While I was leafing through the Liverpool Watch Committee minutes for my doctoral research, I came across a rather intriguing handbill about the death of Thomas Higgins due to arsenic poisoning. It was tucked away in between the pages of the ledger with no reference to it at all in the handwritten notes. I was keen to find out more and soon discovered that this was a heinous crime that had shocked Victorian Liverpool and hit the national headlines.
Thomas Higgins’ death certificate revealed that the 36-year-old hod-carrier died on 2 October 1883 at his home at 27 Ascot Street. The cause of death was recorded as dysentery, from which he had suffered for eight days. The informant was his widow Margaret, who was present at his death. Their next-door neighbour later described how the night before his passing, he was ‘in great agony.’ Thomas was clearly agitated and he placed his hand on his chest and exclaimed, ‘Oh if this pain had gone from me.’ The neighbour recalled that his wife and her sister were attending to him. There was no doctor present and the women gave him sips from a mug to ease his pain.
Thomas had moved in with his future sister-in-law, Catherine Flanagan, who was widowed, and her family in 1881, along with his first wife and their daughter Mary. The cramped household at 31 New Blenheim Street also included Catherine’s children, Patrick, aged 19 and Ellen, 10; her widowed sister Margaret Thompson, who was a domestic servant; and lodger Patrick Jennings, a dock labourer, and his 15-year-old daughter who was also called Margaret. Shortly after the Higgins family moved in, Thomas’ wife died and he married Margaret Thompson (née Clifford) in October 1882. She was aged 40 and he was 36.
After the wedding the Flanagan/Higgins household moved to 5 Skirving St, where Thomas’ young daughter Mary died the following month from bronchitis. She was ten years old. The remaining members of the family relocated again, this time to 105 Latimer Street and in September 1883, Thomas and Margaret separated from the others and moved into a cellar dwelling nearby in Ascot Street, where he died ten days later. His widow had paid into a burial club for him so she was able to quickly make the arrangements for his funeral. However, the proceedings were stopped before Thomas was committed to the ground.
Thomas’ brother Patrick Higgins had become suspicious after learning of Thomas’ life insurance which was taken out by his wife. Patrick approached the coroner but nothing could be done. When he went to see the coroner again, this time in the company of the doctor who had signed his brother’s death certificate, the coroner sent his beadle to halt the funeral. A post mortem was carried out and it was discovered that Thomas had died of arsenic poisoning. Professor of Chemistry James Campbell Brown found large quantities of the poison in Thomas’ stomach, liver, spleen and kidney. Whilst Margaret Higgins was arrested on suspicion of murder, her sister Catherine Flanagan had disappeared.
Catherine and Margaret Clifford were born in Ireland in 1829 and 1842 respectively, according to their prison records. Their father, William Clifford, was a labourer. It is not known when they arrived in Liverpool, but they were certainly settled in the city by 1870. Catherine was a housekeeper and Margaret a charwoman. Catherine’s husband John Flanagan had died of pneumonia in 1879 and she was listed on the 1881 census as working as a licensed broker, although she was illiterate. She had at least three children, the eldest of whom John had died in 1880 at the age of 22. Both women had previous convictions; Catherine had served one month in prison for selling beer without a licence in 1870, and Margaret had spent seven days behind bars in 1882 (six months before her marriage to Thomas Higgins) for drunkenness. After the medical proof of arsenic poisoning, the police set out to find Catherine and to investigate this serious case.
On 5 October, Detective Constable Edward Musgrave, of the Liverpool City Police, searched the cellar at 27 Ascot Street. He found a small glass flask and a market pocket belonging to Margaret Higgins. The items were given to analytical chemist Edward Davies for testing. He confirmed that some fluff taken out of the pocket contained arsenic as well as the fabric itself, leading him to conclude that a bottle of the poison had leaked into the garment. The police also discovered that the sisters had taken out a considerable number of insurance policies for their family members. There were agreements with four companies to insure the life of Thomas Higgins, amounting to £91 (almost £10,000 in today’s value). There were also policies for Catherine’s son John, Thomas’s first wife Mary and the lodger Patrick Jennings’ daughter Margaret, who had died in January 1883 at the age of 18. Following the deaths, the insurance companies had paid out. When I looked up the case file in the National Archives, I found all the original policies, which looked quite innocuous until I considered the sinister reason why they had been taken out. This revelation led the police to wonder whether there might have been more victims. In the meantime, Catherine Flanagan had been arrested.
