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Hanged at Durham
By Steve Fielding The History Press
Copyright © 2013 Steve Fielding
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-5336-8
CHAPTER 1
A FATAL DECISION
* John Dolan, 22 March 1869 *
Catherine Keeshan ran a lodging house on Union Lane, Sunderland. She shared the house with her lover of the previous three years, 37-year-old Irish labourer John Dolan, and two lodgers, Hugh Ward and Edward Collins. Ward had taken lodgings there in October 1868 and seemed initially to be on good terms with Dolan.
On 8 December, Dolan and Ward went out drinking, and during the night their discussion turned to Dolan's paramour, with Ward apparently making some comment about Catherine to which Dolan took exception. They returned to the house in the early hours and Dolan gave Catherine money to go out and buy some ale. When she returned, Ward poured himself a drink but Dolan refused, saying he had to be up early for work on the following morning. Ward then poured a glass for the woman, at which point Dolan jumped to his feet and dragged Catherine out of the room.
They went to their bedroom, where her screams brought Ward running to the room. Dolan pacified him, saying he would not cause any more trouble and Ward went back to his drink. Moments later, more screams rang out and Ward returned to the room and began to fight with Dolan.
Catherine rushed out to find a policeman and in the company of four constables she returned to the house, whereupon the situation calmed down. No sooner had the police departed than Dolan locked the door behind them and started causing trouble. Catherine jumped through the window and called for the police to return, asking them to arrest her drunken lover. They again warned Dolan, who was clearly drunk and aggressive, about his conduct and when Dolan lunged at the woman, he was restrained and hit twice by a policeman. Still they refused to take him into custody, despite her pleas. It was a fatal decision that was to cost two men their lives.
The police finally left the house after Dolan told them he was going to bed, but as Catherine watched him go upstairs she sensed it was not the end of the matter. Following him to the bedroom she could see he was rummaging through a bag. She knew he kept a shoemaker's knife in it and shouted to Ward to watch out. She rushed out to find the police but before they could return Dolan had viciously stabbed Ward in the stomach and face. The first wound tore open his stomach, the second blinded him in the left eye. Ward died from his injuries a few days later.
Dolan was tried before Mr Justice Lush at Durham Assizes on 24 February 1869; his defence was manslaughter through provocation. The jury took just minutes to find that there was no provocation for a brutal attack and return a verdict of guilty of wilful murder.
CHAPTER 2
THE DARLINGTON FENIAN MURDER
* John McConville, 22 March 1869 *
Late on the night of Saturday 30 January 1869, Philip Trainer, an Irish labourer, entered the Allan Arms at Darlington. He stayed for twenty minutes, but no sooner had he left the building than a shot rang out. When witnesses went outside they found him lying in a pool of blood in the adjacent alleyway. He had been shot in the left eye, the bullet penetrating the brain and killing him instantly.
The police were called and, arriving at the public house, they found that although several people had apparently witnessed the attack, nobody was talking. Following several days of enquiries, police eventually arrested John McConville, a 23-year-old Irish furnace puddler, on suspicion of being involved. He denied shooting Trainer but police soon gained enough evidence to charge him with murder.
At his trial before Mr Justice Lush, it was learned that Trainer had previously been a member of a Fenian gang but had begun to distance himself from their subversive activities to the extent that he announced he was leaving the society. On the night of his murder he had gone into the pub for a drink and happened across several members of the gang already drinking there. A scuffle broke out, at which the landlord asked them to leave and it was at this point that McConville had taken out his pistol and fatally wounded Trainer.
Following the conviction, it was announced that the prisoner had a long history of offences through his involvement with the Fenian movement. He had served terms of imprisonment for his proclivities and sympathies and had been involved in the infamous attack on a police van in Manchester that had led to the murder of a policeman and the execution of three men at Salford.
McConville was hanged alongside John Dolan in the first private executions carried out at Durham. It was only the fifth execution carried out in England since the Capital Punishment Amendment Act of 1868, abolishing public executions. It was also the first double execution. William Calcraft officiated, having made the long journey by train from his home near London.
CHAPTER 3
HANGED SIDE BY SIDE
* John Hayes and Hugh Slane, 13 January 1873 *
Four years after the first double execution carried out inside Durham Gaol, two more men also shared the gallows. This was to be one of the rare occasions when two prisoners simultaneously paid the ultimate penalty for the same crime.
It was late on the evening of Saturday 16 November 1872, and at their home that doubled as a tobacconist's shop on Duncombe Street, Spennymoor, Jane and Joseph Waine prepared to settle down for the night. There was a knock at the back door and in walked next-door neighbour, 22-year-old Hugh Slane, who asked to purchase some matches. What happened next led to the trial of four men for murder.
