The Essex Poisoner: Mary May & the Five-Year Hunt for Britain’s Husband Killers
News of the Times | Episode 587 | 1848
One quiet Essex village. One determined woman. And a trail of death so shocking it forced Victorian police to investigate an entire county.

Today we uncover the chilling case of Mary May, the Essex wife whose actions in 1848 sparked Britain’s first major hunt for domestic poisoners. What began as a single suspicious death soon expanded into rumours of a murder ring, burial-club schemes, and a series of sudden “illnesses” that looked far too similar to be coincidence.

In this episode we explore:
🔸 The sudden death of Mary May’s half-brother — and why villagers accepted her explanation… until they didn’t.
🔸 How Victorian burial clubs created a deadly financial loophole.
🔸 The growing panic across Essex as husbands and children linked to Mary May or her close friends began dying in identical ways.
🔸 Professor Alfred Swaine Taylor — the era’s leading toxicologist — and the forensic breakthrough that exposed the truth.
🔸 Fears of a female “death club” operating across Tendring, Wix, Bradfield, and Ramsay.
🔸 The extraordinary five-year government investigation into suspected poisonings across the county.

Was Mary May a lone murderer?
A catalyst?
Or the central figure in a network of women using arsenic to rid themselves of inconvenient husbands?

Victorian Britain had never seen anything like it.

And in today’s Further Particulars, meet the fortune-teller who could predict everyone’s future except his own — including his arrest and three months’ hard labour.

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