Episode 19= The penny policies- Flanagan and Higgins- 1880-1884

Liverpool, 1880. In the packed courts around Scotland Road, thousands of Irish families lived shoulder to shoulder, carrying with them the hunger, hardship, and resilience they’d brought across the water. Among them were two women—Catherine Flanagan and Margaret Higgins—Irish-born, sharp‑witted, and struggling to survive in a city that offered little mercy.

What they built in those narrow rooms was a scheme as cold as it was calculated: take out funeral insurance on the vulnerable, then use poison to turn policy into profit. Between 1880 and 1884, at least four people—children, relatives, lodgers—were murdered for payouts barely large enough to bury the dead.

Their crimes shocked Victorian Britain, not only for their brutality but for the way they exposed the desperation of the Irish poor in Liverpool and the dark opportunities created by the booming funeral insurance trade.

In this episode, we return to those shadowed streets to trace the women, their Irish roots, their victims, and the investigation that finally brought their killing spree to an end.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Murder Under Gaslight. Your guide to Victorian Air Island's most gruesome crimes. Your host is Don Mortel.

SPEAKER_01 0:23

Consider the fly paper. You know it, or you know what it was. A strip of sticky paper, coiled and hanging from a ceiling in a Victorian kitchen or parlour. Designed to trap flies that swarmed in summer and carried disease. Common as candles, sold in every ironmongers and general store in England, that penny fly paper. The reason it worked, the reason insects stuck and died, was that it was impregnated with arsenic. Now, consider this. If you took a sheet of fly paper and soaked it in a bowl of water overnight, you would produce a liquid, colourless, largely odourless, tasteless, more or less. A liquid that, if added to a cup of water or a bowl of broth and given to a man who was sick and thirsty and trusting the women who were nursing him, would kill him slowly, painfully. In a way that in eighteen eighties Liverpool, a doctor attending a poor man in a backstreet cellar dwelling, would likely attribute to dysentery. That is the method. Now, consider the motive. A penny a week. That's all it costs to insure a life in working class Liverpool in the eighteen eighties. A penny a week to a burial society, and when the insured person died, you collected enough for a funeral, and a little something besides. And if you had insured the same life with five different burial societies simultaneously, each charging a penny a week, each paying out independently on the death, you might collect a sum that represented months of a labourer's wages. For a woman with no income, no safety net, no property, and a city full of people who trusted her. That was a fortune. This is the story of two Irish sisters in a slum in Liverpool. Two women who looked at the arithmetic of death and decided to make it work for them. This is the story of Catherine Flanagan and Margaret Higgins, the black widows of Liverpool. Welcome to Murder Under Gaslight. I'm Don Mortell, and tonight we're going somewhere that smells of tallow and cul smoke and something else. Something that the neighbours noticed eventually when they thought back on it. The particular sweet smell of a house where people kept dying. To understand what happened in the back streets of Liverpool in the early eighteen eighties, you have to understand what Liverpool was. It was the second city of the British Empire. Its stocks moved more cargo than anywhere outside London. Its port connected Britain to America, to the Caribbean, to the world. The wealth generated was staggering. In the Grand Civic Buildings, in the merchant houses, in the banks along Castle Street, none of that wealth reached Scurving Street, or Latimer Street, or Ascot Street. These were the streets of working class North Liverpool, of the districts around Vauxhall and Everton and Kirkdale, where the Irish had settled in wave after wave since the famine years of the eighteen forties. Here, a family might live in a cellar dwelling, a single room below street level, damp, dark, poorly ventilated. Here, five or six people shared a bed. Here a working man brought home wages that were sufficient, just barely, for rent and food, and insufficient for anything else. There were no savings. There was no cushion. If a man was injured or fell ill, or died, the family was destitute within days. The Victorian response to this precariousness was the burial society, the friendly society, the insurance club. For a penny or tuppence a week, collected at the door by an agent, a working family could ensure a life, not for wealth, not for luxury, just for a decent burial, and perhaps a few shillings to see the widow through the first desperate weeks. These clubs were everywhere in