Graham Young

The one multiple murderer whose name will for ever be linked to thallium is that of Graham Young. As we saw in the previous chapter, victims of thallium poisoning were generally thought to be suffering from some other condition and treated accordingly, so there was little in the way of evidence that we can use to follow the effect this metal had on them. In Young’s case there were several victims whose illnesses were carefully recorded and we can reconstruct the way that Young administered the poison, although it is difficult to deduce why he chose one person to die and not another. Young used two metal poisons: antimony and thallium, the former to punish, the latter to kill. With thallium acetate he murdered his stepmother, Molly Young, when he was a boy of 14, and later he murdered workmates Bob Egle and Fred Briggs. He fed antimony sodium tartrate or antimony potassium tartrate to all and sundry and thallium acetate in sub-lethal doses to some people. Altogether 13 people, and maybe more, felt the repressed wrath of Graham Young. Graham Young was born in the less-than-fashionable London suburb of Neasden on 7 September 1947 and his mother, Margaret, died of tuberculosis 15 weeks later on 23 December. His father, Fred Young, was obviously not capable of managing a single parent family and Graham was passed to Fred’s sister and her husband who lived nearby at 768 North Circular Road. Graham’s 8-year-old sister Winifred went to live with her grandmother. Despite the care of his aunt, baby Graham was already displaying a common outward sign of the emotionally disturbed child: excessive rocking to-and-fro in his cot. Whether his aunt could ever have supplied all the love of a mother is unlikely, especially as Graham taxed her patience by being a poor sleeper. Whatever chance of emotional stability he had was upset by his having to go to hospital for an operation on his ears. When his father found a new wife both Winifred and 3-year-old Graham went to live back home. By now Graham was a very withdrawn little boy and his childhood years were made even more miserable by his stepmother, whom he openly resented, and who returned his animosity.

Requiem for antimony

Antimony in a corpse persists indefinitely, and unless a body was cremated, which in former times it rarely was, a murderer using antimony could never be certain that he or she would not one day be brought to account. However, that was a small risk to set aside the potential benefits, which could be large. And there were other benefits in choosing antimony as the murder weapon, not least that it was itself widely used in medical treatment. Poisoners choosing antimony invariably selected tartar emetic (antimony potassium tartrate), and indeed its faint yellow crystals had two advantages. Firstly, they are very soluble in water and, while the solution has a faint metallic taste, this is easily masked by the presence of other flavours. Secondly, the compound was readily available, and all pharmacists stocked it and rarely queried its sale because it was widely used to treat sick animals. Moreover, tartar emetic was cheap; an ounce cost only 2d. in 1897 (around 50p or $1 today). Pharmacists ordered it by the pound, which gives some indication of the demand for it. In small doses of about 5 mg, antimony potassium tartrate acts as a diaphoretic, in other words it promotes sweating and will thereby lower the body’s temperature. In larger doses of around 50 mg it acts as an emetic. Vomiting begins within 15 minutes and most of the stomach contents are expelled. Thus the poison acts as its own antidote to a certain extent: witness the man who recovered from a dose of around 25 grams (25 000 mg), corresponding to two teaspoonfuls of the crystals, which were taken in mistake for sodium bicarbonate. On the other hand, some have died after swallowing as little as 120 mg, although such sensitivity to the poison is extremely rare and it would normally require a dose of twice this amount to cause death, assuming it was retained by the body long enough for it to be absorbed. Some individuals are particularly sensitive to antimony, as the ‘Balham Mystery’ will show, and this sensitivity may well explain the puzzling death of Mozart.

