Full factual, detailed account of the life, trial and hanging of Mary Ball who, after an enthralling but unsuccessful official plea for mercy, was hanged for the murder of her husband Thomas in Coventry, 1849. Drawing on a great range of authentic and partly previously unpublished documentation, this gripping true story conveys a strong sense of what it was like for a working-class woman to grow up in the mid-nineteenth century Midlands, UK and what drove this particular woman, the author's great, great grandmother, to take the desperate step which caused her to become the last woman to be publicly hanged in front of around 20,000 spectators, in Wawickshire. Highly readable, informative and fascinating for readers interested in local history and in daily life in Victorian provincial England.