Liverpool's poor districts. There were dozens of them. The British Workman Insurance Company, the Scottish Legal Life Assurance Society, and many more. They were loosely regulated. Their agents were often local men, who came to the door weekly and recorded names in a ledger and asked few questions. They did not always communicate with each other, and critically, there was no mechanism to prevent a single life being insured with multiple societies simultaneously, each unaware of the others. This was the system that Catherine Flanagan and Margaret Higgins understood instinctively and completely, in a way that the insurance companies, staffed by educated men in clean offices, apparently did not. Catherine Flanagan and Margaret Higgins were sisters by birth, born in Ireland, Catherine in 1829, Margaret in 1843, a full fourteen years her junior. Their father, William Clifford, was a labourer. We don't know exactly when they came to Liverpool. By 1870, the records showed them established in the city, living the life of women at the lower margins of the working poor. Catherine was the elder. She was illiterate, couldn't read or write, but she was sharp and capable in the ways that mattered in her world. She had worked as a housekeeper. She had been widowed. Her husband John Flanagan had died of pneumonia in eighteen seventy nine, genuinely, it seems, of natural causes. Though the thought will inevitably occur to you, given what came after. She had children, her eldest, John, was twenty two, and living with her. Margaret was the younger, and by the early eighteen eighties, also recently widowed, under circumstances that would later attract considerable suspicion, though no charges were ever brought for that particular death. Margaret was a char woman, hard physical labour for very little money. Both women had prior convictions, minor ones by the standards of the day. Catherine had served a month in prison for selling beer without a license. They were not strangers to trouble or to the law, but they were not, on the surface, women who stood out. They were two Irish widows in a slum, running a lodging house getting by. What was happening underneath that surface is the subject of what follows. In eighteen eighty, Catherine Flanagan ran a lodging house at five Skirving Street in Liverpool. The household at this address becomes important, so let me tell you who was in it. Catherine herself, with her son John Flanagan, aged twenty two, a young man in decent health by all accounts, Margaret, Catherine's sister, and two lodger families. First, Thomas Higgins, a hard carrier, a labourer who carried bricks and mortar on construction sites, along with his wife and his young daughter Mary, who was about eight or ten years old. It is a tight, close packed household. Five or six adults, and children in a small terraced house in a back street, the kind of household where everyone knows everyone's business. Where there is almost no privacy, where illness and grief and money troubles are visible to all. Now watch what happens to this household over the next three years. December eighteen eighty. John Flanagan, Catherine's twenty two year old son previously healthy, dies suddenly. No one raises particular alarm. Young men died suddenly in Victorian Liverpool. Consumption, fever, infection. Death was an ordinary visitor in these streets. John was buried. Catherine, as it would later emerge, collected a payout from the burial society with which he had been registered. The sum was seventy one pounds, equivalent by modern reckoning to something in the region of seven thousand pounds. Now for a woman who had no property, no savings and no pension, seventy one pounds was not a small comfort. It was a life changing sum. Not long after Thomas Higgins' wife died, also at the Skirving Street address also quickly. The records are thin on this death. No charges were ever brought, and it may have been entirely natural. But the household dynamic shifted. Thomas Higgins was now a widower, with a young daughter living in Catherine Flanagan's house, and Catherine's sister, Margaret, was available. In october eighteen eighty two, Thomas Higgins and Margaret Flanagan, now taking the name Margaret Higgins, were married. Thomas Higgins was a working man, a hard carrier, strong by all accounts, and previously in good health. He was forty five years old at the time of his marriage. He had one surviving child, little Mary, who was around eight or nine years old and came to live with her new stepmother. What Thomas did not know, what he apparently had no idea about, was that his new wife and his new sister-in-law were in the process of insuring his life with multiple burial societies simultaneously. Not one policy, five separate policies, with five different companies each paying out independently on his death. The total sum insured was approximately one hundred and eight pounds and nineteen