Speaker 1: Welcome to The Criminal Podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Speaker 1: Maria trum Marquis, and together we're exploring the margins of
Speaker 1: history and specifically at the intersection of history and true crime.
Speaker 1: Our first season of the show is all about lady poisoners,
Speaker 1: and history has not been kind to ladies. Women have
Speaker 1: been marginalized, they've been vilified, they're falsely accused and often
Speaker 1: just playing misunderstood time and time again. But sometimes women
Speaker 1: take power for themselves and they make their voices heard,
Speaker 1: and sometimes they do it through murder. So poison has
Speaker 1: often been called a woman's weapon, and that's despite the
Speaker 1: fact that roughly two thirds of the poisonings committed throughout
Speaker 1: history have been the work of men. So Maria and
Speaker 1: I wanted to get our hands dirty and dig in
Speaker 1: and start looking at these women accused of using poison
Speaker 1: for nefarious means and trying to figure out their motivations
Speaker 1: and see what patterns develop. So we're going to cover
Speaker 1: everything from Colligulus sister Agrippina. Was she a killer or
Speaker 1: was she just ambitious enough to seem automatically suspicious to
Speaker 1: a lawmate in nineteenth century England, making it illegal for
Speaker 1: women to buy arsenic, which was just rat poison, even
Speaker 1: though it was men doing most of the killing through
Speaker 1: poison at the time to Chicago case where Tilly Clinic
Speaker 1: was given a much harsher sentence than prettier women with
Speaker 1: similar rap sheets. So the takeaway is, if you're going
Speaker 1: to commit crime, be cute about it. Yes, some of
Speaker 1: these women absolutely were guilty, but some of them were
Speaker 1: probably labeled as criminals when that was not the case,
Speaker 1: and all of them were viewed through society's lens as
Speaker 1: sitting at this often sensationalized intersection of being both killers
Speaker 1: and the fairer sex. But how many were truly villains
Speaker 1: and how many were just misunderstood. Join us on Criminalia
Speaker 1: as we untangle their stories on the I Heart radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcasts, or wherever it is you listen wh