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The Black Widow of Durham: How a Nurse Hid Twenty Murders
The Black Widow of Durham: How a Nurse Hid Twenty Murders
Children in County Durham still sing a rhyme about Mary Ann Cotton, the woman accused of killing twenty-one people, most of them her own family. For two decades she moved through marriages, towns, and funerals while doctors wrote ordinary causes like gastric fever-so how did no one connect the pattern until 1873?
In this episode, we tell the story of Mary Ann Cotton from her birth in Low Moorsley to the deaths in West Auckland and the forensic case that concluded in 1873, tracing how social conditions, profession, and mobility…
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