AUTHOR Robert Muscutt came face-to-face with his great-great grandmother in a macabre mask of Mary Ball, the last woman to be executed in Coventry.

Robert, aged 60, is a direct descendant of the killer, who was hanged in front of an estimated crowd of 20,000 people in 1849.

As he signed copies of his book, A Life for a Life: The Real Story of Mary Ball, in the Coventry police museum, he looked up at the death mask of his relative and said: "My feeling is that she should be more pitied that pillo

ried." Mary Ball was an inn-keeper's daughter from Nuneaton. She was hanged at the age of 31 for the murder of her husband Thomas, who had a reputation as a drinker and womaniser.

Three months before her husband's death, Mary had bought a "penny-worth" of arsenic from a local chemist explaining that she wanted to "kill bugs."

Instead, she put the poison on a shelf at her home in Back Lane, Nuneaton.


Her husband died in agony. She denied murder. It was only after a particularly zealous prison chaplain held her hand over a lighted candle to give her an idea of the hell of eternal damnation that Mary, sobbing, finally confessed to the prison governor.

All roads into Coventry were crowded as people from Nuneaton, Bedworth and Foleshill turned out to witness her hanging.

A Life for A Life is available from city bookshops, and from internet retailer Amazon, priced £19.99.