Slane noticed the Waines' lodger, John Wilson, sitting by the fire in the kitchen. He asked Wilson if he had been in Carrick's Beerhouse earlier, where there had been some trouble. Wilson said he was a stranger to the area, that he had no money and he did not know where the beer house was. Slane called him a liar and the two men squared up, only to be separated by Joseph Waine, who ushered his neighbour out into the back alley.
Waine ignored Slane's requests to come outside and fight, and instead he leisurely took out his pipe and went to the door to smoke it. A few minutes later, as Waine was talking to his 12-year-old son, Isaac, Slane reappeared, threw the contents of the matchbox into Waine's face and grabbed him by the lapels. As they stumbled into the alley, Slane whistled a signal and three men appeared from around the corner and proceeded to kick and batter Waine senseless. As his wife rushed to find a policeman, Wilson and Waine's son helped the shopkeeper back into the kitchen. A neighbour went to fetch a doctor but, although Waine received prompt medical attention, he succumbed to his injuries and died later that night.
Police soon had four men in custody: Hugh Slane, 29-year-old John Hayes, 19-year-old Terence Rice and 27-year-old George Beesley. They were remanded to appear before Mr Justice Denham at Durham Assizes in December. The evidence of Isaac Waine, who testified that Slane had called for the help of his friends by whistling for them to join the fight, suggested premeditation. It was a short trial, the jury taking a matter of minutes to find all four guilty as charged. They were sentenced to death and the date of execution was fixed for 6 January 1873.
Petitions for clemency were gathered and sent to the Home Secretary but, although the original date of execution was put back a week, there was no suggestion that a reprieve for any would be forthcoming. Just when it seemed that all four would face the hangman, word came through thirty-six hours before the appointed time that Rice and Beesley had had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment. Slane and Hayes were left to face the hangman. They were hanged side by side.
CHAPTER 4
THE FIRST FEMALE SERIAL KILLER
* Mary Ann Cotton, 24 March 1873 *
Mary Ann Cotton – she's dead and she's rotten,
She lies in her bed – with her eyes wide open.
Sing, sing! Oh, what can I sing?
Mary Ann Cotton is tied up with string.
Where, where? Up in the air,
Selling black puddings a penny a pair.
(Popular Victorian children's rhyme)
Charles Cotton passed away suddenly. On 12 July 1872, his stepmother, Mary Ann Cotton, told the doctor that the 7-year-old had died from gastric fever, but both the doctor and her neighbours were suspicious. Other members of the family had died by similar stomach ailments in recent months, and soon gossip and suspicion spread like wildfire through West Auckland. When it reached the attention of the police, they began an investigation and looked into the background of 40-year-old Mrs Cotton.
Born Mary Ann Robson in the village of Low Moorsley in October of 1832, she had an unhappy childhood. She left home at 16, then gave up her job as a domestic servant in South Hetton when she fell pregnant to her first husband, William Mowbray. During the first five years of their marriage they travelled the country, with Mary giving birth to five children, four of whom died in infancy.
In January 1865, William Mowbray was injured at sea and returned to their home in Sunderland to nurse his swollen foot. A few weeks later, despite a doctor's care, he died from a sudden intestinal disorder. Soon after Mowbray's death, Mary moved to Seaham Harbour, where she struck up a relationship with Joseph Nattrass, a local man who was engaged to another woman. Here, another child died, the eighth to meet that fate of the nine to whom she had given birth.
Mary returned to Sunderland and found employment at a local infirmary, while her sole surviving child went to live with her grandmother. At Sunderland Infirmary, she began courting a patient and, soon after he was discharged, they married at Monkwearmouth in August 1865. He soon developed health problems and died in October 1866 after chronic stomach problems. Although it was her second case of widowhood in two years, it seemed that no one was suspicious of the hard-working nurse
In November 1866, Mary answered an advertisement placed by recently widowed shipwright James Robinson. He needed a housekeeper to look after his children and to maintain the house. Shortly before Christmas, the youngest child developed gastric fever and died. Overcome with grief, James turned to Mary for comfort and she was soon pregnant with his child.
In March 1867, Mary's mother fell ill and she moved in to nurse her. Soon, her mother began complaining of stomach pains and died nine days later. Mary's daughter Isabella came back to live with her and, on returning to the Robinson house, she too soon developed a debilitating stomach ailment. Robinson's two older children were also taken ill and by the end of April all three were dead. The grief-stricken Robinson did not suspect his wife-to-be and they married in August. Their first child, Mary Isabella, was born in November, but on 1 March 1868, she too succumbed to illness.
