CRIME: Britain's First Female Serial Killer: Mary Ann Cotton

Vanessa Richardson (0:12)

On Saturday, July 6, 1872, a man named Thomas Riley walked down Front Street in the village of West Auckland in Northern England. Riley wore a lot of hats in that village. He was a parish official, an assistant coroner, and ran the local workhouse. And that week, he had a problem. A woman in West Auckland had come down with smallpox, and somebody needed to take care of her. Riley knew exactly who to ask. At number 13 Front Street, there was a widow who'd worked as a nurse. Neighbors said she kept the cleanest house on the street, and that she was good with the sick and dying. She turned him down. She said she couldn't take the job because she had her seven-year-old stepson at home and nobody to leave him with. Then she asked whether the parish could take the boy off her hands instead. Riley told her it didn't work that way. Then he turned to go. And that's when she said the thing he'd repeat for the rest of his life. She told him the boy was sickly. She said he would die like the rest of his family had. And then she told him she wouldn't be troubled long.

Riley walked home and let it go. People say strange things when they're tired and broke, and by 1872, this woman had buried more family members than anybody could keep track of. But six days later, her stepson, Charles Edward Cotton, was dead. A neighbor had seen him running errands up and down Front Street the week before. A doctor examined the body, and a coroner's jury heard the evidence. They ruled that the boy had died of natural causes. The woman at number 13 walked away clean.

Her name was Mary Ann Cotton. Everyone knows Jack the Ripper. Almost nobody knows her. But she was the blueprint.

From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories. They're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, a Crime House Original powered by PAVE Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. These cases are wild, and I want to hear what you think. At the end of each episode, please leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review, and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crime House Plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the Crime House lineup ad-free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to crimehouseplus.com. Or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes show page. Today, I'm talking about Britain's first female serial killer, Mary Ann Cotton. Between 1852 and 1872, she lost three husbands, a lover, her own mother, and as many as 11 of her children and stepchildren. Doctors wrote gastric fever on the certificates and moved on, because in a coal mining town in the 1860s, that was just what happened to people. And then, Mary Ann collected the insurance payments. It took two decades for anyone to connect the dots, and when they finally started counting, the number of victims was so high that historians still argue about it today.

All that and more coming up.

In February 1842, a man named Michael Robson went to work at a coal mine and didn't come home. He worked at a mine in Merton Colliery in County Durham, which sits in northern England, closer to Edinburgh than to London. In 1842, it was coal country. The pit villages ran all the way out to the North Sea, and in most of them, nearly every family lived off what came out of the ground. Michael was a sinker, which was one of the worst jobs in the business. Before anybody could dig coal out of the ground, somebody had to dig the hole. Sinkers went down first. They cut the shaft through wet rock, standing in water and breathing bad air, and they moved from pit to pit as new mines opened. That day, Michael fell down the shaft he was working in. The drop was about 150 feet. He was 30 years old. He left behind his wife, Margaret, a young son, and a nine-year-old daughter named Mary Ann. Within days, they lost their house. The cottage belonged to the Colliery, and it came with the job. No miner, no cottage. So the coal company put Margaret and her two children out on the street. Mary Ann watched her father's wages stop, and watched everything her family had go with them. About a year later, her mother married another miner, and the family had a roof again. But Mary Ann never got along with her stepfather. It just wasn't the same. Mary Ann was born on Halloween of 1832, in a village called Low Morsley. Her parents were serious Methodists, and they had her baptized a couple of weeks later. By all accounts, her childhood was ordinary. She went to Sunday school, and the man who ran it remembered her well enough to give a statement about her years later. He described her as innocent.