I'm very fond of the milk-drinking snake myself! poor thing.
It's hard to tell at this distance, but her motives seem to have been primarily financial, with a side of "kids are difficult to bring up, but reliable birth control hasn't been invented yet." A significant number of her victims were insured, with Cotton as beneficiary - though she never got rich off her insurance payments; it was more that they kept her going. What got her arrested in the first place seems to have been an offhand remark - she was asked if she would marry a man with whom she was involved; she said her child was in the way (the man in question didn't want to be responsible) but "she wouldn't be troubled long"; this struck the hearer as suspicious when the child died a few weeks later.
There was a TV mini-series about Mary Ann Cotton recently - at least, I saw it earlier this year, but it may have been older. [Looks up the name based on remembering that the maid from Downton Abbey was in it]: Dark Angel! I only have vague memories of it, but I recall a lot of non-poisoning deaths in her life and a fear of the workhouse. Couple that grief and anxiety with means and opportunity, and her actions almost make sense. (More sense to me than those serial killers who make coats out of skin or suchlike.) She really must have been a winning personality, because there were about five or six husbands in the mini-series.
Her father died in a workplace accident when she was eight; the company immediately kicked her family out of the company housing. Fear of the workhouse was a big deal! So was having a child a year with no more income than before. Definitely one of the more understandable serial killers, I think - though maybe it just looks that way from a long way off; maybe up close it would be different.
Inaccurate zoology is one of the great recurring themes of Sherlockian scholarship (and consequently of the toasts). Though in the case of the Hannibal fan who got shouted down, I don't think he was making any claims about the horses in "Silver Blaze," I think he was just trying to bring his other favorite into the discussion somehow - I don't remember the context, but I do remember that no one was having it.
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...did they say why she poisoned them??
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It's hard to tell at this distance, but her motives seem to have been primarily financial, with a side of "kids are difficult to bring up, but reliable birth control hasn't been invented yet." A significant number of her victims were insured, with Cotton as beneficiary - though she never got rich off her insurance payments; it was more that they kept her going. What got her arrested in the first place seems to have been an offhand remark - she was asked if she would marry a man with whom she was involved; she said her child was in the way (the man in question didn't want to be responsible) but "she wouldn't be troubled long"; this struck the hearer as suspicious when the child died a few weeks later.
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