is the amount of metallic mercury found in the old woman's body:
296 grains--a record.

Having regard to the condition of life in which these Irishwomen
lived, there is nothing, to my mind, in the fact that they
murdered for forty pounds to make their crime more sordid than
that of Mary Blandy.

Take, again, the case of Mary Ansell, the domestic servant, who,
at Hertford Assizes in June 1899, was found guilty of the murder
of her sister, Caroline, by the administration of phosphorus
contained in a cake. Here the motive for the murder was the
insurance made by Ansell upon the life of her sister, a young
woman of weak intellect confined in Leavesden Asylum, Watford.
The sum assured was only L22 10s. If Mary Blandy poisoned her
father in order to be at liberty to marry her lover, Cranstoun,
and to secure the fortune Cranstoun wanted with her, wherein does
she shine above Mary Ansell, a murderess who not only poisoned
her sister, but nearly murdered several of her sister's
fellow-inmates of the asylum, and all for twenty odd pounds?
Certainly not in being less sordid, certainly not in being more
`romantic.'

There is, at root, no case of murder proved and accepted as such
which does not contain its points of interest for the
criminological writer. There is, indeed, many a case, not only
of murder but of lesser crime, that has failed to attract a lot
of attention, but that yet, in affording matter for the student
of crime and criminal psychology, surpasses others which, very
often because there has been nothing of greater public moment at