AT FIRST GLANCE, tediously detailed forensic evidence related to a murder case would seem unlikely to excite a popular audience. Not so, writes television critic Jack Seale: “If you slow a true-crime documentary right down so you’re lingering obsessively on every detail of the case, it's not boring; it's fascinating, because the significance of each small development is highlighted.” True-crime murder has entranced audiences for centuries now. But this new variation, with its emphasis on laboratory analysis of trace evidence—clues often barely perceptible to the naked eye like hairs, skin fragments, fibres—has in recent decades developed a mass following, growing into a wildly popular genre in print, on television, and, now, in podcast series.

When the news broke in 2005 that Dr. Philippe Charlier and his team had undertaken a project to exhume and examine the remains of Agnès Sorel, a ready-made public welcomed the story. Six months of testing confirmed or revealed several important facts: Agnès's age at the time of death, the number of her pregnancies, and the impossibility that her last baby survived more than a few hours. Feeding the inevitable fascination for murdered beautiful young women, the findings also revealed that Agnès had died of an overdose of mercury so enormous as to exclude the possibility that her doctor could have administered it by accident. The findings have since been published in a variety of genres, written, electronic, and audiovisual, and incorporated into new scholarly work. Moreover, they have inspired a series of documentaries, docu-fictions, and semi-fictionalized murder mysteries based on Agnès's life and death.

Although the suspicious circumstances of her sudden demise have attracted attention since shortly after the event, details of the lab tests proving that she died by poison brought an attention so avid that it seems appropriate to claim that Agnès has reached a new stage in her post-mortem celebrity. In what follows I lay out the findings of Charlier and his team to integrate them into the narrative about Agnès. But I begin by examining what we know of the chain of custody associated with her remains, because whether they are actually hers is a question of the utmost importance. Before her tomb was moved in 1777, her remains were inspected, placed in an urn, and replaced in the tomb.