Mary Lefley was the last woman to be executed in Lincoln, arraigned for the alleged brutal poisoning of her husband in 1884 with enough arsenic to kill fifty men. Despite there being little hard evidence, including a lack of motive, as well as a total absence of poison in the house.
Lucy Ann Buxton, Emma Wade and Selina Stanhope were three women residing in different parts of the county of Lincolnshire in the second half of the nineteenth-century:
Jane Bell of Laceby, Elizabeth Dodds of Wrangle and Ellen Green of Fishtoft were three Lincolnshire women put on trial between 1845 and 1875 for killing their husbands with large quantities of arsenic, but were judged to be innocent of the crime.
Between 1844 and 1868, three women were tried and found guilty of the brutal murder of members of their family by poison at the Lincoln Assizes.
The nineteenth century saw the growth of commercially available solutions for dealing with the problem of domestic infestation by mice and rats. Promising a reliable means of destroying the ‘furry detestables’, such products as Battle’s Vermin Killer were sold cheaply over the counter, as well as being sent through the post.