John Flanagan died in December 1880.His mother drew the insurance money.Next year Thomas Higgins married the younger of the sisters, and in the year following Mary Higgins, his daughter, died.Her stepmother drew the insurance money.The year after that Margaret Jennings, daughter of the lodger, died.Once again insurance money was drawn, this time by both sisters.
Thomas Higgins passed away that same year in a house to which what remained of the menage had removed.He was on the point of being buried, as having died of dysentery due to alcoholism, when the suspicions of his brother led the coroner to stop the funeral.The brother had heard word of insurance on the life of Thomas.A post-mortem revealed the fact that Thomas had actually died of arsenic poisoning; upon which discovery the bodies of John Flanagan, Mary Higgins, and Margaret Jennings were exhumed for autopsy, which revealed arsenic poisoning in each case.The prisoners alone had attended the deceased in the last illnesses.Theory went that the poison had been obtained by soaking fly- papers.Mesdames Flanagan and Higgins were executed at Kirkdale Gaol in March of 1884.
Now, these are two cases which, if only minor in the wholesale poisoning line when compared with the Van der Linden, Jegado, and Cotton envenomings, yet have their points of interest.In both cases the guilty were so far able to banish all trivial fond records'' as to dispose of kindred who might have been dear to them: Mrs Holroyd of husband and son, with lodger's daughter as makeweight; the Liverpool pair of nephew, husband, stepdaughter (or son, brother-in-law, and stepniece, according to how you look at it), with again the unfortunate daughter of a lodger thrown in.If they do things better on the Continent''--speaking generally and ignoring our own Mary Ann--there is yet temptation to examine the lesser native products at length, but space and the scheme of this book prevent.In the matter of the Liverpool Locustas there is anengaging speculation.It was brought to my notice by Mr Alan Brock, author of By Misadventure and Further Evidence.Just how far did the use of flypapers by Flanagan and Higgins for the obtaining of arsenic serve as an example to Mrs Maybrick, convicted of the murder of her husband in the same city five years later?
The list of women poisoners in England alone would stretch interminably.If one were to confine oneself merely to those employing arsenic the list would still be formidable.Mary Blandy, who callously slew her father with arsenic supplied her by her lover at Henley-on- Thames in 1751, has been a subject for many criminological essayists.That she has attracted so much attention is probably due to the double fact that she was a girl in a very comfortable way of life, heiress to a fortune of L10,000, and that contemporary records are full and accessible.But there is nothing essentially interesting about her case to make it stand out from others that have attracted less notice in a literary way.Another Mary, of a later date, Edith Mary Carew, who in 1892 was found guilty by the Consular Court, Yokohama, of the murder of her husband with arsenic and sugar of lead, was an Englishwoman who might have given Mary Blandy points in several directions.
When we leave the arsenical-minded and seek for cases where other poisons were employed there is still no lack of material.There is, for example, the case of Sarah Pearson and the woman Black, who were tried at Armagh in June 1905 for the murder of the old mother of the latter.The old woman, Alice Pearson (Sarah was her daughter-in-law), was in possession of small savings, some forty pounds, which aroused the cupidity of the younger women.Their first attempt at murder was with metallic mercury.It rather failed, and the trick was turned by means of three-pennyworth of strychnine, bought by Sarah and mixed with the old lady's food.The murder might not have been discovered but for the fact that Sarah, who had gone to Canada, was arrested in Montreal for some other offence, and made a confession which implicated her husband and Black.A notable point about the case is the amount of metallic mercury found in the old woman's body: 296 grains--a record.
Having regard to the condition of life in which these Irishwomen lived,there is nothing, to my mind, in the fact that they murdered for forty pounds to make their crime more sordid than that of Mary Blandy.
Take, again, the case of Mary Ansell, the domestic servant, who, at Hertford Assizes in June 1899, was found guilty of the murder of her sister, Caroline, by the administration of phosphorus contained in a cake.Here the motive for the murder was the insurance made by Ansell upon the life of her sister, a young woman of weak intellect confined in Leavesden Asylum, Watford.The sum assured was only L22 10s.If Mary Blandy poisoned her father in order to be at liberty to marry her lover, Cranstoun, and to secure the fortune Cranstoun wanted with her, wherein does she shine above Mary Ansell, a murderess who not only poisoned her sister, but nearly murdered several of her sister's fellow-inmates of the asylum, and all for twenty odd pounds? Certainly not in being less sordid, certainly not in being more `romantic.'
There is, at root, no case of murder proved and accepted as such which does not contain its points of interest for the criminological writer.There is, indeed, many a case, not only of murder but of lesser crime, that has failed to attract a lot of attention, but that yet, in affording matter for the student of crime and criminal psychology, surpasses others which, very often because there has been nothing of greater public moment at the time, were boomed by the Press into the prominence of causes celebres.
