near New Romney in Kent while visiting her parents. She told those back at the house that Louisa had fallen accidentally into a ditch. The child was found face down in shallow water, water barely a foot deep. A local doctor confirmed she had drowned. The prosecution argued that in water that shallow, a child could only drown if held under.

 Francis was arrested, tried, and convicted in March 1868. The jury took 12 minutes. On the day of her execution, a crowd gathered outside the prison and burned an effigy of her husband. Francis herself had to be physically supported on her way to the scaffold. She was described as hysterical in the condemned cell. She was hanged publicly outside Maidstone prison at midday on April 2nd, 1868 by hangman William Calcraft.

 The Capital Punishment Amendment Act, the law that would permanently end public executions in Britain, passed through Parliament weeks later. Francis Kidder was, by a matter of weeks, the last woman publicly hanged in England.  History did not choose her for that distinction. The calendar placed her there.

 Across the border in Scotland, another woman had already claimed the same title six years earlier. She did not go quietly either, but the crowd that watched her was three times larger and the silence they left in afterward was something reporters wrote about and could not explain. Case four. She screamed all the way to the scaffold.

 She fainted before she reached it. She had to be carried up the steps and held in place. 3,000 people stood in Buccleuch Street and watched every second of it. April 29th, 1862,  Dumfries, Scotland. Mary Timney was 27 years old. She lived in a stone cottage at Carsphairn, 3 miles from St. John’s town of Dalry, sharing a boundary with the farm of her landlady, Ann Hannah.

The two women had a fractious relationship built on accumulated grievances. Ann suspected Mary of stealing firewood. Mary suspected Ann of an affair with her husband, Francis. Between them ran a debt Mary could never fully repay and a resentment that had nowhere left to go. On the morning of January 13th, 1862, Ann Hannah’s brothers left the farm early to work 3 miles away.

 Ann was alone. Mary appeared at her door. What followed was later described in the press as a brutal assault. Mary attacked Ann with a knife, a poker, and a wooden mallet. Ann Hannah’s brother, Lockhart, found her on the floor hours later, barely alive. She died from her injuries. Mary was found with blood-stained clothing hidden in the rafters of her cottage.

 The mallet was on the floor. She was arrested that same day and tried in April. She was convicted and condemned. As her execution approached, public sentiment shifted unexpectedly. Petitions for mercy circulated, driven partly by the knowledge that that four young children would be left without a mother. The Crown found no grounds to act on them.

Extra constables were sworn in to manage the crowd. Mary Timney had to be carried up the steps of the scaffold. She was calling out for her children. She was hanged on April 29th, 1862, and became, by coincidence, not design, the last woman publicly executed in Scotland. The crowd of 3,000 dispersed in silence. Local reporters noted it.

Not one of them could fully account for it. The next woman on this list didn’t kill once. She killed so many times across so many years that the final count has never been definitively agreed upon. And she did most of it over a cup of tea. >> Case five. The insurance paid out, then it paid out again, and again.

 Nobody asked why until the body of a 7-year-old boy was barely cold. March 24th, 1873, County Durham, England. Mary Ann Cotton was 40 years old. She was a trained nurse and a dressmaker by background. A devoted mother by all outward appearance. Every town she moved to received her as a capable woman enduring hardship with quiet dignity.

 Every town she left had a fresh grave in it. She married four times. Three of those husbands died. She gave birth to 13 children. 11 of them died. She took in stepchildren. They died, too. She nursed her mother. Her mother died. Each death was attributed to gastric fever, to stomach illness, to causes that Victorian medicine accepted without much resistance.

 She was always at the bedside. She was always the one weeping publicly at the grave. She moved on when questions began to gather, and began again somewhere new. The method was arsenic, administered in tea. It was colorless, odorless, and in 1870, nearly impossible for a general practitioner to detect unless he was looking for it specifically. She understood that.

Estimated total victims, up to 21 people across nearly two decades. Her final confirmed victim was her stepson,  Charles Edward Cotton, aged seven, in the summer of 1872. She mentioned to the local parish officer, Thomas Riley, that she expected the boy would soon be out of the way. Weeks later, the boy was dead.

 Riley remembered the remark. He reported it. A postmortem was ordered, the first time anyone had looked closely at one of Mary Ann Cotton’s losses. Arsenic was found throughout the body. Two decades, up to 21 people. It ended because one parish officer remembered one remark made in passing.

 She was hanged at Durham County Jail on March 24th, 1873. The drop was insufficient. The hangman pressed down on her shoulders to hasten her death. It took three minutes. The crowd gathered outside the walls heard it all. The next woman had no interest in patience or quiet accumulation. What she did required planning, at least two other people, and a pot large enough to boil a human head. Case six.

