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
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
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 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
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
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