BELONGINGS thought to have been owned by an infamous serial killer have gone on display at a North-East museum.

Letters, a stool and a teapot believed to have belonged to notorious Mary Ann Cotton have gone on display at Beamish Museum.

Following ITV’s two-part drama Dark Angel, items which reputedly belonged to Cotton are on view in the open stores in the museum's Regional Resource Centre.

Beamish was the setting for several scenes in the mini-series, featuring the Co-op hardware and drapery and The Colliery Yard.

Cotton was convicted and hanged in 1873 for the murder of her stepson, Charles Edward Cotton, though she may have had as many as 21 victims, including three of her four husbands and 11 of her 13 children.

She used arsenic to poison her victims which was added to cups of tea made in the small black Wedgewood teapot on display at Beamish.

This piece of pottery was donated to the museum in 1972 but it wasn’t until 1989 that the daughter of the donor explained its importance.

A local GP inherited the teapot from his step-grandmother who received it from an old lady in West Auckland, where Cotton was living in 1872 at the time of her arrest.

A small, worn three-legged wooden stool was also donated in the early 1970s, with the story that it had belonged to Cotton whilst she awaited trial and eventual hanging in Durham Jail.

More recently a number of photocopies of letters, which appear to have been composed by Cotton, arrived anonymously by post.

Written on County Gaol Durham embossed notepaper, they had been bought from eBay, but it is believed that these letters were sold by a North Yorkshire auction house in 2013.

All of these objects, along with photographs of the ITV crew filming the drama at Beamish, will be on display in the open stores until the end of December.