Britain releases details of women murderers

GRUESOME details of murders committed by British women in the early 20th century were made available to the public yesterday.

Official court documents relating to 17 murderesses were released by the British Home Office at the National Archives in Kew, west London.

All the women were sentenced to death but only one Dorothea Waddingham was hanged.

The remaining 16 had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, on the direction of the then home secretary. Some of the files include prison records and mugshots that have never been made public before.

Most of the women were convicted of murdering children, including Ann Neath, who stabbed her own baby boy with a scissors. Neath, 28, a domestic servant, had secretly given birth in her room and hid the baby's corpse under her bed.

She was convicted at Leeds in March 1921 and had her death sentence commuted to life imprisonment.

One of the most disturbing cases was that of Edith Proctor, who starved her partner's child to death over a prolonged period.

The case bore chilling similarities with that of Victoria Climbie's. The eight-year-old girl died after months of abuse by her great-aunt and her boyfriend in London in 2000.

Proctor, 39, forced seven-year-old Nellie to spend most of her time in a small back bedroom and deliberately gave her little to eat.

Her partner, Walter Gibbins, and his other children from a previous relationship all were aware that Nellie was being starved and beaten but were too scared to intervene.

Nellie never went to school or played outside and was rarely even seen by her own siblings. Shortly before she died, one of her sisters described her as looking like "a skeleton as white as death".

The youngster died weighing just 18lbs. The average weight of a child her age was 50lbs.

Proctor's file includes a shocking photograph of Nellie's emaciated corpse that was shown only to jury members at her trial in Leeds in 1918. Her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment as she was pregnant at the time.

Waddingham was hanged in April 1936 for murdering an 87-year-old widow and her disabled daughter at a nursing home in Nottingham.

She was one of only 12 women in England to be hanged for their crimes in the last century.

The cases were selected for release as part of the Home Office's review of the closure period applied to records. They were originally subject to closure for 100 years because they contained medical and domestic details that could not be released during the lifetime of the prisoners and, in some cases, their immediate families.