 The head was recovered from the Thames the morning after it had been thrown in. It had been boiled first to prevent identification. The river returned it anyway. A witness looked at it and recognized the face. May 9th, 1726.  London, England. Catherine Hayes was approximately 36 years old. She had been born near Birmingham in 1690 and had come to London with her husband, John Hayes, a carpenter and coal merchant who operated a shop on Oxford Road, Tyburn.

To anyone looking from the outside, a married woman keeping a house, entirely unremarkable. She had a lodger named Thomas Wood, a butcher by trade, and a younger man named Thomas Billings, a tailor who had come to stay with them. Billings, records suggest, was Catherine’s illegitimate son, though this was not confirmed at trial.

 The three of them had, over the early months of 1726, reached a shared conclusion about John Hayes. On the night of March 1st, 1726, they gave John Hayes wine until he lost consciousness. They then struck him with a coal hatchet. John Hayes died from the blow. They removed his head. Thomas Wood, using skills from his trade, dismembered the rest of the body.

 The pieces were carried to Marylebone Fields and thrown into a pond. The head was placed in a bucket, taken to Millbank, and dropped into the Thames. It surfaced the following morning near the bank. A churchwarden had it retrieved and mounted on a pole at St. Margaret’s Churchyard in Westminster, standard practice for unidentified remains, so the public could help name it.

 Within days, a man came forward who knew John Hayes. Catherine was arrested shortly after. She had boiled the head to make identification impossible. The Thames returned it overnight. Convicted of petty treason, the law classified the killing of a husband as a more serious offense than an ordinary homicide. Catherine Hayes was sentenced to be burned at the stake at Tyburn.

 The executioner attempted to strangle her first, as was the customary mercy, before the fire was lit. The flames reached him before he could finish. He released the rope. Catherine Hayes was conscious when the fire took hold. Witnesses reported that she pushed the burning [ __ ] away from her body with her bare hands.

 She continued doing this until she could no longer move. Her body was not fully consumed for 3 hours. The crowd at Tyburn watched every second of it. Six women, six different crimes across three centuries.  Thousands of people who came deliberately to watch them die. Before we continue, think about the person in your life you would never suspect of anything. Drop it in the comments.

 We read every one. Stay with us. The next cases are the reason this episode  exists. Every woman in this documentary was trusted by someone. A husband, a child, a father who forgave his daughter from his deathbed. The violence never came from strangers. It came from the person who made the tea, who sat at the sickbed, who nailed the charm to the door.

 Think about the person you would never suspect. Drop your answer in the comments. We read every one. Stay with us. Case seven. She climbed the ladder herself. Before the hangman placed the rope, she turned to the crowd assembled below and made one final request. She was not concerned about the rope. She was concerned about her skirts.

 April 6th, 1752, Oxford, England. Mary Blandy was approximately 31 or 32 years old. She was the only child of Francis Blandy, a prosperous attorney and town clerk of Henley-on-Thames, who had publicly advertised her dowry at 10,000 post carats to attract a suitable husband. She was well educated, witty,  and described by those who knew her as having an animated and warm manner.

 In 1746, when Mary was approximately 26, a Scottish army captain named William Henry Cranstoun arrived at the Blandy household. He came from a noble family, presented himself well, and told Mary he he unmarried.  He was not. Cranstoun had a wife and child in Scotland, a fact he had managed carefully for years.

 When Francis Blandy eventually discovered this and grew hostile to the courtship, Cranstoun devised another plan. He sent powders from Scotland. He told Mary they were an old Scottish love remedy, a preparation that would soften her father’s opposition and make him favorable to their union. Mary believed him. She stirred the powder into her father’s tea and his water gruel over a period of weeks.

 Francis Blandy, aged 61, began to decline. A servant girl who accidentally consumed residue from the same treated pan became seriously ill. Suspicion began to gather. Mary was seen throwing letters into the fire. Francis Blandy lay dying on August 14th, 1751. He told his daughter he knew what she had done. Mary fell to her knees on the floor beside him and begged his forgiveness. He gave it.

 He told her he pitied her. Cranstoun fled to France the day she was arrested. He was never charged. She was hanged at Oxford Castle on April 6th, 1752. She climbed the ladder to the scaffold without assistance. Her last words to the crowd standing below, “For the sake of decency,  gentlemen, don’t hang me high.

” She was afraid the young men in the crowd would look up her skirts when the drop came. Cranstoun died in a monastery in Furness,  France in late 1752, months after her execution. He died penniless and alone and never answered for a single thing. The next woman also poisoned her family. Case eight. The coffins were waterlogged.

Investigators bored holes in the lids to drain them before the bodies could be lifted out. They laid the remains on the tombstones for examination in the open air. The smell was described as dreadful. August 21st, 1849, Guestling, East  Sussex, England. Mary Ann Geering was 49 years old. She and her husband Richard, aged 56, had lived together in the same laborer’s cottage for more than 30 years.

