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

Mary Ann had hoped that he might be sent to a workhouse, but was told by Thomas Riley, a minor parish official, that she would be obliged to accompany him.
    After declining, she informed Riley that Charles was sickly, adding, ‘I won’t be troubled long. He’ll go like all the rest of the Cottons.’ Riley, who had always seen the boy healthy, thought the statement peculiar. When Charles Cotton died five days later, he visited the village authorities and urged an investigation.
    An inquest held the following Saturday determined that Charles had, indeed, died of natural causes. Mary Ann’s story that Riley had made the accusation because she had spurned his advances would very likely have affected his position as well as his reputation, had it not been for the local press.
    Reporters looking into Mary Ann’s story discovered that she had buried three husbands, a prospective sister-in-law, a paramour, her mother and no fewer than 12 children, nearly all of whom had died of stomach ailments. The revelations caused the doctor who had attended Charles to reopen his investigation. He soon discovered traces of arsenic in the small samples he’d kept from the boy’s stomach.
    Mary Ann was arrested, and the body of Charles Cotton was exhumed. After another six corpses were dug up in failed attempts to locate the body of Joseph Nattrass, it was decided that she would stand trial for the murder of Charles alone. Proceedings were delayed a few months until the delivery of the baby fathered by Quick-Manning.
    During the trial, Mary Ann attempted to explain Charles’ death by saying that he had inhaled arsenic contained in the dye of the wallpaper of the Cotton home. The theory was dismissed and she was sentenced to death.
    On 24 March 1873, Mary Ann Cotton was hanged at Durham County Gaol. Her death was long and painful, the result of an elderly hangman having miscalculated the required drop.
    THE BLOODY BENDERS
    In Kansas, the Bender family is legendary, and as with all legends, it is difficult to determine the difference between truth and embellishment. However, one claim that can be made with some certainty is that they were the first known serial killers operating in the United States.
    Late in 1870, the Bender men arrived in Osage Township in the south-eastern part of Kansas. Like nearly all settlers, they came from the east, but exactly where from has always been something of a mystery. The assumption is that they were German. The patriarch, a giant of a man named John Bender Sr, barely spoke – his vocabulary seemed to consist of little more than muttered curses. His son, John Jr, was easily the more sociable of the two. Though he spoke with a German accent, he was fluent in English and given to laughter.
    The two spent the remainder of 1870 and nearly all of the following year preparing their land and constructing a cabin and a barn, several kilometres south of the town of Cherry Vale. In the autumn, they brought Ma Bender and her daughter Kate to the new homestead. They used large pieces of canvas to divide their cabin in half. The back became the family home, while the other half was set up as a general store and inn offering lodging to weary travellers who passed along the Osage Trail. It was a good location, providing a tempting if modest place to stop for many lone men travelling from the east to a new life in the west.
    Over the months that followed, people started going missing from along the Osage Trail. In a time of erratic and unreliable mail service, the disappearances weren’t noticed at first; it was only over time, when the names of the missing had begun to accumulate, that suspicions began to be aroused. In neighbouring communities, rumour and speculation began to circulate.
    Among the missing was a well-known physician, William H. York, who had disappeared in March 1873 while travelling the 160-kilometre route from Fort Scott to Independence, Kansas. Not long after the doctor’s disappearance, the