Lady Killers Read online

  But with this death, and her casual remark about the “rest of the Cotton family,” Mary Ann had gone too far. Riley was certain that she’d murdered her tiny stepson. He refused to look at the body, and instead went straight to the police.

  An inquest was held, and Charles Edward’s poor little body was laid out on a table. The postmortem was a sloppy one, because the boy’s death was ruled “natural.” Still, the doctor must have had his suspicions, because he was careful to preserve some of Charles Edward’s viscera, which he buried in jars in his own yard.

  Mary Ann went on her way, but her days of freedom were numbered. The town gossips and local papers had already picked up on Riley’s suspicions, and people eventually convinced the doctor to investigate Charles Edward’s body again. So the doctor dug up the jars, analyzed their contents using a more systematic technique, and found arsenic in everything. He ran to the police station at midnight, and Mary Ann was arrested the next day.

  The Short Drop

  Initially, Mary Ann was only accused of the murder of Charles Edward, but soon enough the charges expanded to include the murder of Joseph Nattrass, Frederick Cotton Jr., and the baby Robert Robson. Their bodies were exhumed and tested, and huge amounts of arsenic were found in all three. Police tried to exhume Frederick Cotton Sr., but in a bizarre twist, they couldn’t find his body anywhere, despite digging up several graves in the process.

  Mary Ann gave birth to Quick-Manning’s child in prison, and during her trial she would breast-feed the baby in front of the court, refusing to talk. It was a savvy move, working the jury’s sympathies by tapping into Victorian ideals of femininity. (The era’s perfect woman was captivated in all her stifling glory in the 1854 narrative poem “The Angel in the House,” which gushed, “For she’s so simply, subtly sweet/My deepest rapture does her wrong.”) How could this silent, breast-feeding mother be capable of murder? Reporters watched her in the courtroom, noting her “delicate and prepossessing” beauty, which was deliberately obscured in the portraits of her that ran next to their articles.

  Her defense latched onto the fact that no arsenic had actually been discovered in her house at the time of Charles Edward’s death. They argued that the boy had been accidentally poisoned by arsenic fumes rising off the green wallpaper in his bedroom and by flakes of the arsenic-and-soft-soap mixture Mary Ann used to clean house. The prosecution brought in a prestigious doctor to discount this theory. There was simply too much poison in the corpses, the doctor said. Joseph Nattrass’s body, for example, contained four times the amount of arsenic necessary to kill a man.

  The only time Mary Ann broke down was when the defense gave a melodramatic speech about the implausibility of a mother killing her own child. “A mother nursing [her baby] . . . seeing its pretty smiles, while she knew she had given it arsenic!” they wailed. “Making its limbs writhe as it looked into her face, wanting support and protection!” How could any “simply, subtly sweet” Victorian mother possibly be accused of such horrors? At this point in the proceedings, Mary Ann started to cry. Sympathetic onlookers may have interpreted her crying as agreement with the defense: Yes, exactly, I could never do that to a baby. Really, though, the defense was describing exactly what Mary Ann had done numerous times, to numerous babies. She knew all about the ways that “pretty smiles” could turn into writhing and vomit and foaming at the mouth.

  Ultimately, Mary Ann was convicted of “the awful crime of murder” for the death of Charles Edward. “You seem to have given way to that most awful of all delusions,” said the judge, “. . . that you could carry out your wicked designs without detection.” She blanched as she heard her sentence read aloud: death by hanging.

  The hangman chosen to execute Mary Ann Cotton was a controversial figure with several botched executions under his belt. He preferred to use a “short drop” from the platform, which occasionally had the unpleasant side effect of not breaking the prisoner’s neck. When this happened, the hangman would have to press down on the shoulders of the dying as they strangled slowly, spinning at the end of the rope.

  During her final days, Mary Ann wrote frantic letters to family and friends, asking them to petition for a reprieve. She had no idea what was going on with her trial; at one point, she wrote that the lawyer for the prosecution would be “thare to defende mee.” She continued to insist she was innocent, and her letters took on a martyred, incredulous tone as she complained about the “lyies that has been told A Bout me.” She also begged her one surviving husband, James Robinson, to visit her and to bring baby George. Naturally, he refused.

