Poison and Poisoning

Chapter 15

POISONING DOES NOT ALWAYS happen by accident, and sometimes people clearly have murder in mind.

Poison especially comes into play in warfare and strategic assassinations. Weapons of biological and chemical warfare have been used to kill for thousands of years. Poison arrows and other projectiles, plagues of various types, together with a number of chemical weapons, including Greek Fire, naphtha and even gunpowder were used in the wars of the Ancient World. Greek Fire was a mixture of naphtha and quicklime which is set on fire on contact with water. It was used with great success against Arab ships when they were besieging Constantinople in 674-6 AD.

Unfortunately, the desire to destroy and conquer has extended beyond these battles of the past to modern warfare, and more: politics and even religion have led to assassinations and murder. In the personal realm, money and marriage have also been the cause of many, many murders.

Smoke bombs and burning bullets

Chemical weapons were first used as a means of mass poisoning in modern times in the First World War (1914-18), and have been used in many later conflicts during the twentieth century.

In World War I, burning white phosphorus produced dense white clouds of gas, which were used to hide troop movements from the enemy. Phosphorus was also used in tracer bullets and in Mauser bullets, which shot down the Zeppelin airships. These airships were filled with hydrogen, a highly inflammable gas that burns readily in air. The phosphorus-containing bullets were set alight as they sped through the air, reacting with the oxygen in the atmosphere and bursting into flames. The flaming bullets destroyed the airships by not only setting them on fire, but also causing them to explode because of the hydrogen they contained.

In WWII (1939-45), phosphorus was again used to make smoke bombs and shells, as well as Molotov cocktail bombs and phosphorus bombs, which could be dropped from aeroplanes flying over enemy territory to set fire to anything they might land upon. Phosphorus was also used in more recent times, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the Vietnam War. Then, the Geneva Treaty of 1980 stated that phosphorus was unsuitable for use as a weapon of warfare against civilians. However, such niceties were disregarded by the Israeli army in their bombardment of the Palestinian populace in the Gaza Strip in January 2009.

Phosphorus particles from flares and rockets have to be removed from wounds as soon as possible; otherwise they continue to burn through the flesh, causing far more extensive damage. The most effective treatment in the past involved dilute copper sulphate solution being first applied to the burning phosphorus. This was then washed away with saline solution, and sodium perborate was applied to try to prevent copper poisoning, although this could cause boron poisoning instead, which could easily occur due to absorption by the burnt areas of raw flesh.

Blistering poison gases

In WWI, the Germans used chlorine gas, which was blown over the British trenches, causing some 5,000 deaths among the troops and wounding at least a further 15,000 men. Later in the war, phosgene, mustard gas and lewisite were also used. Phosgene, also called carbonyl chloride, was a poison gas chemically related to chlorine, but which had far more drastic poisonous effects.

Mustard gas was a chemical warfare agent, dichloroethyl sulphide, first used during WWI by the German army at Ypres, Belgium, in 1917. This colourless, oily liquid produced a vapour which caused blistering of the skin, swelling around the eyes and, if inhaled, stripping of the mucous membrane from the bronchial tree in the lungs. The effects of mustard gas took time to manifest themselves and led to a lingering death, some four or five weeks later, which frequently occurred in severe cases of gassing. Today, mustards are successfully used as medicines: they are used with very great care, in conjunction with a variety of other drugs, in the treatment of cancer, for which see Chapter 17.

Lewisite, an arsenic-containing substance, was another chemical weapon first used in WWI because of its poisonous nature. It was named after the American chemist, Winford Lewis, who developed its potential after its inventor, Julius Nieuwland, realised how poisonous it was in 1904 and refused to work on it any further. This chemical, which apparently smelt of geraniums, caused massive blisters on exposed skin and damaged the lungs if it was inhaled.

Fortunately, an antidote was quickly developed in Britain, and was simply called British Anti-Lewisite (BAL). When given by injection, BAL can remove the arsenic atoms of the Lewisite from the proteins, including enzymes, to which it attaches within the body. This antidote is an important drug still used today to treat patients who have been poisoned not only by arsenic, but also by mercury and other heavy metals. It is now called dimercaprol. Further details of it have already been given in the chapter on treatment of toxins.

A nerve gas is any chemical warfare agent that attacks the nervous system. The first nerve gas, called tabun, was made by the German scientist, Gerhard Schracher in 1936. Tabun was even more deadly than mustard gas because its molecule contained a phosphorus-cyanide chemical bond. During World War II, further nerve gases, including sarin, which contained a phosphorus-fluorine bond, and soman were developed. The Nazis used these agents as part of their policy to exterminate the Jews across Europe during the period from 1939 to 1945. The Holocaust resulted in the deaths of some six to seven million European Jews in concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, where they were gassed with these poisonous chemicals, or eventually died from disease or starvation.

And after the war

After the war, in the 1950s, British researchers developed even more such gases codenamed VX, VE, VG and VM, which all contained phosphorus-sulphur bonds. For several decades in the mid-twentieth century, the Ministry of Defence used the facilities at the Porton Down chemical research establishment to test nerve gases and other chemical and biological agents. Thousands of British servicemen participated in these tests and some even died as a result. Many of these human guinea pigs were under the impression that the tests being carried out were for the common cold.

