said it was a fortunate thing for many people that she was to
die, for had she lived she would have continued to poison men and
women indiscriminately''; if, still according to the same writer,
``when the arsenic was found on her person after the arrest, she
seized the packet and gloated over the powder, looking at it, the
chronicler assures us, as a woman looks at her lover''; and if,
``when the attendants asked her how she could have brought
herself calmly to kill people with whom she was living--whose
meals and amusements she shared--she replied that their faces
were so stupidly healthy and happy that she desired to see them
change into faces of pain and despair,'' I will say this in no
way goes to prove the woman criminal to be more deadly than the
male. This ghoulish satisfaction, with the conjectured feeling
of omnipotence, is not peculiar to the woman poisoner. Neill
Cream had it. Armstrong had it. Wainewright, with his reason
for poisoning Helen Abercrombie--``Upon my soul I don't know,
unless it was that her legs were too thick''--is quite on a par
with Anna Zwanziger. The supposed sense of power does not even
belong exclusively to the poisoner. Jack the Ripper manifestly
had something of the same idea about his use of the knife.

As a monster in mass murder against Mary Ann Cotton I will set
you the Baron Gilles de Rais, with his forty flogged, outraged,
obscenely mutilated and slain children in one of his castles
alone--his total of over two hundred children thus foully done to
death. I will set you Gilles against anything that can be
brought forward as a monster in cruelty among women.

Against the hypocrisy of Helene Jegado I will set you the
sanctimonious Dr Pritchard, with the nauseating entry in his