Mary Ann Cotton: The Arsenic Widow Who Buried Her Own Children
In Victorian England, a nurse and mother named Mary Ann Cotton watched husbands, stepchildren, and even her own babies die of “gastric fever”—then collected the insurance. Alexander Lawson traces the quiet, calculated killings of Britain’s most prolific female serial killer, from the coal towns of County Durham to the botched hanging that ended her life. How did she poison as many as twenty-one people without raising alarm for nearly twenty years? This episode uncovers the pattern of deaths, the arsenic in the tea, and the moment a single careless remark finally brought her down.
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