All these poisonous nerve gases are organophosphorous compounds, which work by inhibiting the body’s ability to break down the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. This ultimately results in signal failure, as the nerve commands, including those to the lungs, are no longer being transmitted, causing respiratory failure. Nerve gases are particularly nasty because they do not even have to be inhaled – they are absorbed directly through the skin, and some are so powerful that they can be fatal within minutes.

In 1969, there was a leakage of VX vapour from a plant in Newport, Indiana, USA, where American nerve agents were manufactured. The vapour drifted across the appropriately named Skull Valley and killed all 60,000 sheep that were grazing there. In the Iran/Iraq war (1980-88), the Iraqis, led by Saddam Hussein, used mustard gas and nerve gas to devastating effect on the Kurdish town of Halabja, killing some 5,000 civilians. These gases were also used in the offensive against the Kurds in 1987-88, when 100,000 Kurds – mainly civilians – were killed.

More recent attacks

In April 1995, there was a sarin attack on the Japanese underground in Tokyo, killing 12 people and injuring 5,000 others. This was carried out by the Aum Shinrikyo doomsday sect, a sort of religious cult. This same group had carried out an earlier attack in Matsumoto in 1994, killing seven and injuring 200. Cult members even used VX to dispose of a former member in Osaka in December 1994. They stopped him in the street, squirted VX on the back of his neck and ran off. He tried to chase them but collapsed in a coma and eventually died ten days later.

Even today, the regime of Kim Jong Il in North Korea uses poison gases in its prison camps. Dissidents and their families are imprisoned, systematically tortured and experimented on in gas chambers, where the scientists test chemical weapons on the prisoners while also executing some of them.

The 700,000 troops who were sent to fight in the Gulf War in 1991 were not only at risk of nerve gases and other chemical warfare agents coming from the enemy; they were also at risk from the supposed protection provided by their own side – they were exposed to organophosphate poisoning due to everything being drenched in insecticides in an effort to prevent malaria. The American and the British troops were all injected with a cocktail of vaccines and given tablets to take as well, but not told exactly what they were being given.

Tens of thousands of the troops, American and British, developed Gulf War Syndrome as a result. This collection of mainly neurological symptoms, including chronic fatigue, dizziness, amnesia, digestive upsets and muscle wasting, has caused many of the troops to become so disabled that they have had to be retired from the services. Many of them are now so disabled that they cannot work at all. However, it is only very recently that the British Ministry of Defence has even admitted that Gulf War Syndrome exists, let alone paid out compensation for it.

Tear gases are another group of gaseous substances. They specifically affect the mucous membranes of the eyes, causing irritation and copious watering. Designed as a means of riot control, these agents are used by police forces in many countries. Usually tear gases are organic halogen compounds. Among the most widely used are Mace and CS gas, with the more recently introduced pepper spray as a safer alternative. Their effects are designed to be quickly disabling to the recipients, but unlike the chemical warfare agents, they leave no lasting damage once the lacrimatory – tear inducing – effect has worn off.

Murder most politic

Political assassinations using poison are almost as old as politics themselves. The Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all murdered in the name of politics, and some examples have been given in earlier chapters. Centuries ago, poisons such as arsenic were used, especially in Europe, in so-called ‘succession powders’. These were used to remove kings, dukes and even popes from power, in order to allow a preferred successor to reign.

Generations of the Borgias turned the Vatican and the Pontificate into a long-running scandal. It is believed that they used a white powder, La Cantarella, which probably contained arsenic, lead and phosphorus, to poison their enemies. In the fifteenth century, Cesare Borgia’s father became Pope Alexander VI, and Cesare became a Cardinal at the rather young age of 18.

This Pope had a cabinet in his Vatican apartments, with a stiff lock, and he would ask his victims to unlock it for him. There was a sharp point in the handle of the key, which would prick the person’s hand and so poison the soon-to-be-dead victim.

Eventually the Pope and his son Cesare were both poisoned with some toxic wine. There are a number of variations among historical sources as to how this happened, but the outcome remains the same. The father died, but his son survived the poisoning and continued killing his enemies. Cesare had a large ring, which had twin lion heads with sharp teeth on it. His victims were greeted with a hearty handshake, and the poisoned teeth did the rest.

In the early eighteenth century, a Sicilian woman named Toffana was arrested in Naples, tortured and then executed by strangulation. This was in retribution, as it was said that she had murdered 600 men with a poisonous liquid. This liquid came to be known as Aqua Toffana and was claimed to be a transparent, tasteless liquid of which five or six drops would be fatal.

The drink’s composition remains unknown, although it probably contained arsenic, as either sodium or potassium arsenite, and possibly a little belladonna. It produced death slowly, without pain, inflammation, convulsions or fever. Instead, it caused a gradual decay of strength, disgust for life, lack of appetite but constant thirst, leading eventually to consumption and death. Some used this liquid to get rid of their romantic or political enemies.