shillings, the equivalent today of somewhere around eight to ten thousand pounds, a hod carrier's wages for several years. He also did not know, and this detail from the contemporary record deserves to be stated plainly, that on one occasion, when an insurance company supervisor came to the house to verify that a Thomas Higgins actually existed before issuing a policy, he was not met by the real Thomas. He was met by a woman who presented to him an imposter, a man standing in for Thomas, playing the part well enough to satisfy the agent. A fraudulent verification, hiding in plain sight. The marriage was in october eighteen eighty two. By the end of november eighteen eighty two, barely a month later, Mary Higgins, Thomas's daughter, from his first marriage, was dead. She was ten years old. The courts recorded bronchitis. Margaret, her stepmother, collected the burial payout. The premium that had been paid on Mary's life was one shilling and sixpence. The payout on her death was twenty one pounds and eighteen shillings and sixpence. A ten year old child a shilling and sixpence in premiums twenty one pounds in return. Let that arithmetic settle. January eighteen eighty three. The lodger's daughter, Margaret Jennings, was eighteen or nineteen years old. She had lived with one or other of the sisters for twelve years. In some accounts, she is described almost as a ward of the household. A young woman who had grown up in Catherine Flanagan's orbit. On the twenty fifth of january eighteen eighty three, Margaret Jennings died. The sum collected by Catherine on her death seventy nine pounds. That is now three deaths in the Flanagan household in the space of about two years. John Flanagan, december eighteen eighty, Mary Higgins, late eighteen eighty two, Margaret Jennings, january eighteen eighty three. The neighbors were beginning to talk. The evidence as we understand it now suggests that the neighbourhood chatter was building. The frequency of deaths in these particular houses was being noticed and remarked upon. In such a community, tight knit, close quarters, where everyone knew everyone, gossip was the only surveillance available. There was no formal mechanism for counting suspicious deaths in a single address. No database, no flag that would be raised automatically when the same lodging house appeared on a series of death certificates. The sisters, it seems, were aware of the growing murmur around them. Because in the face of neighbourhood gossip, they did something telling. They moved twice. The household relocated from Skirving Street to one hundred and five Latimer Street, and then in september eighteen eighty three, Thomas and Margaret moved again to twenty seven Ascor Street, a cellar dwelling, a new address, new neighbors who didn't yet know the history, and Thomas Higgins, the man with five insurance policies on his life that he knew nothing about, moved into the cellar with his wife. Ten days later he was dying. Thomas Higgins had begun to complain of severe stomach pains. He was a strong man. His neighbors would later describe him as such, with some bewilderment that such a man could have fallen so quickly to something as ordinary as dysentery. His doctor, a doctor Whitford, was called. He examined Thomas, and attributed the illness to dysentery, caused by excessive drinking and prescribed opium and castor oil. He was wrong about the cause. He was not wrong about the severity. What Thomas was experiencing and what arsenic poisoning produces in the body with terrible reliability What Thomas was experiencing and what arsenic poisoning produces in the body with terrible reliability was a syndrome that mimics gastroenteritis and cholera almost exactly. Violent abdominal cramping, nausea, burning in the throat, vomiting and purging that strips the body of fluids and electrolytes faster than they can be replaced. The skin becomes clammy, the pulse weakens. The pain is relentless. The neighbour next door would later testify about the night before Thomas died. She described him as being in great agony. She said he was distressed, and that he placed his hand on his chest and cried out Oh if this pain had gone from me, his wife and her sister were attending to him. They gave him sips from a mug to ease the pain. From the spectator reporting on the trial in february eighteen eighty four, in language drawn from witness testimony, it was noticed that whenever Flanagan gave Higgins water, there was an immediate and severe access of pain. She was giving him water, and after each sip, the pain got worse, because the water she was giving him was not clean water. Thomas Higgins died on the second of october eighteen eighty three. He was forty five years old. The cause recorded on his death certificate by doctor Whitford Dysentery. The informant present at his death, as named on the certificate, his widow, Margaret. That same day, the sisters had already obtained