 Every neighbor who was asked described  her the same way, devoted, attentive, a woman who nursed the sick without being asked and without complaint. In September 1848, Richard fell violently ill, extreme thirst, stomach cramping, repeated vomiting.  The attending physician attributed it to an intermittent fever. Richard died.

George, her son aged 21, fell ill next with the  same symptoms and the same progression. He died. Then James, aged 26,  developed the same presentation. Three deaths in 6 months, each one recorded as illness, each one witnessed by a grieving and devoted wife and mother. James was attended by his brother through the nights and by Mary Ann during the days.

 He stabilized in the evenings. He deteriorated every morning.  He died during her shift. When her youngest son Benjamin then fell ill, two physicians intervened.  They changed his diet entirely and removed him from the food she had been preparing. He recovered completely within days. A full recovery from the moment she stopped feeding him.

 That recovery was the evidence no exhumation could have delivered alone. It meant the illness was being given, not caught. Investigators found that Mary Ann had purchased arsenic from a chemist in Hastings.  She told him it was for rats and horses. Arsenic was confirmed in the the of Richard and James.

 Mercury was found in George. Within weeks of Richard’s death, she had drawn out his entire savings from  the bank. At her trial, she confessed. She was hanged at Lewis on August 21st, 1849. Between 3,000 and 4,000 people attended. The Times reported that no feeling was shown by the crowd when she mounted the scaffold.

 Benjamin, the son who lived, had given the testimony that put her there. The next woman was 24 years old and did not go to a chemist. She made the poison herself at the kitchen table while her husband was still alive in the next room. Case nine. The family pig died overnight. It had gotten into the vomit left outside the door.

 Nobody in that village could explain that away. August 5th, 1843, Wrestlingworth, Bedfordshire, England. Sarah Harriet Day was approximately 24 years old. She had grown up in Potton. Auburn hair, brown eyes, the daughter of a barber who died when she was seven.  She had buried a first husband and an infant son before she was 22.

 The village had extended its sympathy both times. She accepted it graciously. She married William Day in February 1841 and the couple moved to Wrestlingworth. William drank heavily. He struck her on more than one occasion. She confided in a neighbor named William Walldock that she would kill any man who raised a hand to her. Walldock did not forget it.

 By the autumn of 1842, William was sick. Sarah had replaced the medicine the doctor had prescribed with pills she was making herself at the kitchen table. Simeon’s teenage daughter, Ann Meade, who was living with them, swallowed one of Sarah’s pills  to demonstrate they were harmless.

 She became seriously ill within the hour. The pig in the yard got into the vomit that night. It was dead by morning. William Daisley died on October 30th, 1842. Investigators exhumed William and found arsenic in his body. They also exhumed Sarah’s infant son Jonah, who had died at 7 months old while in Sarah’s sole care. Arsenic was found in Jonah, too.

Simeon Meads’ body was too decomposed to test. Sarah was charged only with William’s murder. Judge Baron Alderson raised the matter of Jonah at sentencing.  He told the court directly that the jury already knew what had been done to that child. He did not elaborate. The jury had been present for the evidence.

 He did not need to. Sarah was hanged outside Bedford Jail on August 5th, 1843, before a crowd estimated at 7 to 12,000 people. She was the only woman ever publicly executed there. She maintained her innocence at the end. >> Case 10. >> She had been there 2 years. Every account from the people who knew her described her the same way, quietly religious, decent in her conduct, no history of violence of any description.

On the evening of February 23rd, 1759, Mary walked a family guest named Mrs. Thatcher safely across the street and returned to her aunt’s house shortly after. A woman selling oysters in the street  heard a voice cry out from inside, “Help! Murder! They have killed my aunt!” Mrs. Susanna Walker was found on the floor.

 Her throat had been cut. Mary told investigators that four men had broken in through the rear of the house and that a tall man dressed in black had threatened to kill her if she identified them. When investigators searched the property, the items Mary said had been stolen were still there, hidden in the privy pit beneath the floor.

 A man named Holloway examined the wound on Mary’s arm, which she said came from the door during the struggle. He told her plainly that he did not believe her account of it. Mary fell into a fit and had to be taken to a neighbor’s house and bled by a surgeon. There was no eyewitness. There was no weapon recovered, a wound that did not match her story, and some hidden goods.

 The jury convicted her on March 31st. She was hanged 4 days later. She had no legal representation. The law in 1759 did not permit defense counsel in capital cases. She stood before the court entirely alone. On the scaffold at Kennington Common, she told the crowd she was innocent and that she freely forgave those responsible for bringing her there.

 The executioner could not fit the proper hood over her head. He used his own handkerchief instead. Her body was taken from the gallows directly to a hospital for anatomical dissection. Her guilt has never been established beyond what the jury decided that day. It never will be. The next woman left no ambiguity at all.

