David Wilson

You'll hear how she handled the paedophile fantasies, the hopelessness of a teenager locked up for years under a discredited law, and the cleaning tips learned from a killer who left his crime scene spotless apart from his wife's body.

Welcome to This Much Is True Crime with me, Martin Frizell, and Emeritus Professor of Criminology, David Wilson, and our guest, former probation officer, Elizabeth Baxter.

Well, welcome to Liz, I'm going to call you Liz, if that's all right.

Thank you, yeah.

Familicide sits among a number of types of family murder, all the terms which mean the act of killing in Latin, often adding to the confusion over terminology.

A research study published in the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice in two thousand thirteen by Elizabeth Yardley, David Wilson, and Adam Linz has been particularly influential in this field.

They analyzed newspaper articles over three decades from nineteen eighty to two thousand twelve where cases of familicide were reported.

They found a total of seventy-one cases where fifty-nine of the perpetrators were male and over half were between the ages of thirty to forty years old when they committed the crime.

Most offenders were employed and aged between thirty and thirty-nine years old at the time of the murders.

In sixty-eight percent of cases, the male annihilator committed suicide after the murders.

Professor David Wilson has stated that family annihilators have received little attention as a separate category of killer, and they are often treated like spree or serial murderers, a view which presupposes traits such as the idea that the murderer snaps or that after killing their partner or children, the killer may force a standoff with the police, which is not an entirely accurate representation of these killers.

In contrast to other groups such as serial killers and mass murderers, these were found to be individuals with good backgrounds.

Well, now she's talking, as is the son she abused.

But why so cruel? Seriously mentally ill or just a plain, greedy con woman? Welcome to This Much Is True Crime with Emeritus Professor of Criminology David Wilson and me, Martin Frizell.

Hello, David.

Martin, how are you?

Good, thank you.

But pretty much to this day, I'm quite sure, definitely sure, they were all true.

They were all absolutely true.

Tell you one other thing, David, that we always did with those little children.

It's about why you've probably never heard of her.

David Wilson, a criminology professor who wrote a book about this case, points out that however you cut it, Mary Ann Cotton killed more people than Jack the Ripper, more than Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, who murdered five children in the 1960s, more than Fred and Rosemary West, who killed at least a dozen young women in the '70s and '80s.

Every one of those names is infamous in Britain.

Hers isn't.