from the British Workman Insurance Company the sum of twelve pounds, nine shillings and sixpence. A further seven pounds and seventeen shillings and sixpence would later be collected from the Scottish Legal Life Assurance Company. Other offices in which Thomas's life had been insured declined to pay. They had collected before the body was cold. Patrick Higgins, Thomas's brother, the man who saved everyone from the next death, or the one after that. Patrick Higgins was suspicious, not forensically suspicious, not medically suspicious, just the deep instinctive unease of a man who knew his brother as healthy and strong, who knew the rate of death in that household, and who, when he asked a few questions, discovered something that stopped him cold. He visited several local insurance companies, not one, several. And at each one he found that his brother's life had been insured policy after policy in the name of Thomas Higgins, with Margaret Higgins as the beneficiary. Five policies. Total payout approximately one hundred and eight pounds and nineteen shillings. Patrick went to the police. He went to the coroner, he pressed the case firmly and persistently. He was not a man of standing. He was a working man, trying to get someone in authority to listen to him about his brother's death. The coroner listened. What happened next is one of those moments that belongs entirely to its era and is almost impossible to imagine now. The police and the coroner's office went to twenty seven Ascot Street. Thomas Higgins was already laid out, the wake was in progress. The mourners were gathered. The women of the house were receiving condolences. The coroner walked in, and in the middle of the wake, in the room with the body and the mourners and the candles, he ordered a postmortem. Catherine Flanagan heard that a full autopsy was to be performed. She left immediately. She walked out of the house and disappeared into the streets of Liverpool. Margaret stayed. She was arrested at the scene. The postmortem on Thomas Higgins was conducted by Professor James Campbell Brown, professor of chemistry, whose analysis would prove to be the pivot on which the entire case turned. What he found in Thomas Higgins' body was unambiguous arsenic, in quantities indicating poisoning over several days. Not a single accidental dose, but a sustained administration. The arsenic was present in the stomach, liver, spleen, and kidneys. A search of the house at Ascot Street produced two critical pieces of evidence. First, a bottle containing a mystery white substance. When Campbell Brown analysed it, he found it to be an arsenic solution. Second, arsenic dust and fabric residue in the market pocket worn by Margaret Higgins. It was as though she had been carrying a bottle of the stuff and it had leaked. Campbell Brown confirmed that the arsenic in the pocket, the arsenic in the bottle, and the arsenic in Thomas Higgins' body all contained the same unusual adulterants, the same trace compounds, linking them to the same source. Investigators first assumed the arsenic had come from rat poison, which was commonly available, but the adulterants didn't match rat poison. They came from a different source entirely. It was the fly papers. Common fly papers, the sticky strips sold cheaply across Liverpool in every corner shop, were in the eighteen eighties impregnated with arsenic trioxide. Soak one in water, wait overnight, and you produced a solution of arsenic that matched adulterant for adulterant what was found in the bottle at Ascot Street and in Thomas Higgins' organs. You didn't need to visit a chemist. You didn't need to give a name or sign a register. You didn't need to know anything about chemistry. You just needed fly papers. A bowl and water and patients. Margaret Higgins, after her conviction, admitted this. She confessed that the poison had been obtained by soaking fly papers. The confession confirmed what the chemistry had already proved. The Sale of Arsenic Act of eighteen fifty one had attempted to restrict the purchase of arsenic, requiring buyers to be known to the seller, requiring signatures in a register, restricting sales to white arsenic mixed with a colouring agent to make it identifiable. It had not apparently occurred to the lawmakers to consider the fly paper. The arsenic was hiding in plain sight in every kitchen in England. While Margaret was in custody, Catherine Flanagan was loose in Liverpool. She was fifty-four years old, illiterate. A woman with no money of her own, no obvious place to run to, moving through a city that was, even for some of her background, immense and anonymous enough to hide for a while. She moved from lodging house to lodging house across Liverpool, changing her appearance and using aliases. She told people she was running away from a violent son. She kept moving. She evaded capture for almost a week. Now this detail matters because it tells us