This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruske.

Here now, Tony Brewski.

Before the mug shots, before the headlines scream matriarch of murder for hire,

there was just Donna Adelson, a woman who for most of her life appeared to have it all under control,

if that's the way you'd like to look at it.

That word control is the gravitational center of her story, though.

But control isn't something that shows up fully formed in adulthood.

It's learned, molded, practiced, reinforced, and sometimes it becomes religion.

So let's strip away the courtroom drama and step back into the world that built Donna Edelson,

the post-war promise of order, the generational gospel of achievement,

and the quiet undercurrent of fear that defined mid-century American families.

What made Donna Donna?

Now, we are going to take some liberties here.

We're going to make some assumptions, make some

generalities. We're trying to understand what is behind the genesis of this control. And to do that,

we have to go back in time and take a look at the world in which Donna grew up in. Donna was born

around 1950, growing up in or near

New York City. The child of a country obsessed with stability at that moment in time.

White picket fences, perfect families, suburban lawns, trimmed a regulation length.

She'd go on to attend Queens College, part of the city university of New York system,

a solid middle class step towards professional respectability.

She trained as a teacher, a role that in the mid-century imagination carried moral authority

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