Robinson had by now become suspicious of his wife and threw her out of the house. Besides the tragic sudden deaths of the children, debts were building up. There was also the matter of her constant requests for him to insure his life.
In 1870, a friend introduced Mary to her brother, Frederick Cotton. They married in September and Mary quickly insured the lives of her new husband and his two sons. She gave birth to a son in early 1871 and, when she learned that Joseph Nattrass was now living in nearby West Auckland, she moved the family there and rekindled the relationship.
In December 1871 Frederick Cotton died of gastric fever and Nattrass began to lodge at Mary's house. Mary had also found work as a nurse to John Quick-Manning, a customs officer who was recovering from smallpox. Mary soon became pregnant by him and decided that he was to be husband number four. Realising that marriage to Quick-Manning was hampered by the remaining members of the Cotton household, she went to work and, by the summer of 1872, both children were dead. Nattrass passed away soon after the last child, and also shortly after changing his will, leaving everything to Mary Cotton.
Shortly before Charles Cotton's death, Mary had spoken to Thomas Riley, a localgovernment official, about the possibility of sending him into a workhouse. Informed that it would only be possible if she went with him, she coldly told Riley that the boy was in the way of a marriage with Quick-Manning, and '... he'll go like all the rest of the Cotton family.'
When he learned of the child's death, Riley spoke to a doctor and outlined his suspicions. The doctor was surprised to hear of the news, as he had tended to Charles several times during the previous week and had detected nothing life-threatening. The doctor delayed issuing a death certificate until an investigation could take place.
Instead of calling on the doctor after the boy's death, Mary visited the office of the insurance company to collect on the policy. Learning that money could not be released until she presented a death certificate, she called to see the doctor. Mary was told she could not have a signed death certificate until a formal inquest had been held.
The subsequent inquest found that death was not due to natural causes. When the story was picked up on by local newspapers, resentment toward her in West Auckland quickly built up. Appalled by the gossip, Quick -Manning severed all contact with Mary, who made plans to leave the area.
Samples of Charles's stomach contents were analysed and tested positive for arsenic. The doctor contacted the police, who arrested Mary and ordered the bodies of both Charles and Joseph Nattrass be exhumed. Both tested positive for the presence of arsenic. Although officers built up a long list of suspicious deaths, it was decided to proceed with the single murder charge of Charles Cotton. Mary was heavily pregnant at the time and, once she had given birth, the trial began.
The court heard of the long list of gastric fever victims and about Mary's statements describing Charles as an obstacle towards marriage, and numerous witnesses testified to her purchases of arsenic. The defence claimed that Charles could have inhaled loose airborne particles of arsenic, as it was used as a dye in the green wallpaper of the Cotton home.
Mr Justice Archibald in his summing-up dismissed this theory and the jury retired for just ninety minutes before returning to find Mary guilty of murder. She continued to protest her innocence and had to be carried from the dock after collapsing on hearing the verdict.
On 24 March 1873, she was led to the scaffold erected in the courtyard, where veteran hangman William Calcraft placed the noose around her neck and pulled the lever. The trapdoors opened and she dropped into the pit. But death was not instant: she struggled slowly and painfully on the end of the rope for over three minutes before life was extinct.
Mary Ann Cotton holds a place in the annals of crime as one of the most notorious poisoners on record. In her greed and the desire to rid herself of people who became obstacles in her life, the total number of victims in her twenty-year killing spree could be as many as twenty-one. Her death count was surpassed only by mass murderer Dr Harold Shipman, who also spent time in a Durham prison cell a century and quarter later.
CHAPTER 5
AN UNCONTROLLABLE TEMPER
* Charles Dawson, 5 January 1874 *
In the late summer of 1873, four men went out drinking in Darlington. They were Charles Dawson, who shared a house with Martha Addison at Cleveland Street, Darlington, along with their three lodgers, Tom Mullen, Pat Dempsey and John Harper. Dawson and Mrs Addison had been living together for two years, since he left his wife at Stockton and moved in with her.
Apart from the money from their tenants, both made a small income, hers legitimately from selling home-made ginger beer to the ironworkers at the factory across from her home; Dawson earned some of his money from labouring work in the ironworks, but most of it from poaching. It was well known that he was a violent man and often lost his temper with Mrs Addison, usually when drunk.
On the evening of Saturday 13 September, the men visited a number of public houses, where Dawson told Mullen he was going to find Martha, with whom he had had a quarrel earlier in the evening. They parted and Dawson soon found Martha walking near a railway cutting at Albert Hill. They exchanged words and he struck her in the face, knocking her to the floor. He then helped her to her feet and they returned home, where Mullen was sitting drinking in the kitchen.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hanged at Durham by Steve Fielding. Copyright © 2013 Steve Fielding. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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