something about Catherine Flanagan that the conventional portrait of her as a crude, brutish woman of no great intelligence doesn't quite capture. She was illiterate, yes, but she was also a woman who had been running a sophisticated insurance fraud for at least three years, insuring multiple lives with multiple companies simultaneously, using impostors to pass verification checks, manipulating the burial society system with precision. She was not stupid. She was, in the particular skills of survival and deception that her circumstances had required, genuinely capable. But Liverpool was not infinite. She was arrested in the district of Wavertree on the sixteenth of october eighteen eighty three. Both women were formally charged with the murder of Thomas Higgins. The investigation now turned to the other deaths. Orders were issued for the exhumation of three bodies John Flanagan, Catherine's son, who had died in december eighteen eighty, Mary Higgins, Thomas's daughter, who had died in late eighteen eighty two, and Margaret Jennings, the eighteen year old lodger, who had died in january eighteen eighty three. The exhumations were carried out under the supervision of Detective Inspector Stephen Boys in january eighteen eighty four. The process, as recorded in the trial documents, was methodical and grim. On the sixteenth of January, Boyes oversaw the removal of a coffin from Ford Cemetery. He identified the occupant from the plate on the lid, conveyed the coffin to a shed, and waited for the doctors. Inside were the remains of ten year old Mary Higgins, identified by a description provided by her uncle Patrick, the man who had started all this. The pathologists found something that they had half expected, but that was still striking to see. Minimal deterioration. Arsenic, it turns out, acts as a preservative. Bodies with significant arsenic concentrations do not compose at the normal rate. Mary Higgins had been in the ground for over a year, and her remains, while discoloured and partially degraded, were far better preserved than they should have been. Her organs showed arsenic. So did the organs of John Flanagan and Margaret Jennings. Four deaths, four bodies, four positive tests for arsenic poisoning. The prosecution now had a pattern so clear and so consistent that the individual cases barely needed arguing separately. The same method, the same household, the same women present at each death, the same insurance policies paid out to the same names. Now here is where the case becomes, if anything, more disturbing, because Catherine Flanagan and Margaret Higgins were not, the evidence increasingly suggests, operating alone. When Catherine was arrested, she was not silent. She spoke to her solicitor, and what she said was extraordinary. She claimed that the murders were not isolated acts. She provided a list, six or seven other deaths, she said, that were killings related to burial society fraud, and she named names. Five other women who had either committed those murders or arranged the insurance on the victims. The names she gave were Margaret Evans, Bridget Begley, Margaret Potter, a Mrs. Fallon, a Bridget Stanton, and a Catherine Ryan. According to Flanagan, Margaret Evans had been the instigator of the whole enterprise, beginning with the murder of a mentally handicapped teenager for which Ryan had obtained the arsenic and Evans had administered it. Now we have to be careful here. Catherine Flanagan, at the time she provided this information, was a woman fighting for her life. She was hoping desperately to trade information for a reprieve. Her account of the other women was sometimes contradictory. In one case, she named Bridget Stanton as part of the conspiracy, then reversed herself and exonerated her after Stanton was arrested. The prosecuting solicitor for Liverpool, William Marks, concluded in february eighteen eighty-four that while the additional deaths were likely murders, it would be difficult to prove that anyone other than the two sisters was responsible for them, especially when the primary evidence was coming from a woman with every reason to spread the blame. But this much is supported by the wider investigation. The women Catherine named all appear in connection with suspicious deaths in North Liverpool in this period. Bridget Stanton was linked to the insurance policies on three of the deaths. Groups of two or more of the named women were observed visiting the homes of people who died shortly afterwards. And then there was the imposter. When an insurance company supervisor visited the Higgins address to verify that Thomas Higgins existed, he was greeted by a woman who was neither Catherine nor Margaret, who presented a man who was not Thomas, a supporting player in a fraud that required organisation and coordination. Angela Brabon, who researched this case most thoroughly in the Black Widows of Liverpool, concluded that the sisters