her. She was not at all gentle in manner, but children ran to
her. And yet, without being enormously fat, 'Fina must have
weighed close on fifteen stone. She had forearms and biceps like
a coal-heaver's. She was black-haired, heavy-browed,
squish-nosed, moled, and swarthy, and she had a beard and
moustache far beyond the stage of incipiency. Yet those two
British seamen, fairly decent men, neither drunk nor brutish,
could not have been more attracted had 'Fina had the beauty of
the Mona Lisa herself. I may add that there were other women
handy and that the seamen knew of them.

This in parenthesis, I hope not inappropriately.

Where the selected victim, or victims, is, or are, feeble-bodied
you will frequently find the murderess using physical means to
her end. Sarah Malcolm, whose case will form one of the chief
features of this volume, is an instance in point. Marguerite
Diblanc, who strangled Mme Reil in the latter's house in Park
Lane on a day in April 1871, is another. Amelia Dyer, the
baby-farmer, also strangled her charges. Elizabeth Brownrigg
(1767) beat the feeble Mary Clifford to death. I do not know
that great physical difference existed to the advantage of the
murderess between her and her older victim, Mrs Phoebe Hogg, who,
with her baby, was done to death by Mrs Pearcy in October 1890,
but the fact that Mrs Hogg had been battered about the head, and
that the head had been almost severed from the body, would seem
to indicate that the murderess was the stronger of the two women.
The case of Belle Gunness (treated by Mr George Dilnot in his
Rogues March[1]) might be cited. Fat, gross-featured, far from
attractive though she was, her victims were all men who had