Episode 19= The penny policies- Flanagan and Higgins- 1880-1884

Send us Fan MailLiverpool, 1880. In the packed courts around Scotland Road, thousands of Irish families lived shoulder to shoulder, carrying with them the hunger, hardship, and resilience they’d brought across the water. Among them were two women—Catherine Flanagan and Margaret Higgins—Irish-born, sharp‑witted, and struggling to survive in a city that offered little mercy.What they built in those narrow rooms was a scheme as cold as it was calculated: take out funeral insurance on the vulnerable, then use poison to turn policy into profit. Between 1880 and 1884, at least four people—children, relatives, lodgers—were murdered for payouts barely large enough to bury the dead.Their crimes shocked Victorian Britain, not only for their brutality but for the way they exposed the desperation of the Irish poor in Liverpool and the dark opportunities created by the booming funeral insurance trade.In this episode, we return to those shadowed streets to trace the women, their Irish roots, their victims, and the investigation that finally brought their killing spree to an end.