035 | The Rugeley Poisoner: One Conviction, Fourteen Suspected Dead | Staffordshire, 1856

035 | The Rugeley Poisoner: One Conviction, Fourteen Suspected Dead | Staffordshire, 1856

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the life and crimes of Dr. William Palmer of Rugeley, Staffordshire, a trusted physician, compulsive gambler, and the man Victorian England came to know as the Rugeley Poisoner. Formally convicted of a single murder, Palmer was suspected of killing as many as thirteen or fourteen people over the course of a decade, among them his wife, his brother, and several creditors. He was hanged at the age of thirty-one, and the country was so afraid he might escape justice that Parliament changed the law specifically because of him.

034 | The South Sea Bubble: A Nation's Savings Lost to Fiction | London, 1720

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores one of the most audacious financial frauds in British history: a company that barely moved a single legitimate cargo, convinced a nation to pour its savings into a fiction, and then collapsed, leaving tens of thousands of ordinary people with nothing.

033 | The Trials of Oscar Wilde: He Walked Into the Trap | London, 1895

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the three trials of Oscar Wilde in the spring of 1895, and the quiet, ordinary moment that set them all in motion: a calling card left at a London gentlemen's club, slipped into an envelope by a hall porter who couldn't quite make out the handwriting, and left on a shelf for ten days.

032 | The Franks Kidnapping: A Perfect Crime Undone | Chicago, 1924

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores the 1924 murder of Bobby Franks, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago's South Side, and the long, complicated aftermath of the case that followed his death.

031 | The Haymarket Affair: Eight Tried, Four Hanged | Chicago, 1886

Tonight's Cozy Crime story explores one of the most consequential unsolved crimes in American history: a bomb thrown into a crowd on a Chicago street in 1886, eight men tried for murder, four of them hanged, and not one of them ever proven to have done it.