  She did make one final maternal gesture, though, when she arranged for her last child to be adopted. But even this was tinged with malice. Apparently, days earlier, she had been caught “rubbing its gums with soap,” thinking that if her baby grew ill, “her life might be spared until its recovery.”

  Mary Ann had been a mother, now, for exactly half of her life. Whether she liked it or not, her existence up to this point had been largely defined by being secretly pregnant, or publicly pregnant, or recently pregnant, or pregnant with another man’s child. Seduction and, by extension, pregnancy, had been one of her most faithful weapons (the other was a nefarious white powder available at any pharmacy). Mary Ann used her fertility to control the rise and fall of her life. Giving away this last baby was a powerful sign that everything—the seduction, the marriage, the birthing, the poisoning—was very much over.

  Was Mary Ann a sociopath, addicted to the rush of killing the innocent? Was she a capitalist, climbing the social ladder of husbands in a desperate attempt to gain some autonomy? She was clearly striving for something, but it’s unclear what she wanted most. Money? Freedom? Other people’s pain? She saw marriage and motherhood as a form of imprisonment—one that she desperately wanted to break free from—but also as a form of salvation, and so her methods were cyclical to the point of madness. She killed one husband only to marry the next; she poisoned one child and soon became pregnant with another. What did she think would happen with that next husband, that next baby? Was she expecting something to kick in deep inside her: a final sense of satisfaction, comfort, maternal instinct, love? No matter how many horrors she inflicted on other people, nothing ever really changed for her. And so she never escaped her hall of mirrors, forced to relive her own sordid history time after time.

  Frightfully Wicked

  Mary Ann walked the four minutes from her cell to the scaffold on March 24, 1873. She was forty years old, wearing a black-and-white-checked shawl that disguised the fact that her arms were bound to her sides with a belt. Those types of shawls were considered fashionable in surrounding towns, but after Mary Ann was photographed in hers, the trend quickly died off. A crowd of people gathered outside the jail to catch a glimpse of her. The journalists inside wrote that she looked like “a doomed wretch,” sobbing hysterically as she shuffled forward. On the scaffold, she shuddered when the rope went around her neck. Her last words were “Lord, have mercy on my soul”—and then the ground dropped from under her feet.

  It took her three minutes to die, and the executioner had to steady her twitching body with his own hands.

  “The announcement of her execution may dispel a popular idea, long too prevalent, to the effect that a female assassin, however frightful her wickedness, may generally hope for a reprieve in consideration of her sex,” ran the Burnley Advertiser a few days later. “But the atrocities of Mary Ann Cotton put her beyond the pale of human mercy, for, unless she was fearfully maligned, no more hideous monster ever breathed on earth.” Of course, England had no idea that in fifteen years their most famous serial killer would start disemboweling prostitutes in the poorest areas of London. He would then be the most hideous monster to ever breathe on earth, and would capture the attention of the press in a way that Mary Ann Cotton never did.

  About a week after she died, a moralizing play called “The Life and Death of Mary Ann Cotton” opened. For a while, children sang about her on the street: “Mary An
n Cotton, she’s dead and she’s rotten/lying in bed with her eyes wide open.” But soon enough she was forgotten, and the cycle of birth and death went on as before in the little towns of England.

  THE TORMENTOR

  Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova

  Darya Nikolayevna Saltykova liked the ritual of church: the liturgy, the tithing, the regular pilgrimages. She was, in a way, a creature of habit. Predictable. Ticking through life like a clock. Once a year, for example, she’d head out of town to visit the sacred reliquaries and cathedrals of the Russian Orthodox Church. At home, she maintained an almost meditative torture practice, beating her servants for hours and killing the ones who bothered her most. Even her torture was predictable: she beat the ones who failed to clean her house properly. Tick. Tock.

