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Detecting the Murderess: Newspaper Representations of Women Convicted of Murder in New York City, London, and Ireland, 1880–1914

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Crime and the Construction of Forensic Objectivity from 1850

Part of the book series: Palgrave Histories of Policing, Punishment and Justice ((PHPPJ))

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Abstract

Women who kill violate societal norms and provoke public disquiet. The murderess has therefore tended to attract intense and sensationalist press coverage. This chapter explores the pseudo-forensic analysis of the figure of the ‘murderess’, engaging with newspaper coverage of her appearance, demeanour, and emotion. Drawing on research into press depictions of women sentenced to death for the murder of an adult in New York City, London, and Ireland, from 1880 to 1914, the chapter outlines how these features were assessed to gauge whether the murderess could be detected. The chapter draws on the popular appeal of criminal anthropology and New Journalism in this period to examine popular conceptions of the murderess, and techniques by which public anxiety towards such a figure was neutralised.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    G.M. Bakken and B. Farrington, Women who Kill Men: California Courts, Gender, and the Press, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009; N. Goc, Women, Infanticide, and the Press, 1822–1922: News Narratives in England and Australia, Farnham: Ashgate, 2013; J. Knelman, Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998; L. Seal, Women, Murder and Femininity: Gender Representations of Women Who Kill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; M. Shipman, ‘The Penalty is Death’: US Newspaper Coverage of Women’s Executions, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2002; B. Walsh, Domestic Murder in Nineteenth-Century England: Literary and Cultural Representations, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014; J.C. Wood, The Most Remarkable Woman in England: Poison, Celebrity and the Trials of Beatrice Pace, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012.

  2. 2.

    Walsh, Domestic.

  3. 3.

    K. Saxton, Narratives of Women and Murder in England, 1680–1760, Farnham: Ashgate, 2009, p. 1. Emphasis in original.

  4. 4.

    A. Cossins, Female Criminality: Infanticide, Moral Panics and the Female Body, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

  5. 5.

    J. Knelman, Twisting.

  6. 6.

    Her birth name was Wheeler, but she was referred to as Pearcy, Piercy, Piercey, or Pearcey , which was used most commonly in the press and official documents and so is used here.

  7. 7.

    A. Linders and A., van Gundy-Yoder, ‘Gall, gallantry, and the gallows: Capital punishment and the social construction of gender, 1840–1920’, Gender and Society, 2008, 22: 324–348.

  8. 8.

    L. Downing, ‘Murder in the feminine: Marie Lafarge and the sexualization of the nineteenth-century criminal woman’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 2009, 18: 121–137, pp. 122–123.

  9. 9.

    N. Hahn Rafter, ‘Criminal anthropology: Its reception in the United States and the nature of its appeal’, in P. Becker and R.F. Wetzell (eds.), Criminals and their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, p. 160.

  10. 10.

    D. Horn, The Criminal Body: Lombroso and the Anatomy of Deviance, Abingdon: Routledge, 2003, pp. 12–15; Rafter, ‘Criminal’, p. 177; M. Gibson, ‘Labelling women deviant: Heterosexual women, prostitutes and lesbians in early criminological discourse’, in P. Wilson (ed.), Gender, Family and Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy, 1860–1945, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, p. 90.

  11. 11.

    Horn, Criminal, p. 16.

  12. 12.

    Downing, ‘Murder’, p. 132; Horn, Criminal, p. 52; C. Lombroso and G. Ferrero (new translation and Introduction by N. Hahn Rafter, and M. Gibson), Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1895/2004, Introduction, p. 9.

  13. 13.

    V.M. Nagy, ‘Narratives in the courtroom: Female poisoners in mid-nineteenth century England’, European Journal of Criminology, 2013, 11: 213–227, p. 214; C.B. Ramsey, ‘Intimate homicide: Gender and crime control, 1880–1920’, University of Colorado Law Review, 2006, 77: 101–191, p. 116.

  14. 14.

    Downing, ‘Murder’, pp. 124 and 132.

  15. 15.

    P. Hutchings, The Criminal Spectre in Law, Literature and Aesthetics: Incriminating Subjects, Routledge, 2001, p. 110; Gibson, ‘Labelling’, p. 89; Downing, ‘Murder’, p. 137

  16. 16.

    Downing, ‘Murder’, p. 132.

  17. 17.

    Lombroso and Ferrero, Criminal, p. 27.

  18. 18.

    Bakken and Farrington, Women, p. 7.

  19. 19.

    N. Darby, ‘The Hampstead murder: Subversion in press portrayals of a murderess’, Law, Crime & Society, 2018, 8(1): 5–20, pp. 1 and 6.

  20. 20.

    J. Rowbotham, K. Stevenson and S. Pegg, Crime News in Modern Britain: Press Reporting and Responsibility, 1880–2010, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, pp. 68–76.

  21. 21.

    C. Barlow, ‘Sketching women in court: The visual construction of co-accused women in court drawings’, Feminist Legal Studies, 2016, 24: 169–192, p. 172.

  22. 22.

    Walsh, Domestic.

  23. 23.

    Shipman, ‘Penalty’.

  24. 24.