were probably part of, possibly the leaders of, a genuine criminal network, a poisoning syndicate, operating for profits across the slum district of North Liverpool. Up to eight women, possibly more, perhaps twenty three deaths in total, if all the suspected cases were genuine. A wholesale organized business of murder for insurance. The prosecuting solicitor for Liverpool wrote in February 1884 that six victims were probably poisoned by this network. He added, with the matter-of-fact candor of a Victorian bureaucrat, it would be difficult to prove that anyone other than Higgins and Flanagan were responsible, so only the sisters were tried. The trial opened on Thursday, the fourteenth of february, eighteen eighty four, Valentine's Day, at St. George's Hall, Liverpool, one of the great neoclassical civic buildings of Victorian England, home to the Liverpool of Sizes, its columned portico rising above Lime Street. The case drew enormous public attention. The local press had covered the arrest and investigation in detail. The public galleries were packed. The sisters stood in the dock together. Catherine, aged fifty five, was described in contemporary accounts as a heavy set woman, dark complexioned with a somewhat defiant bearing. Margaret, forty one, was smaller, and reportedly more visibly distressed. Both were dressed soberly. The presiding judge was Mr Justice Butt. The Crown charged the sisters formally with the murders of Thomas Higgins, Margaret Jennings, and John Flanagan. The case of Thomas Higgins was heard first. The prosecution's case was built on three foundations the forensic evidence, the insurance evidence, and the pattern of behaviour. The forensic case was anchored by Professor Campbell Brown's analysis, which established beyond reasonable doubt that Thomas Higgins had died of arsenic poisoning, that the arsenic found in his body matched the arsenic solution found in the house, and that the source of that solution was fly papers soaked in water. Dr. Whitford, the family doctor who had signed the death certificate attributing the death to dysentery, had simply been wrong. In the way that Victorian doctors frequently were wrong, when confronted with symptoms that perfectly mimicked a common disease. The insurance evidence was devastating in its simplicity. Five policies, five companies, total payouts over one hundred and eight pounds. Thomas Higgins had been insured for more than a healthy man of his age and occupation should ever have been. Insured so heavily and without his full knowledge that his death was worth more to his wife than his life. As one contemporary observer put it, with blunt precision, his life expectancy had decreased in direct proportion to the amount by which his life insurance had increased. The pattern of behaviour, the three prior deaths, the exhumations, the arsenic in everybody, assembled into something the jury could not look away from. The neighbours testified, Thomas's own words relayed through the woman next door, Oh if this pain had gone from me. The observation confirmed by the neighbour, that whenever Catherine Flanagan gave Thomas water, the pain intensified immediately. Two women, bending over a man in agony, offering him the mug. The mug with the water. The defence had almost nothing to work with. There was no plausible alternative explanation for the arsenic in Thomas Higgins' organs. No explanation for the arsenic solution in the house, no explanation for the arsenic dust in Margaret's pocket. There was no argument that the five insurance policies were coincidental. The jury took fifty minutes fifty minutes to deliver guilty verdicts on both women. Margaret Higgins collapsed in the dock. When the sentence was pronounced, Catherine Flanagan, by the accounts of those in the courtroom, received it without visible collapse, with something closer to resignation. Mr Justice Butt sentenced both women to death. He held out, according to the spectator reporting at the time, no shred of hope of a reprieve. The sisters were returned to Kirkdale Jail, a forbidding Victorian prison in the Kirkdale district of North Liverpool, to await execution. In the weeks that followed the verdict, Catherine made her last attempt to save herself. She offered the prosecution a deal. She would give evidence against the other women in the network, naming names and describing their crimes, in exchange for commutation of her death sentence to life imprisonment. The offer was refused. The prosecuting solicitor had concluded that her testimony was too self serving and too contradictory to be reliable. The sisters filed a petition for reprieve on the grounds of their sex. There was a Victorian reluctance, genuine, documented, and frankly complicated, to hang women. Juries found ways around capital convictions for female defendants. Judges sometimes recommended mercy. Petitions sometimes succeeded. This one did not. In the