The Female Con Artist Anatomised After Death: What She Threatened Wasn't Money, It Was Order
In 18th-century England, the female swindler Mary Bateman ran fortune-telling and poisoned-pie scams — not for money, but for the pleasure of control. Her tricks hit human longing with precision, and after death she was dissected and put on display, revealing society's fear of those who upend its order.
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When the con artist melts into the crowd, the magician's pact collapses
In the 1740s, a magician announced he would climb into a bottle at London's Haymarket Theatre. The audience paid for tickets, expecting to enjoy clever trickery in suspended disbelief. But the performer never appeared, the crowd rioted at being fooled, and soldiers put them down. Maddie points out that until then a pact existed between magician and audience: the illusion on stage was safe, and the audience knowingly played along. When a con artist breaks the contract and melts into the crowd, becoming any stranger at all, every bit of trust fails. The episode is a metaphor for its age: every established rule was being rewritten.
— Maddy PellingShe didn't need money — what the con gave her was intimate control
The mill burned down, and a pregnant Mary went door to door collecting bandages for the hospital — then turned around and sold them all. She didn't lack money; her husband John was a wheelwright with a respectable income and a militia post. Maddie stresses that Mary acted out of a craving for intimate control, not economic motive. She was skilled at using her pregnancy to win trust, reading others' fears, offering what looked like precise comfort, then destroying them utterly. That pattern of manipulation runs through her whole life and foreshadows the graver crimes to come.
— Maddy PellingThe scam's endpoint isn't money, it's a pie laced with arsenic
Rebecca Perigo suffered from chronic illness, and Mary claimed a spell had to be worked through an intermediary, Miss Blythe, inducing the couple to hand over almost everything they owned, including a new bed, ham and gold coins. When William grew suspicious, Mary's final instruction was to eat a pie mixed with powder, then take honey to mask the bitterness. Rebecca ate a few bites, rolled on the ground vomiting, and died miserably days later; William survived because he ate only one bite. He set a trap to catch Mary, who was carrying a small bottle of arsenic, and multiple items belonging to victims were found in her home. The scam had escalated from psychological manipulation to lethal poisoning.
— Maddy PellingThe letter she told him to burn became the evidence that hanged her
At trial, William produced the letters Mary had written him — she had asked him to burn them after reading, but he kept them, and they became the strongest physical evidence. Several doctors examined the pie residue and vomit, and one even suffered a heart attack in the courtroom. After being sentenced to hang, Mary asked to plead the belly; the judge closed the court, women present examined her, and the conclusion was that she was not pregnant. A prison guard recalled that at the end she nursed a baby, handed the child to her husband, and walked to the gallows. Mary lied to the very end, but the chain of evidence could no longer be overturned.
— Maddy PellingHanging her wasn't enough — she was boiled and put on display
After Mary was hanged, her body was taken back to the Leeds anatomy school, where the anatomist William Hay charged admission to exhibit it for three days, dissecting the corpse in public and holding up the uterus to declare, "There is no baby here," while spectators joked that her heart wasn't black enough. Her remains were boiled and displayed, and her bones stayed on show in a museum until 2015. Visitors queued to touch the bones, afraid she would come back for revenge. Maddie argues that this extreme treatment shows she shook the emerging capitalist hierarchy and had to be erased completely, not merely executed.
— Maddy PellingShe made a living by defying the system, so she had to be erased
Maddie notes that Mary feels eerily modern — she read weaknesses, offered hope, faked authority, just like so many con artists today. That she could make a living inside the social system by defying it was precisely what threatened the consolidating structure of capitalist power. So she was dissected, boiled and publicly displayed to eliminate her symbolic threat. This exposes the era's fear of losing control: when society changes too fast, people seek an outlet in irrational explanations, and Mary was both a product of that need and its scapegoat.
— Maddy PellingA con artist doesn't sell a product, but the hope reality can't give
A listener named Stuart's aunt paid $15,000 for a "magic box" built from a low-spec computer, on the reasoning that expensive means good. Maddie analyses that the most powerful thing about a con artist's story is that it offers hope reality cannot deliver, while faking authority and expertise. She warns that in the Enlightenment the definition of knowledge and the location of authority were shifting violently, leaving ordinary people unable to tell the difference; the modern internet amplifies the danger of "authority mimicry" even more. When a person is drawn to the certainty a stranger projects, that is often the most vulnerable moment.
— Maddy PellingThe cruellest forgery proves the authenticator was right all along
Tim uses the Van Meegeren case to show how precisely a con can hit its target. The art critic Abraham Bredius spent his life convinced that Vermeer had travelled to Italy and been influenced by Caravaggio, though the evidence was thin. Van Meegeren painted a Vermeer in Caravaggio's style, letting Bredius see his long-held theory confirmed, and so fooled an authoritative authenticator. Tim stresses that this is more like "pressing a button" than mere forgery — it proves the other person has been right their whole life. Anyone can be brought down by their own background and blind spots, and that is the hardest part of guarding against fraud.
— Tim HarfordIn their own words · checked verbatim
And suddenly the trickster can be anyone, and the gloves are off, essentially, and this opens the gate for all kinds of chaos.
Maddy Pelling7:24
She was able to make a living actively working against it, and for that she is taken apart and destroyed and obliterated.
Maddy Pelling30:46
I think it's got to be that it offers people hope.
Maddy Pelling32:53
That story is the contract. Van Megran was a Nazi.
Tim Harford36:00
We are all products of our own context and our own ignorances and will will be taken in by something I think.
Tim Harford41:04
Figures
| Mary Bateman's year of birth | 1768 | 8:27 |
| Year of the Doomsday Egg scam | 1803 | 17:34 |
| Price Stuart's aunt paid for the magic box | $15,000 | 32:53 |
| Year Mary's bones were taken off public display | 2015 | 28:45 |
Glossary
- pleading the belly
- A legal plea by a female prisoner in 18th- and 19th-century England claiming pregnancy to win a reprieve or escape the death penalty.
- bottle conjurer
- A street magician who claimed he could stuff himself into a wine bottle — in practice a byword for a hoax.
- ill wishes / well wishes
- Objects sewn into clothing and believed to cast or break a curse.
How to listen
Anyone interested in the psychology of scams, historical crime and the mechanics of trust; product and marketing people can learn to spot the tricks used to manipulate users.
The Patreon plug and closing credits at the end can be skipped.