The poet and the poison

Mercury is not a particularly promising homicidal poison, but it is possible to dispose of someone by feeding them mercury(II) chloride provided you disguise its metallic taste. In the 1800s solutions of corrosive sublimate, as it was then called, were used as an antiseptic and as an insecticide against bedbugs, and its very availability resulted in thousands of poisonings being reported to the health authorities, although these were mainly accidents or as a result of its being taken deliberately in order to procure an abortion. Mercury was not a poison to feature in many murder cases because it was so easily detectable by the intended victims, especially if they started to vomit, which they almost always did. Then the metallic taste became particularly noticeable, and the presence of mercury could easily be confirmed by simple analytical tests. The poisoners who chose mercury had to use a large dose and this would kill within a day or two. Despite these inherent drawbacks, a few poisoners made use of it. Two of the murderers whose cases we are about to analyse opted for the large single dose approach, but the third murderer achieved her ends by targeting her victim with multiple doses. That murder became famous because of whom she killed and the political repercussions it caused. It was also notorious for the manner in which the final fatal dose of poison was administered. Mary Bateman was known as the Yorkshire Witch and she had a plan that she thought would lead her victims into taking a fatal single dose of mercury. Instead it led her to the gallows. At the time of her crime, Bateman lived in Leeds, Yorkshire, where she earned her living telling fortunes and swindling gullible clients out of their cash and possessions. She claimed to receive her supernatural information from a spirit medium, a Miss Blythe, into whose mouth she put the advice that always seemed to result in her clients handing over their money and saleable goods, with the promise that if they did as Miss Blythe said, then good luck would soon come their way, and they would be more than compensated.

Driving you hairless

William Crookes named thallium after the bright green colour it produced when its salts were put into a Bunsen burner flame. He compared the colour to that of a fresh green shoot, so he based its name on the Greek word for this, which is thallos. Thallium’s deadly nature was not at first appreciated and it became part of the treatment for ringworm of the scalp, given in relatively large doses to children because it caused their hair to fall out, the better to treat the disease. Meanwhile others were using it to kill vermin, and always thallium brought tragedy in its wake. Agatha Christie built one of her murder mysteries around thallium poisoning. In 1952 she wrote The Pale Horse, in which the murderer used it to dispose of people’s unwanted relatives and disguised his activities as black magic curses. The plot involves a murdered priest and a pub owned by three modern-day witches. Christie described the symptoms of thallium poisoning very well: lethargy, tingling, numbness of the hands and feet, blackouts, slurred speech, insomnia, and general debility, and she is sometimes blamed for bringing this poison to the attention of would-be poisoners. However, her book was responsible for saving the life of one young girl as we shall see. In any case Christie was not the first mystery writer to employ this deadly agent. In Final Curtain, written in 1947, the novelist Ngaio Marsh had her villain using it. The murder to be investigated was the death of Sir Henry Ancred who had been poisoned with thallium acetate which had been prescribed in the treatment of his granddaughter’s ringworm. Marsh clearly had no knowledge of how thallium worked in that she imagined that those poisoned with it would drop dead in minutes. Would-be murderers seeking to emulate her villain would have been very puzzled when their intended victims appeared to suffer no ill effects, although this disappointment might only have lasted a few days, and then they would have been fascinated at the many symptoms it produced.

Lead murders

Criminal poisonings with lead compounds are noteworthy because of their rarity. Indeed a person intent on poisoning someone would be unlikely to choose lead because of its uncertainty of action. Nevertheless there were murders in which it was used, such as the killing of Thomas Taylor in September 1858, when white lead was the poison, and the murder of Mary Ann Tregillis in 1882, when lead acetate was used. This salt was also the agent in the attempted murder of Honora Turner also in 1858. The lead compound that killed Pope Clement II in 1047 can only be speculated on. The inquest into the death of Thomas Taylor, which was held by the coroner for Gloucestershire on 27 September 1858, was reported in the November issue of the Pharmaceutical Journal because it was an unusual case of death by poisoning with lead carbonate. Thomas lived in Gloucestershire with his wife, Ann, and the child that he had fathered by another woman. He also had a brother, Charles, who had recently been released from prison and who had gone to live with the Taylors. It was not long before quarrels broke out between Thomas and his wife, whom he accused of being too affectionate towards Charles. In fact Ann was more than affectionate; she openly stated that she preferred brother Charles and wished her husband was dead. Her wish was to be granted. In August 1858 Thomas was seized with violent pains in his stomach which lasted for several days and for which he sought medical treatment. The doctor gave him some opium pills to kill the pain and senna water to act as a laxative. When these failed to cure him his doctor prescribed larger doses which he said could be obtained from his surgery. However, the doctor noticed that when his wife Ann went to collect more senna water she brought along a bottle that had contained the original medicine and that the dregs of the first dose were now a different colour and it tasted odd. Thomas died on 4 September, but the doctor was sufficiently suspicious of the cause of death that he refused to issue a death certificate until he and a surgeon friend of his had carried out a post-mortem.