condemned cells, they were attended by Father Bonte, the Roman Catholic chaplain of Kirkdale. Both women had rosary beads. Both received the last sacraments. Whatever else they were, whatever else they were, whatever they had done, they died in the faith they had been born into. Margaret in her final days, admitted her guilt. She confirmed that the poison had been obtained by soaking fly papers. She offered to give further evidence against her sister in a last desperate reversal, trying even at the end to save herself at Catherine's expense. The offer was also refused. The hangman, Bartholomew Binns, arrived at Kirkdale on the afternoon of Saturday, the first of march, eighteen eighty four. He was a man with a brief and troubled career at the end of a rope. Appointed the previous November after the death of the previous hangman, and already the subject of complaints about drunkenness and incompetent technique. He was allowed an assistant for this execution, a man named Samuel Heath, because it was a double hanging. The morning of Monday, third of march eighteen eighty four. Liverpool Snow. The Liverpool Echo described it thus a fall of snow that enveloped everything like a shroud, a semi darkness that frowned upon the surroundings and a piercing chill that seemed to enter into one's very marrow. At seven forty five in the morning, Catherine Flanagan and Margaret Higgins were taken from the condemned cells to the reception room to be pinioned, their arms bound to their sides. The prison bell began to toll. The procession into the prison yard was led by the chief warder, followed by the governor, the under sheriff, the jail surgeon, his counterpart from Walton Prison nearby, and then the two women, assisted by two female and two male warders. And behind them Binns and Heath. Both women were dressed in long dark gowns. Catherine had chosen black, Margaret dark brown. The snow continued to fall as they crossed the prison yard and were guided up the twenty two steps to what the Echo called the ugly black painted scaffold. Catherine Flanagan leaned heavily on the arm of Father Bonzo. She was murmuring prayers, trying to repeat his words as they climbed. Rosary beads were around her neck. They were placed in position on the trapdoors. Bartholomew Binns pulled the white caps over their heads. He adjusted the nooses. He drew the bolt. They fell together. They died, the accounts say, almost instantaneously. It was eight o'clock in the morning. A reported thousand people had gathered outside Kirkdale Jail to witness the moment or to be present for it, since no one outside could see anything of what would happen within a crowd of a thousand people, standing in the snow in silence, waiting for eight o'clock. It was the first time in over thirty years that two women had been hanged on the same day in England. It would remain one of only two occasions in the Victorian era where women were executed simultaneously for the same crime. Their wax effigies were placed in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's. They remained there for almost a century. I want to stop before the analysis and say the names of the people who died. John Flanagan, twenty two years old. Catherine's own son, the first death. The one that set the pattern. We know almost nothing about him, his character, his life, his hopes. He was Catherine's child, and she insured him and poisoned him and collected seventy-one pounds. Mary Higgins, ten years old, Thomas's daughter by his first wife. She died within a month of her father's marriage to Margaret, her new stepmother, who had insured her life for a shilling and sixpence in premiums and collected twenty-one pounds on her death. A little girl in a house full of adults. Margaret Jennings, eighteen or nineteen years old. She had lived in Catherine Flanagan's household for twelve years, since she was about seven. She had grown up in that house. Catherine had known her since she was a child and insured her, and poisoned her and collected seventy nine pounds. And Thomas Higgins, forty five years old, hod carrier. A working man who carried bricks for a living, and moved to a new neighbourhood and fell in love and married and had no idea that the woman he married had already decided that he was worth more dead than alive. Who lay in a cellar in Ascot Street and cried out in pain and was given water by his wife and her sister and died on the second of October, eighteen eighty three. Four confirmed victims. A possible further six or seven or more in a network that the law never fully unraveled. The murdered are not the footnote here. They are the story. The case of Flanagan and Higgins is genuinely unusual, and it's worth being precise about why. Most Victorian poisoning cases, and there were many, arsenic was called inheritance powder in certain circles, for reasons that should be obvious, involved a single victim, a single perpetrator, a single