Isabella Young lived in Durham, she was happily married,
healthy and well provided for with a young family, who could want more? In 1872
on a summer afternoon around 3pm Isabella took two of her children for a walk.
After a while she left the baby in her pram by the road while she took the
older daughter into the woods, where getting out a dinner knife Isabella tried
to cut her daughter's throat. The little girl fought off her mother and with
her clothes covered in blood ran home.
Isabella returned then to the baby in the pram and stabbed her in the stomach,
Isabella then slit her own throat from ear to ear. On hearing cries from the
woods two men passing by discovered the mother and baby. Isabella was certainly
dead but the baby was expected to live. A coroners jury returned the verdict
that the deceased had cut her throat while in an unsound state of mind.
