Free Female Executions: Martyrs, Murderesses and Madwomen by Geoffrey Abbott Page B

was placed in a wheelchair – the first time a victim had ever been transported in that manner on such an occasion – and in the execution chamber was lifted into the electric chair. Limp and unresisting, her eyes closed and all the colour drained from her face, she was obviously unconscious and the warders had no difficulty in strapping her into the chair and attaching the electrodes. After checking that all necessary connections had been made, Mr Elliott gently raised her head and, pressing it back against the rubber headrest, secured it in position.
    To block the view of the helpless woman from would-be photographers among the official witnesses in the audience, the guards placed themselves between the chair and the observation window, and as soon as they did so the executioner moved swiftly to throw the switch – and Mary Frances Creighton died without even knowing.
    As an indication of the heat that is generated in a person being electrocuted, one of the warders on duty that night suffered severe burns on coming into contact with Mrs Creighton’s body while releasing her from the chair; normally this would have been prevented by the thick clothing usually worn by the victim, but on this occasion her flimsy apparel proved inadequate.

American tabloids were never averse to giving criminals lurid labels, especially the female ones, as evidenced by those given to murderess Ada LeBoeuf by one southern newspaper in the 1920s, ‘the Siren of the Swamps’, ‘Louisiana’s Love Pirate’ and ‘Small Town Cleopatra’ being just a few. Nor were the details of her appearance ignored, repeated allusions to her entertaining guests in her cell wearing a white organdie dress, and when someone suggested that she have her long black hair bobbed, she allegedly answered, ‘Oh no, bobbed hair suits some women but I don’t think I’d like it; I’ve never had my hair cut and I don’t intend to now.’
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    Davy, Margaret (England)
    A man named Richard Roose was indirectly instrumental in Margaret Davy being executed in a particularly gruesome manner, for in 1531 he added poison to the yeast in some porridge which had been prepared for the family and servants of the Bishop of Rochester, and for the poor of the parish, causing serious illness in many victims and two deaths. The Bishop himself was not affected, he not having partaken of porridge that day.
    Henry VIII was so appalled at such a secretive and indiscriminate method of killing people that he caused an Act to be passed in that year, to deal with the crime, chapter 9 stating in part that:

Our Sayde Sovereign Lord The Kynge, of his blessed Disposicion, inwardly abhorrying all such abhomynable offences because that in no persone can lyve in suretye out of daunger of death by that meane yf practyse thereof shulde not be exchued, hath ordeyned and enacted by auctorytie of thys presente parlyment that the sayde poysonyng be adjudged and demed as high treason [...] and requyeth condigne punysshemente for the same, and it is ordeyned and enacted by auctoritie of this presente parlyment that the sayd Richard Roose shalbe therfore boyled to deathe.
    And because that was the penalty for poisoning, poor Margaret Davy, who was found guilty of poisoning three households in which she had been employed, was similarly ‘boyled to death’, being immersed in a cauldron of water in the marketplace in Smithfield, London, on 17 March 1542 and watched by crowds of ghoulish spectators. Whether the water was boiling at the time or subsequently heated was not disclosed.

By the nineteenth century condemned women, having mounted the scaffold and being positioned on the drop, had their arms and ankles tied, the latter thereby preventing their long skirts rising as they fell. Regrettably this precaution was not in force in 1751 when well-educated though naive Mary Blandy met her end. She had succumbed to the blandishments of Captain William Henry Cranstoun who was intent on securing her dowry; her