Out Of The Shadows

Poison seeped through the marble corridors of ancient Rome—and one woman mixed every drop. In the Season 36 opener of Serial Killers in History, we track Locusta of Gaul, the herbalist-turned-assassin who helped Emperor Nero carve a blood-stained path to power.What you’ll hear:How a captive chemist became the world’s first documented serial killerDeadly dinners: the mushroom that felled Emperor Claudius and the draught that doomed BritannicusThe Senate’s panic and the birth of Rome’s anti-poison lawsModern forensic insights that finally decode Locusta’s toxic recipesStay to the end for a teaser of Episode 2—Paris’s infamous Affair of the Poisons.