 She wrote down exactly what she had done, every detail, and arranged for it to be published only after she was dead. Case 11. She stopped mid-attack. She allowed the dying woman one final moment. She let her hold the baby and kiss it. August 30th, 1867, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. Bridget Durgan, known incorrectly in the newspapers as Bridget Durgan, a name she disputed to reporters, was 22 years old.

She had come from Doon Cleodna in County Sligo, Ireland, after being seduced by an employer’s son and quietly paid to leave the country. She arrived in New York alone, without money or contacts. She became pregnant. She gave birth in conditions of poverty. She was put out of her lodgings when her circumstances became inconvenient.

 She eventually found a position as a domestic servant with the Coryell family in New Market, New Jersey. Dr. William Coryell, his wife Mary Ellen, and their infant. The confession published after her death, which her defenders have since disputed in several particulars, included  this account of what had been forming inside her during those months.

 “From that moment, I began to hate everybody. But most of all, mistresses. I resolved to kill someone if only the chance came my way.” She fixed on the idea that if Mary Ellen Coryell were gone, she could remain in the household and raise the child  herself. The thought, she said, arrived completely formed all at once.

 On the evening of February 26th, 1867,  Dr. Coryell left the house. Bridget attacked Mary Ellen, stabbing her repeatedly. During the attack, she stopped. According to the account published in her name, she allowed the dying woman to hold and kiss her infant one final time. Then she finished. She set the house on fire and ran to a neighbor’s house,  telling them robbers had killed Mrs.

Coryell. Investigators found no signs of forced entry anywhere on the property. The account collapsed within hours. She was hanged in the jail yard at New Brunswick on August 30th, 1867, before a crowd of 2,000 people. The mechanism used was poorly designed  and strangled rather than dropped her.

She was 22 years old. A published account of her life and confession appeared after her death, as she had reportedly arranged. The baby she had done all of it for survived. Whether the confession was truly hers has been debated ever since. Case 12. Thomas Higgins was 45 years old, healthy and strong.  His brother Patrick watched him die and refused to accept the explanation.

Patrick went to the insurance companies himself. What he found there unraveled everything. March 3rd, 1884, Kirkdale Prison, Liverpool, England. Catherine Flanagan was 54 years old. Her sister Margaret Higgins was 41. They were Irish-born women living together in the Liverpool slums at 5 Skirving Street, described by those who encountered them as barely surviving.

Poor, frequently drunk, and largely unremarkable to anyone who passed them on the street, they had discovered a method that required no pharmacy, no registry, no record of purchase. They soaked flypapers in water and boiled off the arsenic residue that rose to the surface. It was simple, slow, and traceable only if someone thought to look.

 Thomas Higgins, Margaret’s husband, moved into Catherine’s house in 1881 with his first wife and young daughter Mary. His first wife died shortly after. Margaret married Thomas in October 1882. By the end of November, Thomas’s 10-year-old daughter Mary was dead. Thomas himself fell severely ill in October 1883, suffering the now-familiar symptoms: intense stomach pain, deterioration, collapse, and died shortly after.

 His death had been certified as dysentery. The sisters had taken out five separate insurance policies on Thomas’s life, totaling 108 pounds and 19 shillings. They also held policies on Catherine’s son, John, the teenage lodger Margaret Jennings, and young Mary Higgins. All four were dead. All four had died of arsenic poisoning, confirmed by postmortem.

 Patrick Higgins went to the police. Margaret was arrested at Thomas’s funeral wake. Arsenic powder was found in her dress pocket. Catherine  fled, but was apprehended a week later in Wavertree. The jury took 50 minutes. Both women were hanged at Kirkdale Prison on March 3rd, 1884. Snow was falling.  They crossed the frozen courtyard dressed in black.

 Catherine had spent the final days attempting to offer testimony about a wider network of poisoners operating across the Liverpool slums in exchange for her own life. The prosecution refused to bargain. The rope did not negotiate. The next woman on this list did not use poison. What she did was carried out in a farmhouse in Upstate New York in December with her children watching, and it took most of one day to finish. Case 13.

 She was a small woman. That was the problem. The suspension hanging was designed to jerk the body upward and snap the neck. For Roxalana Druse, it didn’t snap anything. She strangled. Witnesses reported it took 15 minutes. They heard  everything. February 28th, 1887. Herkimer, New York, USA.

 Roxalana Druse was approximately 39 or 40 years old. She had married William Druse in 1864 when she was 17 and he was 36. They lived on a farm in Warren, Herkimer County with their daughter Mary, their son George, and William’s 18-year-old nephew Frank Gates. The marriage, by multiple accounts, had been defined by financial strain and persistent domestic  violence.

