She lived on rural family home in Plymouth until the age of 20, when she married the young farmer Willis W. Bean of nearby Dixmont.

In the following two years, Alice and Mabel died from peculiar stomach aches, but yet again, no investigation was conducted, and the deaths soon forgotten after the burials at the Plymouth cemetery.

[1] Some time later, Mary married George H. Taylor, a Dixmont laborer who worked at the Lewiston mills, where the newlyweds moved to live.

Taylor, who belonged to the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, died after four days of acute stomach pain in 1891, in similar circumstances to Mary's former family.

According to neighbors who arrived to provide assistance with putting out the fires, they found the family's clothing, dishes and other items tied up in bundles and ready to be carried out.

One witness was a little neighborhood girl who had seen Mrs. Cowan putting white powder into the boy's medicine, which had been left by the doctor, but she did not testify per request of her father, who feared for her safety.

On one occasion, she confided to a reporter that she had hired a private detective who supposedly unearthed evidence in favor or her innocence, and expressed belief that she would be a free woman again one day.

In 1898, her examining physician turned to then-governor Llewellyn Powers with the request of pardoning Mary, as she was in failing health and wished to die peacefully in her Dixmont home.

Cowan, by then dubbed 'The Borgia of Maine' by the press, was first interned at Etna, where her parents lived,[8] but her body was then moved to the Sawyer Cemetery in her birthplace of Plymouth, where she was buried on the family plot with her murder victims.