This is a fairly run-of-the-mill documentary barring the fact it covers the activities of three murderous women from two different eras:
Pamela Gourlay from 20th-21st Century Scotland; Elizabeth Brownrigg from 18th Century London, and Edith McAlinden, again from 21st Century Scotland. The cases are dealt with in this order.
Elizabeth Brownrigg was a notorious murderess who was sent to Tyburn Tree on September 13, 1767. McAlinden murdered her lover the day after she was released from prison, and then recruited her own sons to murder a witness. They ended up murdering not one but two people. Both these women took evil to new extremes; although she was responsible for only one death rather than three, Brownrigg is arguably the worst of the three because of her prolonged brutality of young girls in her charge. Like McAlinden she was a manipulative individual who dominated men, in her case her husband and son John.
Her systematic torture of Mary Clifford which led to the girl's death echoes the torture death of Sylvia Likens at the hands of Gertrude Baniszewski in the 1960s.
The crime of Pamela Gourlay was motivated by drugs; she stabbed her neighbour to death in a frenzied attack. To the disgust of her victim's family, Gourlay was paroled last year after serving her tariff, a mere 14 years. Disgust aside, there are striking similarities between her crime and the murder of Meredith Kercher, similarities that suggest the prosecution got it right, however bizarre the scenario may be of Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede holding her down, and torturing her to death.
This documentary includes a fair amount of psychobabble, reconstructions and interviews.