Some well-known victims

Generally the names of the victims of crimes tend to be forgotten, while those of the criminals go down in the annals of history. The political murder of Georgi Markov using ricin has already been presented in Chapter 3. Here are a few more stories about some well-known victims, what – and who – poisoned them and why.

In 2008, analysis of the remains of China’s second-last Emperor found lethal levels of arsenic in the hair and bones. The Guangxu Emperor died in 1908 at the age of only 38. The analysis suggests that he may have been poisoned to stop him introducing reformist plans. It may never be known whether it was the dying Empress Dowager Cixi, her faithful eunuch courtier or her commanding army general who was responsible, but the Guangxu Emperor was certainly poisoned with arsenic and died in the Water Terrace Pavilion in the Imperial Palace complex.

Cixi died the following day in the nearby Graceful Bird Pavilion, also within the Imperial Palace complex. The Empress Dowager had imprisoned Guangxu for over a decade as a punishment for a show of independence, as he had ambitions to reform and revive the faltering Qing dynasty, which ended three years after his death. The modern analysis was able to rule out chronic low-dose poisoning, by comparing his arsenic levels with those of his wife, which were over 250 times lower.

In the early twentieth century, poison was still considered to be a useful means of disposing of people who could be regarded as political enemies. Rasputin was a peasant monk who arrived in St Petersburg at a time when mystical religion was fashionable in Russia. He obtained an introduction to the royal household and quickly gained the confidence of the Tsar, Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra during World War I.

It appeared that, through hypnosis, he was able to control the bleeding of the haemophiliac heir to the throne. However, he caused a public scandal due to his sexual and alcoholic excesses, as well as using his influence politically. He was murdered in 1916, by poisoning, probably with cyanide. His murderers were a group of aristocrats, led by a distant relative of the Tsar.

In late August 1978, Pope John Paul I was elected following the death of Pope Paul VI. Only 33 days later he was dead, supposedly of a heart attack, despite a medical examination three weeks previously that had shown him to be in good health and with no family history of heart trouble. Many suspected that he was poisoned, with all the evidence carefully removed in a Vatican cover-up. It is believed that he was handed a poisoned drink in a champagne glass by the now deceased Cardinal Villot, who at that time was Secretariat of State and who orchestrated the cover-up.

Some medical murders

A number of doctors in the past have used their knowledge of the poisonous properties of various medicines and other preparations to dispose of unwanted girlfriends, wives and other relatives. A number of them have already been mentioned earlier in this book, and here is another big one.

Doctors and nurses have been known in the past to end the lives of terminally ill patients by injecting potassium chloride, which results in rapid death by heart attack. Indeed, this is the ‘non-toxic lethal injection’ used quite legally in some states in America as a form of capital punishment. The prisoner is injected with a barbiturate to induce sleep, with a muscle relaxant and then with a concentrated solution of potassium chloride to stop the heart.

Dr J. Milton-Bowers likely poisoned both his second and third wives similarly, with phosphorus; his first wife may well have gone the same way, but we shall never know. As a doctor he had easy access to phosphorus as it was a common, though useless, ingredient of medicines at that time.

The doctor was born in 1843 and married his first wife, Francis Hammet, when he was only 21 years old. The marriage didn’t last too long as she died in 1865. Wife number two was an actress called Theresa Shirk, whom he met in New York. She died in 1881.

Within barely six months of her death, he had married his third wife, Cecilia Benhayon-Levy. This lady’s parents disapproved of the marriage because they had heard rumours that the doctor had poisoned his second wife, Theresa. They were right to be suspicious, as their daughter, the third Mrs Bowers, died in agony in 1885. Her body was grossly swollen at the time of her death and her family demanded a post-mortem to determine the cause. This showed that she had died from phosphorus poisoning.

The doctor already had a fourth wife lined up but was arrested, tried and found guilty of murder before he could marry her. Two years later, Cecilia’s brother committed suicide by taking cyanide and left a suicide note confessing to the murder of his sister, the third Mrs Bowers. Investigations revealed that this brother had rented an apartment to the husband of the doctor’s housekeeper. The police suspected that this man might have poisoned the brother and forged the suicide note, acting on behalf of the doctor.

However, at his trial, the housekeeper’s husband was acquitted. This meant that the brother’s suicide and the confession that he had murdered his sister were the truth. So the doctor’s first trial was then set aside and a retrial was dismissed. Once released from prison, Dr Milton-Bowers sought out the young lady he had been seeing before the trial and they married. She, at long last, became wife number four, and the couple lived happily ever after, until the doctor died in 1905.

The case of the pinpoint pupils

Many doctors use morphine, laudanum or heroin to kill, including the notorious Dr Shipman, whose case is described at the end of Chapter 20. Today the use of morphine and other opium-derived drugs is controlled by the Dangerous Drugs Act (1965) and the Misuse of Drugs Act (1971), but this was not so in the past.

Dr Robert Buchanan qualified in Edinburgh, and in 1886 took his wife to New York, where he set up in general practice. His practice prospered by day, but by night he frequented clubs and brothels. It was in one of these brothels that he met Anna Sutherland, a brothel madame, who was also one of his patients. At that time she was unmarried. In 1890, Dr Buchanan divorced his first wife because he had found out that she had had an affair.