  Some might look at her behavior and see the worst sort of religious hypocrisy: paying lip service to good while worshiping evil. But Darya saw nothing duplicitous about her behavior. She was merely acting out of a message she’d internalized: that she was legitimately better than others, and as such could act as she pleased. Why should she wring her bloody hands and pray for forgiveness? She was the one who chose to forgive—or not. She felt as untouchable as a god.

  The Young Widow

  Darya’s world was a privileged one. She was a wealthy Russian noblewoman, she was related to statesmen and princes, she had an army of servants at her disposal, and the law was firmly on her side. She could expect to be treated with dignity and given the benefit of the doubt no matter what she did—because even if the law didn’t technically support all of her actions, her fellow Russian nobles certainly would. These aristocrats didn’t like to set precedents they couldn’t take back—like, say, the risky precedent of holding nobles accountable. No. They liked life as it was: safe for them, and dangerous for everyone else.

  Darya was born in March 1730, the third of five daughters. She married well: her husband, Gleb Alexandrovich Saltykov, was the captain of the Cavalry Regiment of the Russian Imperial Guard. The Saltykov family was famous and well connected, related to a veritable who’s who of other noble families: Stroganovs, Tolstoys, Tatishchevs, Shakhovskies, Musin-Pushkins, Golitsyns, and Naryshkins. Surely this marriage brought with it a considerable amount of social pressure and even stress for Darya, as she mingled with future statesmen and the grandchildren of ancient tsaritsas. And Darya wasn’t an educated woman. She never learned how to read.

  Darya and Saltykov had two sons—Theodore and Nicholas—but their marriage didn’t last long, as Saltykov died in 1756. Darya was suddenly a widow at the age of twenty-five. We can imagine that she felt, at some level, both overwhelmed and abandoned. She had her young boys to take care of, and she was suddenly in charge of two very sizable estates. Her dead husband had owned a mansion in Moscow on Kuznetskaya Street and a summer estate that presided over the village of Troitskoye. Immediately, unexpectedly, both of them were Darya’s.

  When she wasn’t running her new estates, Darya was taking her annual pilgrimage to one Orthodox shrine or another. She liked the city of Kiev, famous for its religious architecture, and she sometimes traveled to see the beloved icon Our Lady of Kazan, one of the most sacred relics in the entire country. The gilded portrait featured a pensive close-up of the Virgin Mary with a tiny Christ standing solemnly on her lap.

  Perhaps Darya enjoyed the grave, almost foreboding look in their eyes. Maybe she liked the thought of a Christ who never smiled. At the very least, she probably relished being away from home, because as soon as she returned, her responsibilities came closing in on her. Both the Moscow and the Troitskoye estates came with souls. Hundreds of souls. And Darya owned them all.

  Souls

  Darya lived during a time when a nobleman’s wealth and influence weren’t measured by how much land he owned, or how much money he possessed, but how many serfs worked for him. Serfs were Russian peasants who lived and labored on their proprietors’ land. They owed the proprietor toil, money, or a combination of both, but they weren’t technically slaves because they could hypothetically save up to buy their freedom. You know, the way Sisyphus could hypothetically rig some sort of structure to keep his boulder from rolling back down the hill for all eternity. Serfs had existed in Russia for centuries, but by the mid-1700s, Russia was approaching what you might call peak serfdom. Serf owning had turned into a form of conspicuous consumption, and it was totally out of control. For example, during Catherine the Great’s reign, the richest noblemen prided themselves on their serf orchestras and serf ballets.

  But this was an awkward time for Russia to be conspicuously consuming millions of peasants. Catherine the Great was about to take over the throne, and she wanted to show the world that Russia was an enlightened country and that she was a humane and modern ruler. And yet—the serfs! Somehow the issue of serfs’ rights never quite caught up with Catherine’s vision for a shiny new Westernized country. Even in the most liberal circles, the sight of serfs working in the gardens and plowing the fields would have been a constant visual reminder that it was never possible to leave human cruelty entirely behind, no matter how modern your world had become.

