The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases Read Online Free PDF Page A

of malpractice.
    As she had immediately after the death of her first husband, Mary Ann again left Sunderland. She settled in Pallion, where she was hired by a man named James Robinson. A shipwright, Robinson had also recently lost a spouse, and was in need of a housekeeper to look after his five children. But in December 1866, tragedy again struck the Robinson household when the youngest child died suddenly of gastric fever. Meanwhile Mary Ann, it seems, provided something more than sympathy for her new employer – she was soon with child.
    Early in the New Year, Mary Ann received news that her mother had been taken ill. She made the trek back to Sunderland, arriving to find that her mother had all but recovered her health. Yet nine days later, she was dead.
    With Isabella in tow, Mary Ann returned to her employer. Soon after their arrival, the girl began complaining of stomach pains, as did two of the Robinson children. By the end of April, all three were dead.
    It can be said with some certainty that Robinson initially made no connection between the rash of deaths and his new housekeeper, for in August 1867 the two were married. The child Mary Ann was carrying, a daughter they named Mary Isabella, was born in late November. She lived for only three months.
    The death of Mary Isabella proved to be the saddest event in a disastrous marriage. Although the couple would have one more child, the relationship deteriorated rapidly. Robinson soon came to the realization that his wife was running up debts without his knowledge and had stolen money he had asked her to deposit in the bank. After valuables began disappearing from the house, he confronted his children and was told that their stepmother had forced them to pawn the items. In late 1869, two years after they’d married, Mary Ann’s husband threw her out of the house.
    By the beginning of 1870, Mary Ann had been reduced to living on the streets. Her luck began to change when a friend, Margaret Cotton, introduced Mary Ann to her brother, Frederick. As in the case of Robinson, Frederick Cotton had been recently widowed. He’d also suffered through the deaths of two of his four children. Within a few months of meeting Mary Ann, he buried another child, who died of an apparent stomach ailment. Not long into the grieving process, Mary Ann became pregnant with Cotton’s child. Early in the pregnancy, Margaret Cotton died of an ailment similar to that which had taken the life of her young nephew. Although Mary Ann was still married to Robinson – a secret she kept from the expectant father – she and Cotton were married in September 1870.
    Shortly after the birth of her 11th child, a boy named Robert, Mary Ann heard news of Joseph Nattrass, her former lover. No longer married, Nattrass was living in the village of West Aukland, a little over 60 kilometres to the south. Not only did Mary Ann quickly move to resume the relationship, she somehow succeeded in convincing her husband to relocate the family closer to where Nattrass lived. Two days after his first wedding anniversary, Cotton died from a gastric fever.
    Shortly after her husband’s death, Mary Ann welcomed Nattrass into her home as a ‘lodger’. Although she had received a substantial payment owing from Cotton’s life insurance policy, she went to work as a nurse for John Quick-Manning, an excise officer who was recovering from smallpox. She soon became pregnant by him.
    Between 10 March and 1 April, death visited the Cotton home on three separate occasions. The first to die was Frederick Cotton, Jr. His death was followed by Robert, the child of Mary Ann and her late husband. Before the infant could be buried, Joseph Nattrass also died; but only after rewriting his will so that all would be left to Mary Ann.
    Once again pregnant, this time with Quick-Manning’s child, Mary Ann’s thoughts turned to marriage. It would appear that to her thinking only one obstacle remained: Charles, the surviving Cotton child.