Soon after this, he persuaded Anna to make a will leaving her money to her husband, should she be married at the time of her death or, if she died unmarried, to her friend Buchanan. Having ensured that either way he would inherit her wealth, he then married her a few weeks later, even though she was twice his age. The doctor continued to enhance his professional reputation but feared he would lose patients if they discovered the embarrassing nature of his wife’s business.

In 1892, he told his new wife that he proposed to return to Edinburgh for further study, and that he intended to go alone. His wife was not pleased at being left behind and threatened to cut him out of her will. Nonetheless, he bought only one single ticket, rather than two return tickets. Four days before he was due to set sail, he told some of their friends that Anna was seriously ill. Another doctor was called to examine her, but she lapsed into a coma and died within a few hours. The cause of death was given as cerebral haemorrhage and Buchanan inherited $50,000, with little sign of grief.

The following month, a business partner of the deceased brothel keeper, who also happened to be a disappointed suitor, visited the coroner. He had suspicions about the cause of death and told the coroner that he suspected murder by the doctor, in order to inherit the money. The coroner was not very interested in his suspicions, until a New York newspaper heard about the story and began asking questions.

Only the previous year, in 1891, the paper had followed up on a murder case, in which pinpoint pupils were a feature in the diagnosis of morphine poisoning. In the case of Dr Buchanan, the newspaper had discovered that he had remarried his first wife within but a mere month of the death of his second wife, and so printed a news story about it. The newspaper made a connection between the two stories, and this led to an exhumation, which was followed by a post-mortem. This examination showed that the cause of death was not cerebral haemorrhage at all, but was indeed morphine poisoning.

But the pinpoint pupils, which were a known feature of such poisoning, were absent. With or without this one sign, the doctor was put on trial in March 1893. During the trial, someone remembered that at the time of the 1891 case, Buchanan had been consulted and had said that pinpoint pupils could be disguised by using belladonna eye drops, which have the opposite effect on the pupils. Which is precisely what he had done. Buchanan was found guilty of murder and died in the electric chair in 1895.

Pinpoint pupils again

Dr Robert Clements married his first wife in 1912, when he was only 22. She died in 1920 of sleeping sickness, and the following year he remarried, but he was widowed again in 1925 when his second wife died of endocarditis. In 1928, he married for the third time; this marriage lasted somewhat longer, as his third wife didn’t die until 1939, supposedly of cancer. And, in due course, he married yet again.

The doctor was a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, and this case illustrates well how some people can abuse their position of trust to their own ends. One evening in May 1947, Clements called a doctor to examine his current wife (number four) at their home in Southport, Lancashire. Two doctors came but the lady was unconscious by the time they arrived. After examining her, they then arranged to transfer her to a nearby nursing home, where she died the following morning.

Her husband had told the doctors who attended her that she had myeloid leukaemia, and so that was the diagnosis entered on to the death certificate. A third doctor then performed a post-mortem and confirmed the diagnosis as myeloid leukaemia. The other two doctors were somewhat suspicious of this as a cause of death, as they had noticed that her pupils were pinpoints. So, suspecting an overdose of morphine, they contacted the coroner.

Investigations began and it became clear that Mrs Clements’ health had deteriorated over a considerable period of time, with the symptoms suggesting that she was a morphine addict. However, it was then discovered that Clements had prescribed large doses of morphine for one of his patients, but this patient had never received them. A second post-mortem was then ordered and the pathologist was surprised to find that some of the body’s organs were missing. They were conveniently destroyed after the first post-mortem. Despite this, further examination showed that death had indeed been due to morphine poisoning.

The police then called on Clements but found him dead. He had committed suicide – using morphine, of course. Then the doctor who had performed the first post-mortem also committed suicide, but he had used cyanide. He left a note saying he could not live with the terrible mistake he had made, confirming the cause of death as myeloid leukaemia when it was really murder by morphine.

Clements was in due course found to have murdered his wife. She was heir to a fortune that he would have inherited. Further investigation showed that all his marriages were for money. In each case, the doctor signed the death certificate on each of his four wives. Some suspicions were raised after the death of wife number three, but she had been cremated by the time anyone official thought to investigate. The authorities decided not to exhume the bodies of his first two wives.

Agatha Christie’s book

Thallium has been mentioned a number of times in earlier chapters, and has been used as a poison both in fiction by Agatha Christie and in real life by political regimes to remove opponents, as was the case in the 1980s and 90s by the Iraqis.

Christie worked in the dispensary at University College Hospital in London during World War II and became well aware of chemicals and their poisonous effects. In 1961, her book The Pale Horse was published, in which the plot involved an accurate description of thallium poisoning. In 1977, some years after the author’s death, a young Arab girl was flown to the UK and admitted to hospital. After several days of further deterioration, she began to lose her hair. The doctors were mystified by her condition, but one of the nurses caring for her happened to be reading The Pale Horse, and was struck by the similarity of the symptoms. Subsequent testing of her urine revealed thallium, and following treatment for poisoning she was able to return home three weeks later.

