After falling pregnant to her lodger, Ellen Lanigan drowned the newborn twins in seperate locations in 1878.
Ellen was a mother of 4 when her husband was committed to an asylum. She worked in a shop and took in a lodger for extra money. The lodger took advantage of ellen's loneliness and she became pregnant, only for the father to disappear before the birth.
Ellen gave birth in Liverpool Workhouse, before abandoning one baby in a claypit and another in an ashpit, leaving both to drown. After she was sentenced to death Ellen made an impassioned plea, saying it was poverty and distress, not cruelty which drove her to such a dreadful act. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.
|