 On the morning of December 18th, 1884, Roxalana shot William in the neck with a .22 caliber revolver. He did not die from the shot. Her daughter Mary wrapped a rope around his neck while he sat wounded in his chair. Frank Gates was brought back inside and told by Roxalana to fire again under threat that she would shoot him if he refused. Gates fired.

 William Druse was still alive. Roxalana then struck him in the head with an axe. William Drews died. Over the following day, she and her daughter dismembered his body and  burned the remains in the kitchen stove. The ashes were scattered. The head was separately disposed of. Neighbors eventually noticed William’s absence.

 Conflicting explanations from the family led police to question Frank Gates, who confessed. Bone fragments and blood stains confirmed what he described. Roxolana was convicted of first-degree murder in October 1885 and sentenced to hang. Women’s rights organizations and religious groups petitioned the governor across two years.

 The legislature debated exempting women from the death penalty entirely. The governor declined to intervene. On February 28th, 1887, she walked to the gallows at Herkimer County Jail, described as mournful and near collapse. She was shrieking as she was hooded. The drop was miscalculated. She was too small for the rope as set.

She strangled for 15 minutes. She was the last woman hanged in New York State. Three years later, New York replaced the gallows with the electric chair. The next woman ran the most beautiful flower garden in the district. Neighbors admired it for years. Nobody knew what was buried underneath. Case 14. A railway guard watched her board the train carrying a baby and a hatbox.

 When she got off at the next station, the baby was gone. The hatbox was heavy. August 12th, 1895, Invercargill, New Zealand. Williamina Minnie Dean was 50 years old. She was a Scottish immigrant who had settled in Winton, Southland with her husband Charles. They ran a small property of 22 acres called The Larches.

 Since the late 1880s, Minnie had taken in infants from unmarried mothers who had no other options, a practice known as baby farming, legal at the time and almost entirely unregulated. She had a reputation in the district for one thing above all else, her flower garden, lush and carefully kept. Neighbors remarked on it.

 Police had watched her operation for more than 5 years following the deaths of two infants in her care in 1889 and 1891. Inquests had attributed those deaths  to natural causes but noted poor conditions at The Larches. Minnie continued accepting children. On May 2nd, 1895, she was observed boarding a train carrying a 1-year-old girl named Dorothy Edith Carter and an empty hatbox.

 She disembarked without the child carrying only the hatbox, which now appeared substantially heavier. A grandmother named Jane Hornsby came forward. She had given her granddaughter Eva Hornsby, 1 month old, into Minnie’s care that same day. Neither infant could be found. Police searched The Larches. Buried in the flower garden, they found the bodies of Dorothy Carter and Eva Hornsby.

 Alongside them was the skeleton of a boy estimated to be approximately 3 to 4 years old. Minnie told police the hatbox had contained flower bulbs. The woman who supplied her with plants confirmed she had given only small cuttings, nothing that could account for the weight. She was tried in Invercargill in June 1895. The jury took 30 minutes.

 She was hanged at Invercargill Jail at just before 8:00 in the morning on August 12th,  1895. She is the first and remains the only woman legally executed in New Zealand. Her last words, “I have nothing to express except my innocence.” The flowers above the graves were still growing when the police arrived. The next woman kept her victims alive far longer than Minnie Dean did.

 She nursed every one of them to the end. She wept at every funeral, and she did it for 14 years before anyone looked at a plate of food and noticed the white powder sitting on top. Case 15. She was handed a glass of wine on the scaffold, a final custom of the city of Bremen. She took one slow sip. Then she turned and offered the glass to the judges presiding over her execution.

 Whether they accepted it was not recorded. April 21st, 1831. Cathedral Square, Bremen, Germany. Gesche Margarethe Gottfried was 45 years old. She had been born Gesche Tim in 1785, married a saddler named Johann Miltenberg in 1806, and entered Bremen’s respectable middle class. The marriage was unhappy.

 Miltenberg drank excessively and had squandered the family’s money. He was her first victim. She used a rat poison known as Mois a Butter, mouse butter, a mixture of arsenic flakes and animal fat that could be spread invisibly into food. She administered it slowly in small doses, nursing him through his deterioration with what the city saw as extraordinary devotion. He died on October 1st, 1813.

Bremen knew her as the angel. It was not a figure of speech. For 14 years, she nursed every dying person in her life. Her mother, her father, her children one by one, her twin brother who returned from the war and asked for his share of the inheritance, a second husband, a fiance, a neighbor, a lodger, a landlady, a music teacher, and the music teacher’s maid.

 Then the maid’s young daughter, 15 people, she sat at every bedside. She wept at every grave. The city comforted her each time. She was caught in 1828 when a man named Johann Rumph noticed white granules on food she had prepared for him. He reported it to his doctor who had, without realizing it, attended  several of Gottfried’s previous victims.

