Murder most female

Women accused of violent murders have often faced assumptions about their motives and disbelief that the 'gentle sex' could commit such bloody crimes. Rosalind Crone investigates four cases from the 19th century

- Rosalind Crone

1 A female bodysnatcher?

At a time when selling human bodies to anatomy schools reaped hefty payouts, some desperate criminals killed to get their hands on fresh corpses. Was Elizabeth Ross one such grasping murderer?

In the early 19th century, ‘resurrection men’ dug up recently buried corpses to meet the huge demand for cadavers to use in teaching and surgical practice. Others were too impatient to wait for someone to die before snatching a body — and took matters into their own hands.

Between 1828 and 1831, William Burke (operating with accomplice William Hare) in Edinburgh, and John Bishop and Thomas Williams in London, were convicted and hanged for murdering numerous people in order to sell their bodies to anatomy schools. Indeed, all of the infamous bodysnatchers of 19th-century Britain were male. It’s certainly conceivable that women were involved in the trade as helpmates — but could they ever have been the instigators, or even killers?

Meet Elizabeth Ross (alias Cook), a 38-year-old Irish immigrant in London with a reputation for drunkenness, violence and petty crime. She had once been accused of skinning alive six of her neighbours’ cats, and it was rumoured that she had murdered a 14-year-old girl who went missing while in her care. Elizabeth’s common-law husband, Edward Cook, who worked as a nightwatchman for the parish of Aldgate, associated with resurrection men. Little wonder, then, that fellow parishioner Ann Buton was very concerned when her grandmother, Caroline Walsh - at that time an 84-year-old pedlar - accepted Elizabeth’s offer of cheap lodgings.