In 1971, a man called Graham Young used thallium sulphate, purchased from a chemist’s shop, to poison his workmates. Several were taken ill and two of them died. The full story can be found in Chapter 2.

Arsenic, that most popular poison

Amy Hutchison had a violent husband, whom she had married ‘on the rebound’, having been jilted by her first love. Some years later when she met up with this previous lover, she decided to get rid of her brute of a husband. So, she poisoned him with arsenic and then ran off with her lover. In 1750, this British murderess was caught, tried and then executed, first by strangulation and then by being burnt, for killing her violent husband.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, arsenic was readily available as a weedkiller as well as on flypapers, from which it could be easily extracted by simply soaking them in water. Many a poisoner used it in repeated small doses so that the resulting illness was prolonged and mistaken for some sort of wasting disease, as shown by the Maybrick and Seddon cases discussed earlier in Chapter 2.

Fortunately, in 1836, James Marsh developed a chemical test that could detect very small amounts of arsenic. It took some years for this test to be accepted by the authorities, and so it was not until much later in the nineteenth century that the Marsh test became more widely used. This test meant that, at last, it was possible to look for the presence of arsenic in suspected cases of poisoning, and the poisoner could be brought to justice.

But arsenic has still been a powerful tool in the past, as the following five stories show.

A holiday romance

Madelaine Smith was the eldest daughter of James Smith, a successful Glasgow architect. She was an educated girl who filled her days with artistic pursuits. In the spring of 1855, she began a secret affair with a packing clerk from Jersey, Pierre Emile L’Angelier, whom she met while on holiday at the family’s country home. Her maid acted as the go-between during the holiday as the couple exchanged love letters.

Once back home in Glasgow, contact was rather more difficult and her father, not knowing about the affair, was on the lookout for a suitable husband for her. The young people eventually quarrelled and Madelaine requested the return of her letters. The suitor threatened to send them to her father instead. Madelaine begged him not to and renewed the affair in an attempt to appease him.

Two years after the affair started, in March 1857, Pierre suddenly became ill and died. A post-mortem showed his body contained a lot of arsenic. Once the love letters were found and the affair discovered, Madelaine was arrested and charged with murder. She made a statement admitting that she had bought arsenic, but claimed that she only used it as a cosmetic.

The prosecution claimed that she had grown tired of her lover and had administered the arsenic to him in a chocolate drink. The defence made the dead man out to be a seducer and blackmailer, who was known to take arsenic and who also had a history of gastric complaints. The jury brought in the Scottish verdict of ‘not proven’, which can be interpreted as ‘she almost certainly did it but–’. Madelaine went on to live to the ripe old age of 93, marrying twice, the first time to an artist in London and then later again in America.

The fortune-hunting doctor who got away

Thomas Smethurst was born in Lincolnshire in 1805. He had two brothers and a sister, and his father is believed to have been a herbalist. Thomas was a self-styled doctor, having obtained his degree from a university in Bavaria. In 1827, he married one of his patients, a lady some 20 years older than him. She brought a modest fortune to the marriage, which Thomas used almost 20 years later to buy a hydropathic establishment at Moor Park in Surrey.

Such spas were very fashionable at the time and, after only six years, this successful and profitable venture allowed him, in 1852, to retire and become a gentleman of leisure. By 1858, the couple were living in a boarding house in Bayswater, London, and Mrs Smethurst by now was a semi-invalid in her seventies. In the autumn of that year, a new lodger arrived at the boarding house: a spinster of some means, Isabella Bankes. The doctor and Miss Bankes were instantly attracted to each other, and soon their friendship resulted in gossip amongst the other guests. Indeed, the gossip led the landlady to suggest to Bankes that she should move elsewhere, which she quickly did. The doctor left his wife and went with her.

In December 1858, Dr Smethurst bigamously married Bankes at Battersea Parish Church, and they took rooms and lived happily together until the following March. Isabella now became ill, the symptoms suggesting dysentery. She was so ill that Smethurst called in some other medical colleagues. However, the medicines prescribed failed to help, and so a move to healthier quarters was suggested. They moved quickly to new rooms in a house on Richmond Hill.

The two doctors attending Isabella now thought that poison of some sort might be responsible for her illness. But Thomas did not seem like a poisoner. He was most solicitous in his care of Isabella, never permitting anyone to see her unless he too was present. He wrote to her sister, who visited but did not stay long. He called in another prominent doctor and, at the end of April, he summoned a solicitor, who was shown a draft of a will. This draft, wholly in Thomas Smethurst’s writing, left all Isabella’s property to her ‘friend’ Thomas.

A final will was then drawn up by the solicitor and signed quite willingly by Isabella. This disturbed the two local doctors, who now became suspicious enough to test the bodily evacuations of their patient. They contacted the police as a result of their findings and Thomas was arrested. Following a search, more than 20 medicines were removed from their lodgings, but despite everything, the poor lady died early in May 1859.