 The doctor confirmed arsenic. She was arrested on March 6th, 1828, her 43rd birthday, and held for 3 years pending trial. She confessed to all 15 murders.  She described the killings, according to court records, as having brought her an ecstasy-like  satisfaction. She was publicly executed by sword at the Domshof in Cathedral Square on April 21st, 1831.

 She was the last person publicly executed in the city of Bremen. A stone set into the ground at the Domshof marks the exact spot where she died. The local custom is to spit on it  when you pass. People still do. The next woman operated on a scale that Gesche Gottfried never approached. She did not know her victims personally.

 She advertised for them in the newspaper. Case 16. At the moment of her arrest, she said four words that became one of the most chilling statements in the history of British crime. “You’ll know all mine by the tape around their necks.” June 10th, 1896, Newgate Prison, London, England. Amelia Elizabeth Dyer was 58 years old.

 She had been born in Bristol in 1837, trained as a nurse, and by the 1860s had entered the baby farming trade, advertising in newspapers as a warm, motherly widow willing to take infants from desperate unmarried mothers for a fee with the promise of a loving home. She operated under multiple aliases for nearly three decades.

 She moved between addresses. She changed her name. She absorbed children and the payments that accompanied them and made both disappear. On March 30th, 1896, a barge man on the Thames at Caversham hooked a brown paper parcel from the water. Inside was the body of a baby girl strangled with white edging tape. A faint address, almost entirely faded, was still legible on the wrapping.

Police traced it to a Mrs. Thomas in Reading. Mrs. Thomas was Amelia Dyer. When detectives entered her house, the smell of decomposition was present in every room. No bodies were found inside. Police dredged the Thames and recovered six more infants, each strangled with the same white tape.

 Two were identified as Doris Marmon, 4 months old, and Harry Simmons, 13 months. They had been placed together in a carpet bag and thrown from a dock only days before Amelia’s arrest. Confirmed victims, six. Attributed victims over her 27 years of operation, estimated at up to 400. In the condemned cell at Newgate, she filled five exercise books with what she described as her last, true, and only confession.

On the scaffold on the morning of June 10th, 1896, she was asked if she had anything to say. She replied, “I have nothing to say.” The jury at her trial had deliberated for four and a half minutes. Five exercise books, then nothing. The next woman did not poison strangers. She did not run a business. She built an empire  and her clients included the mistress of the King of France.

Case 17. She pushed the crucifix away. The priests offered it again. She shoved it back. The crowd at the Place de Grève watched as she was chained  to the stake, still fighting. February 22nd, 1680, Paris, France. Catherine Deshayes Monvoisin, known to all of Paris as La Voisin, the neighbor, was approximately 40 years old.

 She had been born around 1640 and had married a jeweler named Antoine Monvoisin, whose business eventually failed. After that, she supported the family by practicing chiromancy and face reading, then midwifery, then something considerably more profitable. She built a network fortune tellers and poisoners spread across Paris, all connected to her.

 She provided what her aristocratic clients could not obtain openly, arsenic-based preparations known as inheritance powders, sold to those who needed an inconvenient husband, a rival, or a relative removed. She performed abortions. She arranged black masses with a defrocked priest named Etienne Guibourg,  conducted in a private chapel.

 Estimates of deaths connected to her network range from 1,000 to 2,500 people. The investigation, known as the Affair of the Poisons, was launched in 1679 by a special tribunal called the Chambre Ardente. It issued 319 warrants of arrest and held 210 sessions. It reached into the French aristocracy and  eventually toward the court of Louis XIV himself.

 Among La Voisin’s clients was Madame de Montespan, the king’s own mistress, who had allegedly sought preparations to maintain Louis’s devotion and eliminate rivals. Louis XIV ordered the inquiry closed before it implicated the crown directly. La Voisin died knowing she had gotten that close. She refused every offer of final prayer.  She had refused to name her clients throughout months of interrogation and torture.

 She was burned at the stake at the Place de Grève on February 22nd, 1680. 36 people in total were executed during the Affair of the Poisons. She was the most prominent of them. She died fighting. The crown looked away and survived. The next woman also died at the center of a crowd, but she arrived at the gallows in a wedding dress, scanning the faces below for one man willing to save her. Case 18.

 She stood at the gallows in a white dress and scanned the crowd. She was looking for any man willing to marry her on the spot. Under the law, a new husband would have changed her legal status and potentially spared her life. 2,000 people looked back at her. Nobody stepped forward. February 18th, 1820. Charleston, South Carolina, USA.

 Lavinia Fisher was approximately 27 years old. She and her husband, John Fisher, operated the Six Mile Wayfarer House, a roadside boarding house located 6 miles north of Charleston. Travelers and traders heading into the city stopped there for food and lodging. In February 1819, a mob attacked the Six Mile House, forcing  the Fishers and several associates to flee.

