We're bringing Australian True Crime live to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne this July,

and I have to tell you that Brisbane sold out already.

Good for you, Brisbane, so we've quickly added a second show.

Now we can't keep adding more shows, so please make sure you get your tickets. Our special guests,

our forensic criminologist Santee Mallet in Brisbane and Sydney and the one and only Charlie Bazzina in

Melbourne. There'll be a Q&A of course so you can ask your own burning questions on the night but you have to book quickly.

The producers of this podcast recognize the traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded.

They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders past, present and those emerging.

The following podcast contains content of a graphic violent nature and is not suitable for children.

It's a particularly cruel way to kill someone because you can administer it slowly over a long period of time and it looks like something else.

It doesn't look like poisoning.

So initially, stomach ulcers chronic flu symptoms that then became paralysis

it eventually will send you blind but it also sent people mad.

After World War II, Sydney experienced a crime wave, and it was women who were the perpetrators. The household poison Thallium, normally used to kill rats, was the murder weapon to kill husbands and other inconvenient family members.

Unlike arsenic or cyanide, thallium is colorless, odorless and tasteless.

Victims were misdiagnosed as insane malingerers or ill due to other reasons.

Dr. Tanya Bretherton has delved into these cases of these women and the ways and

reasons why they committed their deeds for her book The Husband Poisoner.

It's called the Husband Poisoner, suburban women who killed in post World War II Sydney.

So why this particular period of time? What was it about this time that saw a number of very high profile cases of women poisoning their husbands or even multiple men.

There's probably two ways to answer that. The first one is that it was convenience. So in New South Wales at the time

we had the availability of a poison that was easy to get, cheap, so it was a heavy metal called thallium, which was commercially

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