Remember When: Mementoes of a killer

ITEMS owned by West Auckland serial killer Mary Ann Cotton have gone on display at Beamish Museum.
People were glued to their screens during ITV’s two-part drama Dark Angel. 
Beamish Museum owns a number of objects reputedly belonging to the infamous Cotton and these have now gone on display in the Regional Resource Centre. They include a teapot, stool and letters.
Cotton was convicted and hanged in 1873 for the murder of her stepson, Charles Edward Cotton, though she may have had as many as 21 victims, including three of her four husbands and 11 of her 13 children. She used arsenic to poison her victims, administered in a comforting cup of tea, made in a small teapot reserved for the purpose.
And what is believed to be this unassuming little piece of pottery has ended up at Beamish.
The small, black Wedgewood teapot was donated to the museum in 1972, though at the time its provenance was unknown. In 1989, a letter was sent from the daughter of the donor explaining just where the teapot had come from.
The local GP who donated it had inherited it from his step-grandmother  –  the wife of a GP in West Auckland,  where Cotton was living in 1872 at the time of her arrest.
His grandmother had been given the teapot by an old lady in West Auckland who had become fond of her – a strange gift as a token of affection. The donor had never felt comfortable with ownership of the macabre relic and was persuaded by his family to send it to Beamish, though he neglected to tell the full story at the time.
A small, worn three-legged wooden stool was also donated to the museum in the early 1970s by a local woman.  This was given to us with the story that it had belonged to Mary Ann while she awaited trial and eventual hanging in Durham Jail.
More recently, the museum were sent a number of photocopies of letters, which appear to have been written by Mary Ann, on County Gaol Durham embossed notepaper, while she awaited trial. 
The copies were sent anonymously by their current owner who felt that the museum should have them for the archive.
They had been bought from eBay, but it’s believed that these letters were sold to a dealer by a North Yorkshire auction house in 2013, though th museum has no idea where they were in the intervening years or how they ended up on eBay.
Though the handwriting is difficult to decipher, the letters make reference to solicitors and financial problems. 
One, addressed to Mr Lowrey  – Cotton’s lodger at the time of her arrest – contains a plea for money to buy clothes for “the child… to come out with” – presumably for her daughter who was born in the jail, and was adopted before the sentence was carried out.