 The Fishers returned and reclaimed the property. A subsequent confrontation led to their arrest along with 10 others. Of the 12 arrested, only the Fishers and one other man were sentenced to death. They were convicted of highway robbery, a capital offense at the time, not murder. No murder charges were ever formally brought.

 The trapdoor bed, the poisoned tea, the pit beneath the floor,  these details belong to the legend that grew around Lavinia Fisher in the decades after her death. What the historical record confirms is narrower. She and John Fisher were convicted robbers who operated an inn where travelers were known to be threatened, and they went to the gallows for it.

John Fisher was hanged first. Lavinia watched from the scaffold, then it was her turn. What is confirmed by a source close to the execution is that her final words were, “If you have a message you want to send to hell, give it to me. I’ll carry it.” She then jumped before the executioner could open the drop.

2,000 people witnessed it. The legend of Lavinia Fisher has been growing ever since. The next woman also met the rope without faltering, but what the rope did to her changed the law of an entire state  and ended public hanging in Arizona forever. Case 19, the trapdoor dropped. The sound that followed stopped everyone in the room. Five witnesses fainted.

 The ones who remained standing never fully described what they saw to people who had not been there. February 21st, 1930, Florence, Arizona, USA. Eva Dugan was 52 years old. She had been born in Salisbury, Missouri in 1878, had spent time in Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush as a cabaret singer, and had eventually made her way to Pima County, Arizona.

 Time magazine gave her the nickname Cheerful Eva. It fit. She cooked her own last meal in  her cell the night before her execution. She played cards with other inmates until almost midnight. She had been hired as a housekeeper by Andrew J. Mathers, an elderly chicken rancher outside Tucson in 1927. The arrangement ended badly.

 Mathers fired her, or she left before he could. Shortly after, Mathers disappeared along with his Dodge coupe and his cash box. Eva was gone, too. Police traced the car to Kansas City, Missouri,  where she had sold it for $600. She was found in White Plains, New York when a postal clerk intercepted a postcard addressed to her.

 She was extradited back to Arizona 9 months after her disappearance. A camper on the Mathers property drove a tent stake into the ground and struck something. The decomposed remains of Andrew Mathers were found in a shallow grave on his own ranch. The night before her execution, a search of Eva’s cell produced a bottle of raw ammonia and three razor blades hidden in the collar of one of her dresses.

 She had intended to end things herself. All of it was removed. She was the first woman executed by the state of Arizona and the first Arizona execution at which women were permitted as witnesses. Five of them sat in the chamber that morning. She told the guards not to hold her arms so tightly because, she said, “The people will think I’m 

afraid.” At 5:11 a.m., the trap was sprung. The force of the drop, combined with the miscalculation of the rope length and her height, produced an impact that separated her head from her body. It came to rest at the feet of the spectators. Arizona replaced hanging with the gas chamber 4 years later. There were three more hangings after Eva Dugan’s. All of them were men.

 The next woman also  faced the gallows on the day she was supposed to be married. She wore the dress she had made for her wedding. She had no idea when she put it on that she would not be coming back from wherever they were taking her. >> Case 20. She did not know it was her execution day.

 She had written to her fiance Edward from prison only days before, telling him she expected to be confined for another 6 months at least. She was wrong about that by 6 months. July 26th, 1815, London, England. Elizabeth Fenning was approximately 22 or 23 years old. She had grown up in poverty and had worked as a domestic servant since the age of 14.

 In January 1815, she entered the household of a tradesman named Orlebar Turner at 68 Chancer Lane in London in the position of cook. She had been there approximately 7 weeks. On March 21st, 1815, Elizabeth made yeast dumplings for the Turner family’s lunch. Orlebar Turner, his son Robert, and his daughter-in-law Charlotte all ate them and  became severely ill within minutes.

 An apprentice named Roger Gadsden ate a small piece and also became ill. Elizabeth herself  had eaten the dumplings. She also became severely ill. Arsenic was found mixed into the dumpling batter. A drawer in the Turners unlocked office where arsenic was kept for killing mice had been accessed.  Elizabeth was summoned to Hatton Garden Police Court and committed for trial at the Old Bailey on April 11th, 1815.

She was charged with administering arsenic with intent to murder. Her defense was the same from the first day to the last. She had eaten the dumplings herself. She had also been poisoned. If she had intended to kill the family, she had poisoned herself in the same act. She had no legal counsel of her own.