Severin Klosowski alias George Chapman

Severin Klosowski was born on the morning of 14 December 1865 in the village of Nagornak near Kolo in part of Russian-occupied Poland. He died 38 years later, as George Chapman, on the morning of 7 April 1903 in London, hanged for poisoning three of his partners with antimony in a way that was long and painful but which made it appear they were dying of natural causes. What is rather unusual about these murders were the many witnesses to the way that he carried them out. Antonio Klosowski was 30 and his wife Emilie 29 when their son Severin was born. They were Roman Catholics, and Antonio was the village carpenter. When he was seven years old, on 17 October 1873, Severin started primary school, which he attended for the next seven years, leaving on 13 June 1880, with a good final report. Later that year, on 1 December, he was apprenticed to Moshko Rappaport, in Zwolen, 90 km south of Warsaw. Rappaport would train him to be a feldscher, an occupation combining the roles of barber and minor surgeon. This qualification would allow him to perform small operations by himself, or to assist major surgery carried out by a fully qualified surgeon. In the summer of 1885, when he was 19, Severin left Zwolen and, armed with a good reference from both his employer and a local doctor, he set off for Warsaw with the idea of becoming a fully qualified surgeon. To finance himself through his studies he took a job as an assistant to a barber-surgeon in the suburb of Praga, and that October he enrolled for a three-month course in practical surgery at the Hospital of Infant Jesus nearby. In January 1886 Severin took a job as an assistant surgeon to a D. Moshkovski and continued working thus until 15 November that year. The following month he came of age: that allowed him to apply for a passport and he was also allowed to sit the entrance examination for the degree of Junior Surgeon at the Imperial University.

Murder revisited: the guilt of Florence Maybrick

Of all the arsenic murders, the Maybrick case is the most intriguing. On 7 August 1889 Florence Maybrick was found guilty of murdering her husband James and sentenced to death, only to be reprieved two weeks later and her sentence commuted to life imprisonment. There are those who believe she should have been acquitted because she was innocent. There are those who believe that even if she was guilty she did the world a service in that the man she killed was really Jack-the-Ripper. That somewhat dubious claim was made in the 1990s with the publication of an old diary supposedly written by James Maybrick. In the furore which followed the trial, Florence was seen as a martyr by two groups: the supporters of the Women’s Rights Movement, and those who campaigned for a Court of Appeal. The first of these saw her as a victim of a male-dominated legal system, and the second saw her as a prime example of injustice which the British legal system as it then stood was unable to rectify. The Women’s International Maybrick Society even enlisted the support of three US Presidents, but to no avail because, unbeknown to them, Queen Victoria had taken an interest in the case and believed Florence to be guilty. Until the Queen died, there was no possibility of her release from prison, although she was set free soon afterwards. Legal problems raised by the Maybrick trial centred on the summing-up of the Judge, Mr Justice Fitzjames Stephens. In its latter stages this became little more than a tirade of moralizing generalizations that dwelt on Florence’s admitted adultery, implying that a woman capable of committing such a sin was indeed capable of murder. (Nothing was said at the trial about her husband’s mistress and the five children that she had borne him.) The summing-up was flawed in other ways; for example the judge introduced material that was not produced during the trial and he read accounts of what witnesses had said from newspaper cuttings of their evidence because his own notes were in such a poor state.

