In 2017, a convicted war criminal stood in a courtroom in The Hague, heard his appeal denied, declared "I am not a war criminal" — and drank poison. Live. In front of the judges.

This week, Chelsea covers the case of Slobodan Praljak (yes, we're going to try to say it): a Bosnian Croat general convicted of war crimes during the brutal Croat-Bosniak War of the 1990s — a man who was, before all of that, a philosophy professor, a theatre director, and an engineer. The crimes he was found responsible for included the persecution and murder of Bosnian Muslims, and the destruction of the famous Old Bridge of Mostar — a 16th-century Ottoman landmark that had survived four centuries before he came along.

We also get into what happened in the former Yugoslavia, why it matters, and why the kind of tribunal that convicted him is both rarer and more important than most people realize.

Britain's deadliest secret lived in a quiet pit village in County Durham — and for nearly two decades, she was hiding in plain sight.

In this episode, we're diving into the chilling true story of Mary Ann Cotton: Victorian nurse, four-time widow, and the woman believed to have poisoned up to 21 people — including three husbands, a lover, her own mother, and eleven of her thirteen children. Her weapon of choice? Arsenic. Cheap, tasteless, odorless, and in the 1860s, available at your local shop with zero questions asked.

We'll take you inside the coal mining villages of industrial northern England and ask the question that haunts this whole case: how does someone kill for twenty years without anyone connecting the dots? Plus — the one careless sentence that finally gave her away, a trial with its own controversies, and an execution that was, to put it mildly, not clean.

This is the story of one woman, a Victorian world full of blind spots, and a crime spree that should have been impossible — and almost wasn't.

A boy genius with a chemistry set and absolutely no boundaries.

At just 14 years old, Graham Frederick Young began slipping poison into his family's tea — methodically, patiently, and with detailed notes. He was caught, committed to Broadmoor Hospital, and eventually released as reformed. He was not reformed.

In this episode, Chelsea covers the deeply unsettling case of Graham Frederick Young — the Teacup Poisoner — a self-taught toxicologist who turned every workplace tea round into a deadly experiment, and whose meticulous diary of doses and symptoms became the evidence that finally put him away for life.