Welcome to Fearsome Fiction — where mysteries, thrillers, and forgotten classics await you on the other side of a rainy night. Join us every Tuesday for true crime stories, some solved and some as cold as the grave, and conversations with the authors who know where the bodies are buried and how they got there. There's always another story waiting in the dark.
True Crime Tuesdays Fearsome Fiction: Mary Cotton - Catherine Wilson
Welcome back to True Crime Tuesdays. Today's case takes us to a Victorian sickroom, where the person meant to make you better was the one who decided whether you lived.
Her name was Catherine Wilson. She worked as a private nurse in small English towns through the 1850s and into the 1860s, sitting at bedsides, mixing medicines, and quietly becoming the beneficiary of more than one dying patient's will. Husbands, lovers, landladies, patients. The deaths piled up for a decade before anyone thought to ask why.
This is The Soothing Draught, the story of the woman who became the first known serial killer nurse in England, caught not because anyone suspected her, but because one patient refused to die quietly.
4 Oct 2026
Fearsome Fiction: Devil's Wood Audiobook (Chapters 3 and 4)
Follow author Mark McNease deep into the Devil's Wood.
An ancient people. A tree that has stood seemingly forever. And a walking stick that must possess anyone who possesses it.
Two chapters at a time, only on the Fearsome Fiction podcast. You can purchase the entire audiobook on Spotify and select online retailers.
Enter the Devil's Wood. But be warned: you may never leave.
And now... fasten your headphones, and tell someone your last known location. The Devil's Wood dotcom.
29 Sept 2026
True Crime Tuesdays on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Mary Cotton - the Arsenic Widow
Enjoy this True Crime Tuesdays episode, brought to you courtesy of author Franklin Maw's upcoming Blood Evidence: 25 True Crime Chillers.
She married often, and buried often — husbands, stepchildren, her own children, one after another, in a mining town that had already seen more than its share of death. No one thought to ask why. Arsenic was cheap, convenient, and nearly impossible to prove... until someone finally did. This is the story of Mary Ann Cotton, one of Britain's first convicted female serial killers, and the quiet, domestic horror she left behind in West Auckland. This is "The Arsenic Widow," from Franklin Maw's Blood Evidence.
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