True Crime Tuesdays on the Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Sarah Freeman – the Shapwick Poisoner (from Franklin Maw’s ‘Blood Evidence’)

The Shapwick Poisoner: Sarah Freeman

The following is from Franklin Maw’s Blood Evidence: 25 True Crime Chillers.

In the winter of 1844, a woman walked into a chemist’s shop in Bridgwater, in the English county of Somerset, and bought three pennies’ worth of arsenic. It was a common enough purchase. Arsenic killed rats. It also killed people, and in the village of Shapwick, people close to Sarah Freeman had a habit of dying.

Her husband, Henry. Her young son, James. Her mother, Mary. Each death was mourned, and each was buried. Then her brother Charles fell violently ill and died, and this time someone asked questions. The bodies came out of the ground. The tests came back. And the village began to wonder how long it had been living beside a poisoner.

On April 23, 1845, ten thousand people gathered in Taunton to watch Sarah Freeman hang. To the very end, she swore she was “as innocent as a lamb.”

Was she a cold-blooded serial killer, or a convenient scapegoat? Today, we open the case of the Shapwick Poisoner.