  These serfs were referred to as “souls,” and a nobleman’s power over his souls was practically unlimited. A few years before Darya’s birth, one imperial decree noted that nobles were under no obligation to treat their souls like humans, but that “the proprietors sell their peasants and domestic servants not even in families, but one by one, like cattle.”

  Nobles would physically punish their serfs all the time, often using a thick Russian leather whip called the knout. This was considered more than acceptable, although the nobles weren’t allowed to actually kill the serfs. Catherine the Great noted in her memoirs that many households in Moscow kept a selection of “iron collars, chains and other instruments of torture for those who commit the slightest infraction.” She’d been struck by one particularly bizarre case: an aging noblewoman kept her hairdresser locked in a cage in her bedroom, because the noblewoman didn’t want society to know she wore fake hair—and the serf was the only one who could have exposed her.

  To add insult to injury, serfs had no way to defend themselves under the law. The authorities, forever paranoid about a murderous uprising, were convinced that legal protection for serfs would lead to feelings of safety, and feelings of safety would lead to insubordination. So not only could their masters send them off to Siberia without a trial, or force them to work in the mines for the rest of their lives, but if any serf dared complain about this to the authorities, that in and of itself was reason for punishment. Even Catherine the Great, who prided herself on her humanity, published an imperial degree saying that if a serf tried to present a petition against his master, he would be whipped and transported to the mines of Nerchinsk for life.

  Therefore, as a serf, your quality of life was entirely dependent on the whims of your master or mistress in all their odd, distrustful, spoiled glory. Granted, there were plenty of benevolent landowners in Russia during those days, and their serfs enjoyed peace, prosperity, support, and copious free time in which to cultivate their own land. But Darya wasn’t one of them. There was blood on the walls and the stairs of her estates.

  “I Am My Own Mistress”

  Darya was obsessed with cleanliness, and liked her floors the way she liked her Orthodox icons: immaculate. She also had a hair-trigger temper, and the resulting combination was bad news for the female servants who cleaned her house. The sight of an improperly washed floor or an imperfect batch of laundry would send Darya flying into a vicious rage. She’d grab the nearest stick, rolling pin, or whip, and begin to beat whatever quivering girl was responsible for the botched job.

  All around the country, nobles were whipping their serfs for similarly trite infractions—but Darya didn’t know when to stop. It wasn’t long before her neighbors in Moscow began to hear horrible rumors about the Saltykova serfs: Darya locked her maidservants in an empty hut and starved them for days, Darya’s girls had bloodstains on the
ir clothes. The villagers of Troitskoye were whispering, too. Something was wrong at Darya’s summer home, they said. Once, they heard that a cart coming out of the estate was carrying the body of a servant girl. When they peered inside, they saw that the girl’s skin was flayed, her hair ripped out.

  The fatal beatings, or at least the bulk of them, started in 1756, the same year Darya became a widow. The first official complaint against Darya was registered in 1757, and it concerned the murder of a pregnant woman named Anisya Grigorieva. It was a double murder, really: first, Darya beat Grigorieva with a rolling pin until Grigorieva suffered a miscarriage. Then, religious Darya called a nearby priest to come and give the dying woman her last rites, but Grigorieva passed away before the priest showed up. Once the priest appeared, he took one horrified look at the body and refused to bury it without a police inspection.

  The police arrived, took the abused corpse to the hospital for an autopsy, and—didn’t do a thing about it. The dead woman had a deep wound by her heart, and her entire back was blue and swollen. Clearly she hadn’t died of natural causes. But what were they going to do, arrest a noblewoman? Absurd!

  When Grigorieva’s frantic husband went ahead and filed a complaint with the police, Darya found out right away. She filed a counterpetition asking the police not to believe the husband’s testimony, but instead to punish him and then send him back to her. Perhaps money exchanged hands at that point. Either way, the police listened to Darya and did nothing about the husband’s complaint. When they returned him to the estate, Darya sent him into exile, where he soon died.