In 1884, two sisters stood in the dock of Liverpool’s St. George’s Hall, charged with the murder of a man who had been their boarder. By the time the trial ended, the jury would take just fifty minutes to convict them, and the evidence presented over three days exposed a scheme that had already claimed four lives. The case began, as many Victorian crimes did, in the grinding poverty of England’s industrial cities, where survival itself was a daily struggle.

Catherine Flanagan was born in Ireland in 1829. Her sister, Margaret, came fourteen years later. When Catherine was still young, her parents left Ireland for Liverpool, joining tens of thousands of others fleeing the famine that devastated the country between 1845 and 1849. In 1847 alone, around 300,000 people arrived in the city.

By 1851, a quarter of Liverpool’s population was Irish-born. The city was one of the world’s great maritime ports, with up to forty percent of global trade passing through its docks, but for the poor who crowded its slums, life was brutal. Water had to be collected from pumps, which were often sources of disease, and many of the poor preferred to drink beer or gin, which was especially cheap. This was the world Catherine Flanagan knew, and it shaped the decisions she would make for the rest of her life.

She opened a beer house near the docks, taking advantage of the Beer House Act of 1830, which had loosened regulations and allowed any ratepayer to brew and sell beer with a license. The location was good, and workers came in after their shifts. But the establishment gained a poor reputation with the local constabulary, frequented as it was by criminals and prostitutes, and it opened on Sundays, which was not permitted. When the Wine and Beer House Act of 1869 gave licensing control to local justices, her beer house was among those forced to close.

With her income gone, Catherine turned to moneylending. It was a lucrative business in Victorian Britain, where the working class suffered from low and irregular wages, and no restrictions existed on the interest rates lenders could charge. It was not a respectable occupation, but it required little to start. Catherine borrowed from local loan offices and lent small amounts to neighbors who had nowhere else to turn.

Around 1880, she opened a lodging house at 5 Skirving Street, hiring her sister Margaret to help run it. Margaret was joined by Catherine’s twenty-two-year-old son, John, a fit young man despite his mother’s claims that he was in poor health. The house quickly filled with tenants, including a man named Thomas Higgins and his eight-year-old daughter, Mary, and another man, Patrick Jennings, with his nineteen-year-old daughter, Maggie. Then people began to die.

In December 1880, Catherine’s son John died suddenly. No one had ever seen him unwell, but his mother collected 71 pounds from the burial society with which he had been registered. Burial societies were common among the poor, who wanted to spare their loved ones the indignity of a pauper’s funeral, but the payouts were also a temptation. In 1882, Margaret Flanagan married Thomas Higgins.

Within months of the wedding, his daughter Mary fell ill and died. Margaret collected 22 pounds from the burial society. In January 1883, Maggie Jennings also died, unexpectedly, at nineteen. Her life was insured through the burial society, and the money was collected by Catherine.

Three deaths in one small lodging house did not go unnoticed. The residents of Skirving Street began to talk. A child and two seemingly healthy young adults dying in the same house was strange, even in a neighborhood where death was familiar. To escape the gossip, the sisters moved, first to 105 Latimer Street and then to 27 Ascot Street.

But death followed them. In September 1883, Thomas Higgins fell ill. He was forty-five, a hard-working man, and he brought money into the household. A doctor named Whitford was called and concluded that the man was suffering from dysentery brought on by drinking cheap whiskey.

He prescribed a mixture of opium and castor oil and told the patient to stop drinking. Two days later, on October 22, 1883, Thomas Higgins died. The doctor recorded dysentery as the cause. Thomas’s brother, Patrick, was not satisfied.

He knew his brother had enjoyed good health all his life. He also remembered that Thomas had once told him that Catherine and Margaret had wanted to take out a life insurance policy on him for 50 pounds. When a doctor came to the house with an insurance agent to examine the proposed policyholder, Thomas had refused to cooperate. Patrick began investigating and discovered that his brother had been insured with five different burial societies, from which Margaret collected a total of 108 pounds.

He went to the police. The police agreed to investigate. On the day of the funeral, a constable, a coroner’s officer, and two doctors arrived at 27 Ascot Street. They found people gathered around the coffin in the small front room, some drinking, with little evidence that anyone was grieving.

The coroner told Margaret that the funeral would not proceed until a post-mortem was conducted. Catherine Flanagan said nothing and slipped out through the back door. The autopsy found high levels of arsenic in Thomas Higgins’s body. The amount suggested he had been poisoned over the course of several days.

A search of the house turned up a bottle containing a white substance later confirmed to be arsenic, and arsenic was also found in the pocket of a coat worn by the widow, Margaret Higgins. She was arrested. Catherine went into hiding, moving from one boarding house to another but never leaving the city. After a week, she was seen and arrested on October 16, 1883.

The sisters were formally charged with Thomas Higgins’s murder. But there were three other deaths to consider, and the magistrate granted permission to exhume the bodies of John Flanagan, Maggie Jennings, and little Mary Higgins. All three contained large amounts of arsenic. All three had died from poisoning.

All three had been insured through burial societies. When confronted with the evidence, Margaret became evasive. Catherine, however, blamed her sister entirely, claiming Margaret had been the instigator. She also explained how the poison had been obtained.

The investigators had expected rat poison, but the common adulterants found in rat poison did not appear in the autopsies. Catherine told them that Margaret had extracted the poison from flypapers and offered to act as a prosecution witness against her sister. The Crown declined the offer. The trial began on Thursday, February 14, 1884, before Mr.

Justice Butts. The case for the murder of Thomas Higgins was heard first, and the evidence was convincing. The jury took fifty minutes to find both sisters guilty, and the judge sentenced them to death. Margaret clapped in the dock.

The Crown did not proceed with the cases for the murders of John Flanagan, Maggie Jennings, and Mary Higgins. The sisters were sent to Kirkdale Prison, held in separate cells, attended by the prison chaplain. Because they were illiterate, guards read to them, hoping they might seek a commutation of their sentences. Catherine spoke to detectives and named other women she said were responsible for other poisonings in the area.

The police investigated her claims but could not obtain sufficient evidence to substantiate them. Liverpool’s prosecuting solicitor, William Marx, wrote to the director of public prosecutions, stating his belief that there were probably more victims, but it would be difficult to prove who besides Catherine Flanagan and Margaret Higgins could have been responsible. There would be no reprieve. At eight o’clock on the morning of Monday, March 3, 1884, on a cold and snowy day, fifty-five-year-old Catherine Flanagan and her sister, forty-one-year-old Margaret Higgins, were hanged.

Despite the weather, a large crowd gathered outside the prison to see the black flag raised. Since 1868, executions were no longer public, but the signal was still watched for. The police continued to investigate Catherine’s allegations. She had named Margaret Evans and Bridget Begley as accomplices, along with Margaret Potter, Bridget Stanton, and Mrs.

Fallon, who she said worked as agents for the burial society, and another woman named Catherine Ryan. Although it was discovered that Mrs. Stanton had close links to insurance payouts made after some deaths, charges were never brought against her or any of the others Catherine Flanagan had named.