Episode Details

Our survey of villainous Victorian women examines six individuals associated with some of the most ghastly crimes of the era, many directed against children (and for this reason possibly a bit of a rough listen for some.)

Five of these criminals inspired murder ballads, or more specifically “execution ballads,”  single-sheet broadsheets sold at the time of the trials or executions.

The sixth woman, Mary Ann Cotton, a poisoner from the north of England, also inspired verses, in this case, however, a schoolyard rope-skipping chant of the type memorializing Lizzie Borden.  (We begin the show with a version the Borden rhyme from 1956 episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents remixed by Bob’s Vids.)

Cotton, Britain’s first female serial killer, was executed in 1873 for the murder of her stepson, the last of 13 offspring whose lives she’d taken, that along with three of her four husbands, who were generously insured to ensure the poisoner would profit from her evil.

Like Cotton, our next murderer also preferred arsenic as her lethal weapon. The American, Lydia Sherman, throughout the 1860s and early ’70s poisoned eight children as well as three husbands in New York and Connecticut. Dubbed “the modern Lucretia Borgia” by the press, Sherman was also the subject of an 1873 book, The Poison Fiend: The Most Startling and Sensational Series of Crimes Ever Committed in this Country.  Unlike Cotton, however, Sherman escaped the gallows, sentenced instead to end her life in prison. We begin her segment with a snippet of  the broadside “Ballad of Lydia Sherman” by the Mockingbirds.

We next look at Emma Pitt, a schoolteacher in the British village of Hampreston in Dorset, who murdered a child in 1869. While only taking the life of a single victim, her crime was regarded as particularly heinous as that victim was her own newborn baby, not only killed but mutilated by its mother.

Our next murderess, the Irish servant Kate Webster was found guilty of killing her mistress J