3 cases from England
Convicted: Mary Frith
Mary Frith, also known as Moll Cutpurse, was a notorious English pickpocket and fence operating in the London underworld during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Her criminal activities primarily involved theft, fencing stolen goods, and occasional highway robbery. She was a well-known figure in London, recognized for her unconventional behavior, including wearing male attire and smoking, both of which were highly unusual for women during the period.
Convicted: Doris Marie Payne
She was 86 years old, wearing an electronic ankle monitor from her previous arrest, and she was shoplifting $86 worth of merchandise from a Walmart near Atlanta. That is the last chapter, so far, in the seven-decade criminal career of Doris Marie Payne, a woman who once walked out of a Monte Carlo Cartier boutique with a half-million-dollar diamond hidden in the seam of her girdle. Born in the coal-scarred poverty of Slab Fork, West Virginia, in 1930, Payne became the most prolific jewel thief in American history: over $2 million stolen, 32 aliases, nine passports, ten Social Security numbers, and an FBI file reportedly six feet long. She wore designer clothes into the finest jewelry stores in Paris, Rome, Geneva, and Tokyo, charmed the clerks with a smile, and walked out richer. Judges called her "the Terminator." Interpol tracked her for decades. She expressed no remorse, ever. Now approaching 95, she lives as a free woman in Atlanta. A documentary about her life won an Audience Award at Tribeca. Halle Berry is reportedly attached to play her in a biopic. And through it all, Doris Payne has remained exactly what she always was: the best-dressed thief in the room.
Convicted: Mary Ann Cotton (née Robson)
'I won't be troubled long. He'll go like all the rest of the Cottons.' That was Mary Ann Cotton's assessment of her seven-year-old stepson Charles Edward, delivered to a parish official in West Auckland, County Durham, in the spring of 1872. Five days later, the boy was dead. It was the statement that finally brought her down. By the time investigators began pulling at the thread, they found two decades of bodies behind it: eleven of her thirteen children, three of her four husbands, her own mother, and a string of lodgers and stepchildren, each one dead of 'gastric fever,' each one insured, each one mourned briefly and then forgotten. The death toll, historians estimate, may have reached twenty-one. Mary Ann Cotton was a nurse, a mother, a wife. She was trusted by the sick she nursed and by the physicians who signed off on her victims' deaths. She understood, precisely, that Victorian medicine would not look twice at a working-class child dying of gastroenteritis. She killed for insurance money: modest sums, accumulated over years, in exchange for the lives of nearly everyone who had ever depended on her. She was only ever convicted of one murder. She was hanged in Durham County Gaol on March 24, 1873, in a botched execution that left her strangling at the end of a too-short rope. She was forty years old. The full story of what she did is both a portrait of individual evil and an indictment of a system that made it catastrophically easy.