Smethurst was arrested, but the local magistrate was not impressed by the evidence against him and set him free. He was not free for long though, as the local coroner reviewed the evidence and issued a warrant for his re-arrest. An early forensic test for arsenic proved positive and Smethurst was sent for trial at the Old Bailey. It was revealed in court that Isabella had been two months pregnant at the time of her death. The doctors were of the opinion that arsenic and possibly antimony, bismuth or potassium chlorate may have been taken by the deceased. It was clear from his summing up that the judge thought Thomas guilty, and so did the jury, and so a sentence of death was passed.

However, the public now decided this was wrong and there was a great outcry. Further investigation led to Smethurst’s reprieve two days before the date set for his execution. On his release, he was promptly re-arrested for bigamy, for which he was sentenced to a year’s hard labour. After his release he went to live in a house off the Vauxhall Bridge Road, London. Although he was quite comfortably off, he then sued for Isabella’s legacy, and much to the distress of her family, he won.

The solicitor’s tyrannical wife

Major Herbert Armstrong was a small, mild-mannered ex-soldier and provincial solicitor who practised law in Hay-on-Wye. His marriage was not a happy one; his wife was somewhat of a tyrant and when she died, early in 1921, everyone judged the Major’s loss to be a happy release. She died after an attack of abdominal cramps, which the doctor had diagnosed as neuritis. A few months later, the Major had a dispute with another local solicitor. The rival was invited to tea and ate a buttered scone and a slice of currant loaf and became ill with severe stomach pains shortly after returning home.

The doctor was summoned and diagnosed a bilious attack and appropriate medication, but the sickness continued and the doctor decided to investigate. On analysis he found arsenic and then realised that the symptoms of arsenic poisoning were very similar to those of neuritis, for which he had treated Mrs Armstrong before she died. The doctor went to the police with his suspicions. The wife’s body was exhumed and tests found a quantity of arsenic in the stomach. The Major was arrested and duly tried, pleading ‘not guilty’, but the jury convicted him and he was sentenced to death. He was executed by hanging in 1922.

The gypsy lover

Charlotte Bryant was an ugly-looking young woman, illiterate, slightly retarded and she drank too much. She was married to a very poor farm worker called Frederick who, people said, was not the father of all her five children. They lived in the village of Coombe in Dorset, where Charlotte was much in demand by the men of the village. Her prostitution was a way of earning a little extra money to help make ends meet. Charlotte dreamt of meeting her ideal man one day.

In December 1933, she met a gypsy called Leonard Parsons, and fell head-over-heels in love with him. She even invited him to dinner on Christmas Day, without even consulting her husband. Leonard and Frederick fortunately got on together so well that within days Leonard was invited to move into the spare room, as he needed a place to stay. Needless to say, it did not take long before Charlotte and Leonard became lovers. They quickly began jumping into bed as soon as Frederick left for work each day. When Frederick eventually found out, he told the gypsy to leave immediately, which Leonard did.

Three days later, Charlotte received a telegram from her lover, asking her to meet him, but as Charlotte could neither read nor write she showed the message to her husband, asking him to read it. Frederick accompanied Charlotte to the meeting place and told Leonard to stay away from his wife, but, after further discussion, the two men made friends again and shook hands on it. Just two days later, Leonard returned to the Bryants’ spare room, and also to his place in Charlotte’s bed.

Charlotte was madly in love and told Leonard how wonderful it would be for them to spend the rest of their lives together. At the thought of this, poor Leonard’s ardour began to cool. Charlotte became aware that he might leave and decided she must act quickly to ensure that he would stay. She went to Yeovil the next morning and bought a tin of arsenical weedkiller from a chemist’s shop, signing the poison register, as was legally required, with a cross.

She hurried home and laced her husband’s lunch with the weedkiller. Frederick was seized with violent stomach pains that afternoon and so Charlotte sent for the doctor. By the time the doctor arrived, it was evening and Frederick was now complaining of not only stomach pains but also of cramps in his legs; the doctor, however, diagnosed a bout of gastro-enteritis. Frederick recovered and returned to work but then went down with another bout of the same symptoms.

The gypsy lodger then announced that he had decided to leave, and after he had departed Charlotte became quite desperate to get him back. Her husband’s third bout of gastro-enteritis happened the next day and, this time, it was so severe that the doctor put him on a special diet. A few days later, just before Christmas 1935, Charlotte prepared her husband’s lunch, again heavily laced with arsenic, leaving it out for him.

She set off to visit Weston-Super-Mare, as she had heard that her beloved gypsy was camped near there. She could not find him and by the time she got home again her husband was in a far worse state. The following day, he was taken to the hospital at Sherborne, where he died a few hours later. A post-mortem revealed the arsenic in his stomach and the police duly arrived at the Bryants’ cottage.

They sent Charlotte and the children to the local workhouse while they searched the house and garden. Although they found traces of arsenic in dust and dirt swept up in the cottage, there was not enough to charge Charlotte, as arsenic was commonly used on farms in those days. They did find an empty green-coloured tin, which had contained weedkiller, in the garden, but had no way of proving that Charlotte had bought it.

A friend of Charlotte’s, however, was her undoing. She told the police that Charlotte had shown her a green tin, saying that she must get rid of it. Several days later, this friend found the same tin in the ashes of the boiler, and had thrown it into the backyard. She also told the police how Charlotte had told her that she hated her husband. Charlotte was also reputed to have said ‘if they can’t find anything, they can’t hang me’ shortly after Frederick’s death.