 She was assigned a court-appointed defense. The recorder’s address to the jury was described by legal observers and campaigners at the time as heavily biased against  her. She was found guilty. The date of her execution was set without her knowledge of it. On the scaffold at Newgate on July 26th, 1815, the date she was supposed to be married, she declared, “Before the just and almighty God and by the faith of the holy sacrament I have taken, I am innocent of the offense with which I am charged.” The executioner could not fit

the proper hood over her head. He used his own handkerchief. 10,000 people attended her funeral 5 days later. The pall was carried by six young women dressed in white. Charles Dickens later cited her case as one of the great miscarriages of British justice. Her guilt has never been established to the satisfaction of historians who have examined the record. It never will be.

Case 21, Elizabeth Ann Duncan, Massachusetts Duncan.  She called herself a devoted mother. The court called her something else entirely. Born on April 16th, 1904 in Kansas City, Missouri, Elizabeth Ann Duncan built her entire world around her son, Frank, a lawyer, her pride, and her obsession.

 But when Frank married a nurse named Olga Kupchik in 1958, Elizabeth saw her not as family, but  as a threat. Investigators later learned she spent months trying to destroy the marriage, convinced Olga had stolen her son away from her. Then she took things further. Elizabeth hired two men, Augustine Baldonado and Luis Moya, to kill her daughter-in-law.

 Olga was 7 months pregnant when she was strangled and buried in the California hills. She had ordered the murder of a woman carrying her own unborn grandchild. The plot unraveled quickly. In December 1958, Baldonado cracked and led authorities to Olga’s body. On Christmas night, Moya confessed to a street preacher.

 Both men identified Elizabeth as the mastermind behind the killing. On March 16th, 1959, a jury needed just 4 hours and 51 minutes to find her guilty. Four days later, she was sentenced to death. More than 3 years later, on August 8th, 1962, Elizabeth Ann Duncan walked into  San Quentin’s gas chamber with her head held high.

 Witnesses said she showed no emotion, no remorse, no tears as she took her place inside the chamber. She spoke her final words, “I’m innocent. Where’s Frank?” Frank wasn’t there. As the chamber sealed shut, he was still fighting in court for one last delay. 8 minutes after the cyanide pellets were activated, Elizabeth was pronounced dead at 10:12 a.m.

 She remains the last woman executed in California before the death penalty was suspended in 1972. Behind her was a murdered pregnant woman, an unborn child, and a crime born from a mother’s obsession with her son. The last woman on this list did not cook for anyone. She ran a boarding house in Washington, D.C., three blocks from Ford’s Theatre.

 And what was planned inside it changed the country forever. Case 22. Five members of the military commission that convicted her recommended that the president commute her sentence to life imprisonment. President Andrew Johnson later claimed he never saw the petition. Her attorney produced evidence that he had. By the time any of it was raised, Mary Surratt was already dead.

 July 7th, 1865, Washington Arsenal Penitentiary, Washington, D.C., U.S.A. Mary Elizabeth Surratt was 42 years old. She was a widow. Her husband, John Harrison Surratt, had died in 1862. She had converted the family’s Washington row house into a boarding house to support herself and her children. The house sat a few blocks from Ford’s Theatre.

 Her son John Surratt Jr. was a Confederate agent. John Wilkes Booth and his co-conspirators met at Mary’s boarding house throughout 1864 and into 1865. On the afternoon of April 14th, 1865, the day of Lincoln’s assassination, Mary made a journey to her former tavern in Surrattsville, Maryland. She carried a package.

 She spoke with her tenant John Lloyd. Lloyd later testified that she told him to have whiskey and firearms ready for men who would be stopping that night. Those men were Booth and David Herold fleeing south after the shooting. Mary denied every element of Lloyd’s account. Lewis Powell, a conspirator who had attacked Secretary of State William Seward the same night Lincoln was shot, declared her innocent to his executioner in the moments before he himself died.

Louis Weichmann, another witness against her, later stated that the government had pressured him to testify and that it troubled his conscience until the end of his life. She was tried before a military commission, not a civilian jury, beginning May 12th, 1865. All defendants were found guilty on July 5th.

 She was sentenced to death alongside three male co-conspirators. She was hanged on July 7th, 1865 at the Washington Arsenal in brutal summer heat. She nearly collapsed on the scaffold and was supported by two soldiers. Her son John escapes to Canada and eventually to Europe where he served in the Papal Zouaves under a false identity.

 He was eventually captured, tried in a civilian court in 1867, and the jury could not reach a verdict. He was released. He gave lectures about the Lincoln conspiracy for money. He lived until 1916. Mary Surratt was the first woman executed by the United States federal government. President Johnson, signing her death warrant, said she had kept the nest that hatched the egg.

 Whether that was justice, historians have been arguing about for over 160 years. 22 women, the rope was the same for all of them. Some of them were monsters by any measure history applies. Some of them were women the law caught in passing.  At least two on this list may not have been guilty of what they were hanged for.

 None of them had the final word on what happened to them. The crowd always did. Drop in the comments which case haunted you the most. Subscribe to Inside Capital Crime. We’ll see you in the next one.