    M.S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses: A True History of Thirteen Respectable French and English Women Accused of Unspeakable Crimes, London: Robson Books, 1977.

  25. 25.

    ‘Mrs. Cignarale’s torture’, Sun, 5 June 1887.

  26. 26.

    Ibid.

  27. 27.

    Ibid.

  28. 28.

    Walsh, Domestic, p. 138.

  29. 29.

    ‘Attractiveness’ was not an objective criterion and was interpreted within a specific context and related to factors such as ethnicity and class.

  30. 30.

    S. Lennox, ‘The beautified body: Physiognomy in Victorian beauty manuals’, Victorian Review, 2016, 42: 9–14, p. 11; K. Barclay, ‘Performing emotion and reading the male body in the Irish court, c. 1800–1845’, Journal of Social History, 2017, 51: 293–312.

  31. 31.

    Horn, Criminal, p. 6.

  32. 32.

    ‘Murder in the Queen’s country’, Leinster Express (LE), 25 August 1883.

  33. 33.

    ‘Mrs. Place convicted’, New York Times (NYT), 9 July 1898.

  34. 34.

    ‘The Kentish Town tragedy’, Daily News (DN), 4 November 1890.

  35. 35.

    ‘Fourth edition’, Pall Mall Gazette (PMG), 21 November 1890.

  36. 36.

    ‘The City tragedy’, PMG, 17 December 1902.

  37. 37.

    Walsh, Domestic.

  38. 38.

    ‘The Clonbrock murder’, Leinster Leader (LL), 13 December 1905.

  39. 39.

    ‘Poisoning mystery’, Anglo-Celt, 11 February 1905.

  40. 40.

    Ibid.

  41. 41.

    ‘Poison mystery at Richmond’, Reynolds’s Newspaper (RN), 24 September 1905; ‘A tragedy of trade’, PMG, 28 September 1905.

  42. 42.

    ‘A woman to be hanged’, New York Tribune, 28 May 1887.

  43. 43.

    ‘The trial of Mary Eleanor Wheeler, alias’, Times, 4 December 1890.

  44. 44.

    S. D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women, London: UCL Press, 1998; G. Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class and Gender in Victorian Britain, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995; S. Frigon. ‘Mapping scripts and narratives of women who kill their husbands in Canada, 1866–1954: Inscribing the everyday’, in A. Burfoot and S. Lord (eds.), Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and Violence, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006.

  45. 45.

    T. Dixon, ‘The tears of Mr Justice Willes’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2012, 17: 1–23, p. 4.

  46. 46.

    V. Bates, ‘“Under cross-examination she fainted”: Sexual crime and swooning in the Victorian court’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 2016, 21: 456–470, p. 457.

  47. 47.

    G. Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class and Gender in Victorian Britain, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995; Frigon, ‘Mapping’; D’Cruze, Crimes; Walsh, Domestic.

  48. 48.

    Walsh, Domestic, p. 13.

  49. 49.

    ‘The Kentish-Town murders’, DN, 12 November 1890.

  50. 50.

    ‘The mysterious death at Hayes’, DN, 9 December 1884.

  51. 51.

    ‘The Blackpool murder’, Examiner, 23 July 1886.

  52. 52.

    ‘Maudlin sentiment in parallel’, NYT, 28 April 1895.

  53. 53.

    ‘Cataldo’s slayer on trial’, Evening World (EW), 8 July 1895.

  54. 54.

    ‘Maria Barberi wept’, EW, 9 July 1895.

  55. 55.

    ‘City stockbroker murdered’, RN, 6 December 1902.

  56. 56.

    ‘The murder in Donegal’, Belfast Newsletter, 8 December 1888.

  57. 57.

    ‘Maria Barberi breaks down’, EW, 17 July 1895.

  58. 58.

    ‘Why she killed Cataldo’, Sun, 13 July 1895.

  59. 59.

    ‘The Cardtown murder’, LE, 8 September 1883.

  60. 60.

    ‘The city tragedy’, DN, 16 December 1882.

  61. 61.

    A. Ballinger, ‘Masculinity in the dock: Legal responses to male violence and female retaliation in England and Wales, 1900–1965’, Social and Legal Studies, 2007, 16: 459–481.

  62. 62.

    ‘The Queen’s Co. murder’, Nationalist and Leinster Times (NLT), 19 July 1902.

  63. 63.

    ‘The Clonbrock tragedy’, Examiner, 10 January 1903.

  64. 64.

    ‘Execution of Mary Daly’, LL, 10 January 1903.

  65. 65.

    ‘Mrs Daly executed’, NLT, 17 January 1903.

  66. 66.

    Ibid.

Newspapers

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Rian Sutton

  2. Maynooth University, Maynooth, Ireland

    Lynsey Black

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  1. Rian Sutton
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Correspondence to Lynsey Black .

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  1. Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

    Alison Adam

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Sutton, R., Black, L. (2020). Detecting the Murderess: Newspaper Representations of Women Convicted of Murder in New York City, London, and Ireland, 1880–1914. In: Adam, A. (eds) Crime and the Construction of Forensic Objectivity from 1850. Palgrave Histories of Policing, Punishment and Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28837-2_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28837-2_10

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