Charlotte was now arrested and sent for trial at Dorchester Assizes. It transpired that the ashes of the boiler had also been analysed, and an unnaturally high level of arsenic was found in them. The jury found her guilty and her appeal was eventually rejected. Her hair turned quite white in the few months while she waited for her execution, by hanging, in July 1936.

Another murderous woman

Audrey Marie was born in Alabama in 1933. In 1945, her family moved from Blue Mountain to Anniston, and Marie went to junior high and then on to the high school there. She met Frank Hilley when she was only 12, and in due course they courted and married in May 1951. Their first child, Michael, was born in November 1952 and Carol, their daughter, in 1960. Marie began spending more than they could afford, and, by the end of 1974, she had even rented a post office box and diverted all bills to that address to hide her overspending from her husband.

It was at about this time that Frank found her in bed with her employer. During this year, Frank had been sick rather a lot, with the doctor prescribing various medicines to treat him. None of them seemed to help much, so eventually the doctor carried out some tests, which showed that Frank had liver failure. New medications didn’t help, his condition worsened and he became jaundiced and died. The cause of death was given as infectious hepatitis. The death certificate stated that the death was due to natural causes so Marie had no trouble collecting the life insurance of about $31,000. Marie then went on a spending spree.

At about this time, there were a series of mysterious fires in her house, as well as in neighbouring ones. There were also harassing phone calls and many other complaints to the police. Unknown to the family, Marie had begun buying insurance, not only for herself, but also to cover her children too. Her daughter, Carol, became ill and was eventually confined to hospital. Carol’s brother, Michael, began to suspect that his father’s illness was not what it seemed and was now suspicious of his sister’s illness. By now, cheques were bouncing and the bank was filing charges.

Eventually Michael told the wider family about his suspicions, and they managed to convince a doctor, who took them seriously and examined his patient very carefully. He found tell-tale white lines on Carol’s fingernails, which are characteristic of arsenic poisoning and indicated that the poisoning had been going on for a period of months. Michael now contacted the coroner about his father’s mysterious illness and death. The body was exhumed and found to have arsenic present in the tissues. Marie’s mother had died from cancer some years previously, and this body was also exhumed. Although she had definitely died of cancer, her tissues also contained high levels of arsenic.

On searching the house, a bottle of liquid, which proved to contain arsenic, was found. Another similar bottle was even found in Marie’s handbag at the time of her arrest. She was charged with murder, but was allowed bail and disappeared about a week later, in November 1979. Other members of the family were also tested and they too were found to have high arsenic levels. Marie had poisoned at least four other members of the family. She went on the run, assuming an alias, bleaching her hair and losing a lot of weight. In January 1983, she was arrested in New Hampshire and returned to Anniston for her trial.

The jury found her guilty of the murder of her husband and the attempted murder of her daughter. She was sentenced to life for the murder and 20 years for the poisoning. Throughout, Marie protested her innocence. She was sent to a women’s prison and, after a time, she was reclassified as a minimum security prisoner which meant that she was allowed passes and even leave from the prison. She absconded, of course, in February 1987, and it was assumed that she had left the state, but only a week later she was found suffering from hypothermia near her birthplace, on Blue Mountain, and there she died.

Phosphorus-flavoured food

In Germany in 1838, a woman prepared some phosphorus-laced soup for her husband and left it out for him to eat on his return from work. In the meantime she set off to visit relatives. But it was night-time before he arrived home, and so he could not help but notice that the soup glowed in the dark – and it smelt rather strange too. Suspecting that the soup had been tampered with, he put some in a bottle and took it to a public analyst the next day. The soup was shown to contain phosphorus. His wife was arrested, tried for attempted murder and sent to prison.

Today, there is a brand of rat and mouse bait available called Rodine. The active ingredient of this product is a coumarin anticoagulant, which will kill rodents after they eat it for several days. This well-respected brand name was in use for more than a century, although the active ingredient has changed with the times. In the mid nineteenth century, the Rodine brand of rat poison contained phosphorus. At that time, phosphorus was actually introduced as a safety measure to replace the arsenic-based rat poisons which were then available. In 1843, the government was so alarmed at the use of arsenic-based products, not only by murderers, but also by the suicidal, that they passed a law stating that only phosphorus could be used to kill vermin. It did not take long for people to discover that the new rat poisons were every bit as effective as the old ones for killing people as well as rats. And once lucifer matches were banned in 1910, rat poison became the only readily available source of phosphorus.

Phosphorus for use as a poison had a few problems: indeed, a person killed with phosphorus was easy to spot, as they glowed in the dark. It also smelled of garlic and the taste was very difficult, if not impossible, to disguise.

The poisoned cake

Mary Ann Ansell was working as a maid servant in a house in a fashionable part of London in 1899. She was engaged to be married, but could not marry until she and her fiancé had saved up seven shillings and sixpence to pay for the marriage licence. Mary Ann devised a plan to raise the money. She took out an insurance policy on the life of her sister, Caroline, who was insane and confined to an asylum in Hertfordshire.

