Dark Angel and Our Obsession with Serial Killers

This Sunday, PBS will air the BBC's production of Dark Angel, which focuses on the life of Mary Ann Cotton, one of the 19th century's most prolific serial killers, and one that you've mostly likely never heard of.

What drives a killer to take the lives of those around them? This is a question that has an entire subgenre of entertainment devoted to it, from true crime novels, to Lifetime movies, to tevision specials on the Discovery Channel to podcasts like Serial. But most of these focus on male killers -- your John Wayne Gacys, your Ted Bundys, your Jack the Rippers. But this weekend, Masterpiece presents a dramatic miniseries that focuses on one of the lesser known serial killers of the 1800s, Mary Anne Cotton, whose death count may in fact be higher than any of those mentioned above.

I say may because in truth, we don't know how many Cotton (the "Dark Angel" of the title) killed over her lifetime. Her drug of choice was arsenic, which is partly why no one can be sure how many of the deaths around her (and there are a startling amount, 21 at least) were by her own doing. Her killing spree, which lasted somewhere on the order of twenty years, coincided with dual outbreaks of cholera and typhoid, both of which cause the exact same symptoms of gastric and intestinal distress as arsenic poisoning. Some of those deaths which occured around her in the early years -- including several of her own children -- might have been due to the outbreak, and not  poisoning. But the truth is we can't be sure. Indeed most of her victims --including her first two husbands, which we know she killed -- were intially diagnosed with having died of cholera or typhoid, or a combination of the two.