West Auckland, County Durham, 1872. A seven-year-old boy is dead of what the doctor calls gastric fever. The village grocer remembers what the boy's stepmother told him only days before, and he won't let the certificate rest. A surgeon tests what he kept back, and finds arsenic.

This is the case of Mary Ann Cotton: a nurse, a wife four times over, and a mother who buried child after child across the coalfield. It goes from the burial clubs that paid out on every death, to the graves opened one by one, the trial at Durham, and the gaol yard on 24 March 1873.

Every detail is drawn from contemporary newspaper reports and trial records.

Sources:

The Northern Echo archive (1872–73)

The Durham County Advertiser

The Darlington & Stockton Times

Capital Punishment UK

Wilson, D., Mary Ann Cotton: Britain's First Female Serial Killer (2013)

Written and produced by Purpose Made. AI-generated voice (ElevenLabs).

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