From the archives

It's true: Geoffrey Abbott's Amazing True Stories of Female Executions contains some of the best collected tales of martyrs, murderesses and madwomen you'll ever read. It's also pretty grisly stuff. There's the Reading Baby-farmer, who tied ribbons around the necks of her young victims and dumped them in the Thames, and the Yorkshire Witch, who sold potions for good health that turned out, incidentally, to be fatal. Almost worse than the crimes themselves, are the…