Since Flanagan had absconded on 5 October, the Liverpool police had issued a handbill with her description: she was about 50 years old, 5 feet 2 inches tall and stout, with a fresh complextion and dark wavy hair which was turning grey. Her only distinctive features were two upper teeth which stuck out slightly and a scar on her upper lip. She usually wore large gold earrings and several rings, and spoke with an Irish accent. Ten days later, Inspector Keighley, of the Lancashire Constabulary, had been on duty at Wavertree police station, when he received information about a woman drinking heavily in the nearby Station Hotel. Not expecting anything out of the ordinary, he wandered over to the bar but by the time he had arrived, she had already left. He decided to follow it up and located her in a private house. As they spoke, Inspector Keighley recalled the handbill with Flanagan’s description and realised she was standing before him. He took her into custody and telegraphed the Liverpool Police.
Both women were charged with the murder of all four potential victims: Thomas and Mary Higgins, Margaret Jennings and John Flanagan. As three of them had been buried some time ago, the police organised for their bodies to be exhumed. The trial records contain a rather chilling account of the process.
On the 16 January 1884, Detective Inspector Stephen Boyes oversaw the removal of a coffin at Ford Cemetery. After identifying the incumbent by a plate on the lid, he conveyed the coffin to a shed and waited for the doctors to arrive. Inside the coffin were the remains of ten-year-old Mary Higgins, which were identified onsite by a description provided by her uncle Patrick Higgins. As well as stating her hair colour, he had told the police that she had a ‘peculiar prominence of the front teeth and a peculiarity of the great toe of the right foot’. The doctors confirmed that this was indeed Mary’s body. They then examined her.
Police surgeon Frederick Walter Lowndes stated that the grave clothes were intact but soiled. Mary’s face and body were discoloured due to decomposition (she had been interred for over a year), and her eyes and part of her nose had disintegrated. On opening her chest cavity, he and his colleague found that she had been suffering from lung disease at the time of her death, but her organs were quite healthy. However, part of her bowel was stained yellow, which immediately aroused their suspicions. They removed the stomach, the liver, spleen and kidneys for analysis. ‘Abundant evidence of arsenic’ was found in the viscera. The poison was also identified in the bodies of the other three victims.
The trial opened on 14 February 1884 at St George’s Hall, Liverpool. Flanagan and Higgins were indicted for the murder of Thomas Higgins, although the other three suspicious deaths were also taken into account. The evidence for the prosecution was mostly based on the medical findings, which confirmed that quantities of arsenic had been found in all four bodies. Both sisters had been present at the alleged victims’ deaths, and the insurance policies provided the final damning evidence of their murderous acts. After three days, the trial ended with a guilty verdict for both women and they were sentenced to death.
Catherine Flanagan and Margaret Higgins were hanged on 3 March 1884 at Kirkdale Gaol. Apparently they were ‘quite resigned to their fate’, despite having initiated an unsuccessful petition to have their sentence commuted to life imprisonment. Since the trial, Higgins had admitted her guilt and confessed that the poison was acquired by soaking flypapers. In a vain attempt to save her own life, she had even offered to give further evidence against her sister, but this was refused. Margaret remained steadfast in her claim that she had acted under Catherine’s influence but her protestations were to no avail.
On the morning of the execution, snow had fallen, creating a sinister atmosphere for the hanging:
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 were the conditions under which a few individuals, whose business it was to witness the execution approached the uninviting precincts of Kirkdale Gaol.
The Liverpool Echo, 3 March 1884
The snow continued to fall as the condemned women, both dressed in black, crossed the freezing courtyard and were guided up the 22 steps to the ‘ugly, black-painted’ scaffold. With rosary beads around her neck, Flanagan leaned heavily on the arm of the Rev. Father Bonté, and she tried to repeat his prayers as they made their way to the gallows. Once in place, executioner Bartholomew Binns pulled the white caps over their heads and adjusted the nooses. He drew the bolt and they fell through the trapdoors and died almost instantaneously.
Even though the Liverpool poisoners were convicted soley of the murder of Thomas Higgins, the authorities were sure that they had also killed Thomas’s daughter, Mary, lodger Margaret Jennings and Catherine’s son, John. However, it is likely that they murdered a further seven family members. Also, it is possible that the sisters were part of a much wider group of individuals involved in killing family members for financial gain through burial club insurance in Liverpool at that time and there may have been many more victims…