motive, a wife poisoning a husband, a servant poisoning an employer, the domestic murder. Flanagan and Higgins are different in almost every dimension. Multiple victims spanning years, a systematic method applied repeatedly, an insurance fraud operation that exploited the structural weaknesses of the burial society system, with the precision of people who had thought carefully about how it worked. Multiple women potentially involved, a network and enterprise, and all of it happening in full view of a community in houses where neighbors heard and saw and smelled and gossiped, and yet the mechanism for translating that community knowledge into official action simply didn't exist. The burial society system was, in theory, regulated. In practice, it was not. Companies issued policies without cross-referencing each other. Agents collected pennies at the door and recorded names in ledgers with no verification. A single life could be insured five times over simultaneously, and no one would know until the claims started coming in. The Sale of Arsenic Act in 1851 had tried to control the most obvious route to arsenic. It had failed to anticipate the fly paper. Arsenic was everywhere, in the wallpaper, in pest control products, in the medicine chest, in the kitchen store cupboard. The solution was hiding in plain sight in every Victorian home, waiting to be discovered by anyone who thought to look. And the doctors. Dr. Whitford, who attended Thomas Higgins, was not a negligent man by the standards of his time. He was a Victorian GP, attending a poor patient in a backstreet cellar. He had no toxicology kit. He had no way of testing for arsenic at the bedside. He saw symptoms that looked like dysentery, because arsenic poisoning looks like dysentery, designed by chemistry to deceive the eye. He wrote what he saw. The system failed at every level. The insurance regulation failed. The pharmacological regulation failed, the medical diagnosis failed. The community knew something was wrong, but had no channel to make it count. And four people died at minimum. Probably more, possibly many more. There is a strange quality to this case that I find genuinely unsettling. And I want to try and articulate it before we close. The crimes of Flanagan and Higgins were not crimes of passion, not crimes of rage, nor desperation or momentary madness. They were the crimes of calculation, cold, patient, precise calculation. A penny a week in premiums, the careful selection of victims, the slow administration of poison, to someone who trusted you enough to drink what you gave them. The filing of the insurance claim, in some cases, before the body was even cold. And yet these were women in desperate poverty, in a system that offered them almost nothing. The burial societies existed precisely because the working poor had no other mechanism for financial security. The penny premiums were the only insurance available to them. The system was designed genuinely, well meaningly, for the benefit of the poor. And these women had looked at that system and found the crack in it, and forced their way through. Now I'm not offering that as mitigation. Four people were poisoned to death. A child of ten, a young woman who had grown up in the house that killed her a man's own son, that is not economic desperation expressing itself in an understandable way. That is murder. Methodical and deliberate for money. But the context matters. The world in which this was possible, in which women with no income, no property, no votes, and no safety net could identify a perfectly legal, perfectly accessible route to profit through death. That world created the conditions. The fly paper, the penny policy, the cellar dwelling, the doctor with no tools, the insurance agent with no database. Catherine Flanagan was illiterate. She couldn't write her own name. She couldn't read an insurance policy or a court document or a newspaper account of her own trial. She operated entirely in the spoken and practical world of the Liverpool slums, and within that world she designed and operated a murder for profit enterprise of a sophistication that had it been deployed to any other end, would have been remarkable. She died on a scaffold in the snow, with a rosary around her neck murmuring prayers. Margaret Higgins died beside her, in a dark brown dress, and somewhere in North Liverpool in what registers the burial societies kept, the names of the dead sat in neat rows, with their penny premiums and their payouts, indistinguishable from the names of everyone else who had simply lived and been loved, and died of ordinary causes. The penny dropped, and four lives bought it. Thank you for listening to Murder Under Gaslight.

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Murder under Gaslight is a West Meath Pocket Cinema production. Historical advisor is Jason McKevitt. Murder under Gaslight is presented by Don Mortel.