Charlotte Bryant

Much to the fury of her compatriots, raven haired Charlotte McHugh was not averse to entertaining the hated British troops serving in her native Londonderry in the 1920s. She dreamed of landing a rich Englishman and moving to London where she knew the streets were paved with gold. Finally the best she could manage was a young farm labourer from rural Dorset called Frederick Bryant. Claiming pregnancy, she forced Bryant to marry her and they moved to a succession of farms in Dorset. Quickly tiring of married respectability and poverty Charlotte turned to prostitution and was soon bringing home a tidy sum to supplement Frederick's meagre income as a labourer. Enter Leonard Parsons, a gypsy with whom Charlotte began a passionate affair. "Would you marry me if I were a widow?" she asked him on a number of occasions. In 1935 the previously robust Frederick started to get sick, usually after sampling meals prepared by his not-so-loving wife and in December of that year he died. A post-mortem showed his body to be riddled with arsenic and when it was proved that his grieving widow had recently bought copious amounts of arsenic based rat poison, her fate was sealed. Her once silky tresses now snow white, Charlotte stepped bravely onto the scaffold at Exeter Prison on 15 July 1936 to pay the ultimate price.