Britain's deadliest secret lived in a quiet pit village in County Durham — and for nearly two decades, she was hiding in plain sight.
In this episode, we're diving into the chilling true story of Mary Ann Cotton: Victorian nurse, four-time widow, and the woman believed to have poisoned up to 21 people — including three husbands, a lover, her own mother, and eleven of her thirteen children. Her weapon of choice? Arsenic. Cheap, tasteless, odorless, and in the 1860s, available at your local shop with zero questions asked.
We'll take you inside the coal mining villages of industrial northern England and ask the question that haunts this whole case: how does someone kill for twenty years without anyone connecting the dots? Plus — the one careless sentence that finally gave her away, a trial with its own controversies, and an execution that was, to put it mildly, not clean.
This is the story of one woman, a Victorian world full of blind spots, and a crime spree that should have been impossible — and almost wasn't.