Murder, Mystery & Makeup · Audioboom Studios

She Used Flypaper to Kill Her Husbands (And It Actually Worked)

·1 hr 6 min·5 clips

Bailey opens by treating the case like something she has been turning over in her head all morning, and that tone sets the pace right away. Lydia Trueblood is framed as a picture perfect housewife on the outside, then the story starts peeling that image back. Suspicious deaths pile up around her. Arsenic is the ugly answer underneath the charm. Flypaper enters the story too, and the bad dye job and two gold front teeth make the whole thing feel even stranger. The episode leans hard into the nickname Idaho's Lady Bluebeard. It also pushes the idea that she may have been one of America's first Black Widow serial killers. Detectives question her, then let her go after a brief discussion because they do not have the hard evidence they need. Lydia answers the whole thing by saying she has terrible luck. The local townsfolk are angry enough that the case becomes part of a local sheriff's race. Lydia leaves Idaho and starts over in Los Angeles. There she meets Paul Southard, a man in the United States Navy, and they marry in November 1920. Soon after, he is transferred to Pearl Harbor in Honolulu, and the story follows them to Hawaii. From there, the episode keeps circling the same sick little question: how does one woman keep ending up at the center of so many awful events?

As heard by us

A poison case with gothic oddity and a steady pulse.

This episode stays with Lydia Trueblood, the picture-perfect housewife figure tied to suspicious deaths, arsenic-laced flypaper, a bad dye job, two gold front teeth, and the gothic nickname Idaho's Lady Bluebeard.

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Why you'd press play

You want a poison case with flypaper, widow energy, and zero chill.

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