Crimescribe

Louisa Merrifield, Blackpool’s boastful poisoner.

It’s a fact that, for all their ruthlessness and guile, murderers can and do make the most idiotic mistakes. Louisa Merrifield was certainly one of them. Born in 1906, Merrifield was a liar, a fraudster, a cheat and ultimately a murderer. Today in 1953 her criminal career ended abruptly at the end of Albert Pierrepoint’s rope. She was the third-to-last woman to hang in Britain and the fourth to die at Strangeways, a prison with a long history of executions.

Her crime, the murder of her employer in 1953, was a squalid affair. She’d worked for some time (and numerous different employers) as a domestic help and housekeeper when she went to work for Sarah Louise Ricketts. Ricketts was a cantankerous, quarrelsome pensioner who happened to own her own home, a bungalow worth £3-4000. That was a considerable sum for the time. Given wartime bomb…