Introducing Criminalia Season 1: Lady Poisoners

Humans have always committed crimes. What can we learn from the criminals and crimes of the past, and have humans gotten better or worse over time? 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to The Criminal Podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Maria trum Marquis, and together we're exploring the margins of
history and specifically at the intersection of history and true crime.
Our first season of the show is all about lady poisoners,
and history has not been kind to ladies. Women have
been marginalized, they've been vilified, they're falsely accused and often

(00:24):
just playing misunderstood time and time again. But sometimes women
take power for themselves and they make their voices heard,
and sometimes they do it through murder. So poison has
often been called a woman's weapon, and that's despite the
fact that roughly two thirds of the poisonings committed throughout

(00:45):
history have been the work of men. So Maria and
I wanted to get our hands dirty and dig in
and start looking at these women accused of using poison
for nefarious means and trying to figure out their motivations
and see what patterns develop. So we're going to cover
everything from Colligulus sister Agrippina. Was she a killer or
was she just ambitious enough to seem automatically suspicious to

(01:07):
a lawmate in nineteenth century England, making it illegal for
women to buy arsenic, which was just rat poison, even
though it was men doing most of the killing through
poison at the time to Chicago case where Tilly Clinic
was given a much harsher sentence than prettier women with
similar rap sheets. So the takeaway is, if you're going

(01:27):
to commit crime, be cute about it. Yes, some of
these women absolutely were guilty, but some of them were
probably labeled as criminals when that was not the case,
and all of them were viewed through society's lens as
sitting at this often sensationalized intersection of being both killers
and the fairer sex. But how many were truly villains

(01:48):
and how many were just misunderstood. Join us on Criminalia
as we untangle their stories on the I Heart radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever it is you listen wh