Insidious arsenic

The journal of the Royal Society of 1671 carried a review of a paper by a Dr Caroli de la Font entitled ‘The nature and causes of the plague’ in which he put forward the theory that it was due to ‘arsenic exhalations’ that were polluting the air. Of course he was wrong, but the idea that such emissions could pollute the atmosphere was not wrong and 150 years later, in 1821, they may well have contributed to the death of one of the great figures of history: Napoleon. Arsenic had, and still has, its uses as we saw in the previous chapter but it is an insidious element and is much more mobile than earlier generations appreciated. When it diffuses into the air we breathe, and gets into the water we drink it causes problems and in this chapter we will look at two ways that it led to – and is still leading to – mass poisonings. The historical story concerns its leakage from wallpaper, the modern story concerns its leakage from underground rocks. The first of these leakages contaminated the air of millions of homes in the Victorian age, the second contaminates the drinking water of millions of people in Bangladesh and neighbouring states of India today. The first of these tragedies was eventually controlled, the second one remains to be dealt with. In days gone by the palette of a painter might well have held three arsenic compounds because they could provide brilliant shades of yellow, red, and especially green. The first two of these came from the natural pigments yellow orpiment and red realgar, both of which are arsenic sulphides; orpiment has the formula As2S3, and realgar has the formula As4S4. Orpiment got its name from the Latin words auri (gold) and pigmentum (paint) and was popular in the ancient world, especially in the Middle East. Its association with gold is probably what made it attractive to alchemists. Orpiment only became widely used in Europe when synthetic orpiment was manufactured and then it was known as royal yellow or king’s yellow and was the preferred source of yellow until it was displaced by chrome yellow (lead chromate) and cadmium yellow (cadmium sulphide).

Mad cats and mad hatters: accidental mercury poisoning

There are two kinds of mercury poisoning: chronic poisoning in which the body is subjected to regular small doses of mercury which exceed the amount it can excrete every day, and acute poisoning, in which a person is exposed to a life-threatening dose. It is the former type of poisoning that this chapter is about. Large doses deliberately given will be the topic of the next chapter. Chronic mercury poisoning used to be an occupational hazard for many employees. Those affected suffered from the physical symptoms of fatigue, general weakness, and a tremor of the hands, to the extent that their handwriting became spidery, and these symptoms were due to the effects on the central nervous system. More serious were the psychological symptoms such as irritability, depression, and a paranoid belief that other people were persecuting them, all of which came as a result of mercury seeping into the brain. The groups of workers most at risk from chronic mercury poisoning were gilders, hat makers, dentists, those in the electrical industries – and detectives. Most of these occupations no longer use mercury, and in those that do it is strictly controlled so that the risks are now negligible. Monitoring those exposed to mercury in their employment can be done via their urine or blood. Yet it was a long struggle to make people aware of the dangers this metal posed, and along the way there were some major examples of exposure involving hundreds of thousands of individuals, many of whom had their lives made wretched by mercury. Indeed the campaign against mercury really started 300 years ago when an Italian physician was the first to become interested in the link between occupation and illness. That physician was the surgeon Bernardino Ramazzini (1633–1714), who is today regarded as the founder of occupational and industrial medicine. In 1700 he wrote the first book on the subject: De Morbis Artificum Diatriba [The Diseases of Workers]. In it he outlined the health hazards associated with various chemicals, dust, and metals encountered by those working in 52 different occupations, including the miners who worked in the mercury mines.

Lead and dead

Gout was once a common malady that immobilized many of the upper class males of ancient Rome and imperial Britain. Both societies blamed it on too much rich food and wine, and they may have been right. The Roman writers, Seneca, Virgil, Juvenal, and Ovid all poked fun at the sufferers of gout, as did the London cartoonists; the popular belief was that it was a just punishment for over-indulgence. Physicians knew of the pain it caused and discovered that it was due to sharp crystals of uric acid between the joints of the bones; but what caused these to form? Among those affected by gout were Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the United States of America, British Prime Minister William Pitt, poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, biologist Charles Darwin, and the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. It has been suggested that Alexander the Great, Kubla Khan, Christopher Columbus, Martin Luther, John Milton, and Isaac Newton also suffered its agonies. In the last century, it was found that more than a third of those suffering from gout had high levels of lead in their blood. It now seems likely that earlier generations had exposed themselves to gout by a fondness for port wine, which was invariably tainted with lead, and kept in lead crystal decanters. At various times in the 1700s, the British were at war with the French and no longer imported their wines or brandy, although quite a lot was smuggled into the country. Instead Englishmen turned to drinking the wines of their most faithful ally, Portugal. These, like port and Madeira, contained lead, and they became so popular that by the 1820s more than 20 million litres of port were being imported annually. Bottles of this age have been analysed for their lead content and shown to have in excess of 1 ppm suggesting that the risk of serious lead poisoning from such drink was relatively low, although it would have had an effect. Indeed the lead may have simply served as an irritant to the gut, which is why a glass of port at the end of a meal was reputed to have a laxative effect by the following morning.