Hee! My Mum was similar - one of my first memories is of Dick Turpin's death cell in York, and the Chamber of Horrors (Robespierre's head on a historically incorrect spike, that must be where the obsession started...!). My mum was an infant teacher, but she clearly thought violent death was a way to get her kids interested in history (Terry Deary's made an awful lot of money on the same principle, I suppose!).