However, David Wilson, the professor of criminology who wrote Mary Ann Cotton: Britain’s First Female Serial Killer on which this movie is based, is convinced of her guilt. And what might have motivated Mary Ann? What we see of her life is the same kind of abject poverty that we see in Victorian Slum House. Ian Smyth Herdman spent thirty years investigating the crimes and insists the police at the time did shoddy work and used hearsay evidence to gain a conviction. Of them, Mary Ann Cotton was the most prolific by far. But it should be noted that there are some who disagree with the premise that Mary Ann Cotton was actually guilty at all. In the mid-nineteenth century there was, in fact, a mild media-induced public panic over the prospects of an epidemic of poisoning, caused mostly by sensationalized stories of other female murderers, who all employed poison as their weapon of choice. What we don’t get to see in Dark Angel is the way the media sensationalized the story of Mary Ann Cotton and her crimes. (Historians believe her tally may have been as high as 21 people, including eleven of her own children.) In the Victorian era, when forensics was still in its infancy, this crime was frighteningly easy to get away with because arsenic poisoning mimicked two of the most common diseases of the day: typhoid fever and cholera. Firsthand accounts from the time described Mary Ann Cotton as strikingly beautiful, but to me, in this photo she looks a bit like Paulie Walnuts, amiright? Arsenic and Young Lace: The (conflicting) stories behind Dark Angel And while fellow Victorian Jack the Ripper gets all the press, the less well-known Mary Ann Cotton actually racked up more victims all by casually slipping arsenic in their tea. Considered to be the UK’s first female serial killer, Mary Ann Cotton was born in 1832, just before Victoria came to the throne (though she seems to have had more in common with Uncle Cumberland than the young Queen). She is playing against type in the true story of Mary Ann Cotton, a notorious Victorian-era serial killer. Our own Anna Bates (AKA actress Joanne Froggatt) is back on our telly screens in Dark Angel, premiering this Sunday night, May 21 at 9pm on THIRTEEN.
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