For a premium of only three pence per week, Ansell was able to insure her sister’s life for £11. She had said that her sister ‘worked’ at a hospital in the country when she took out the policy. She then purchased a tin of rat poison and proceeded to bake a cake, including the rat poison as an extra ingredient to the recipe. She sent the cake to the asylum, requesting that it be shared by the inmates of Ward 7, which included her sister. In fact, Caroline ate most of the cake, and although all of those who ate a piece of the cake became ill, she was by far the worst affected.

At that time, there were several cases of typhoid fever in the asylum, so the doctor was rather busy and did not manage to examine Caroline for several days. When he did, he immediately sent her to the asylum infirmary, but she died soon afterwards. The insurance company did not pay out the £11 to Ansell, as a post-mortem revealed that the death was due to phosphorus poisoning.

The police were called and investigations showed that it was Ansell who had sent the poisoned cake, and that she had earlier purchased the rat poison. She claimed that she had bought it to kill vermin, but her employer denied that there was any need for her to purchase rat poison. Ansell was arrested and tried, found guilty and hanged in July 1899. It would seem that her fiancé had a lucky escape.

She killed for the money

Louisa Highway was born in Wigan, Lancashire in 1907. She was one of eight children, and her father was a miner. She left school at 13 and went to work in the local cotton mill. At about this time she also joined the Salvation Army. When she was 20, she got a job as a kitchen maid at a nearby hospital, and five years after this she married for the first time. She had nine children over the years, although five of them died in infancy, and the rest were taken into care as she preferred to spend her spare time drinking in the local pub to caring for her children.

During World War II, she was sent to prison for stealing ration books. And then, in 1949, her husband died in suspicious circumstances, but investigations found nothing, and his death was put down to kidney failure. Louisa now married a man she had already been seeing for some time – the recently widowed and somewhat elderly 78-year-old, Richard Weston. He sold his house and put the proceeds into his bank account. He moved in with Louisa and married her in early 1950. He was dead only ten weeks after the marriage and his money, some £2,400, had already been spent by Louisa by the time he died.

Louisa now married for a third time to a gentleman called Alfred Merrifield, in August 1950. It was no surprise to find that his money was soon gone too. Louisa Merrifield now got herself a position as a live-in housekeeper to Sarah Ricketts, a 79-year-old widow who lived in a bungalow called Homestead on the North Shore at Blackpool. Alfred lived there too, doing odd jobs about the place.

One day, his wife sent him by train to Manchester to buy a tin of Rodine rat poison. The chemist’s assistant later remembered him well, because he was wearing a hearing aid.

As time went on, Mrs Ricketts was obviously very pleased with the arrangement and began talking of rewriting her will in favour of the Merrifields, rather than leaving everything to the Salvation Army as she had planned. Rather stupidly, Louisa began telling some of her friends that the old lady had died, while to others she said that she soon would be dead.

One evening, Louisa phoned the doctor saying that Ricketts was ill. The doctor came to visit somewhat reluctantly that night, and finding that his patient only had mild bronchitis, remonstrated with the housekeeper. Louisa protested that she was frightened that something might happen to the elderly lady during the night. She called the doctor out several times that week, but he never found anything seriously wrong with his patient.

The following weekend, she phoned the doctor again, saying that Ricketts was now seriously ill. This time the doctor’s partner, who was making all the home visits that weekend, decided to visit other patients first, and so eventually arrived to visit Ricketts at about midday. He was shocked to find the patient near to death, and examination showed that there was nothing he could do to save her. Only 33 days had passed since the Merrifields had arrived at Homestead, and it was only 13 days since the will had been rewritten.

A post-mortem found a mixture of rum and rat poison in the stomach. It was clear that Mrs Ricketts had been poisoned with phosphorus. An intensive search of the house and grounds followed, as the police looked for the tin of rat poison. They couldn’t find it, and they knew Ricketts could not have disposed of it herself as she could hardly walk and rarely left her bungalow. Soon, other incriminating evidence came to light. The Merrifields were quickly arrested once the news emerged that they were the sole beneficiaries of the will and friends and neighbours remembered what Louisa had said a few days earlier.

The jury found Louisa guilty, and she was hanged in Manchester at Strangeways Prison in September 1953. The jury could not agree a verdict against her husband and eventually he was discharged. Alfred Merrifield received one-sixth of the estate, with the remainder being divided equally between Mrs Ricketts’ two daughters. The Blackpool Waxworks Museum later paid the sum of £500 to Merrifield for agreeing to allow effigies of himself and his wife to be displayed in their Chamber of Horrors.

Poisoned With HP Sauce

Mary Wilson may have got rid of her first husband in the same way as she did with the second and third, although we’ll never know that for certain. We do know that for the latter two deaths, she mixed a phosphorus-based beetle poison in with HP sauce to disguise the taste of her poison of choice. She also mixed some with a patent medicine called Chlorodyne, which contained a lot of chloroform, to mask the garlicky smell.

Ernest George Wilson, her third husband, died in November 1957. Suspicions were aroused because of the similarity with the death of her second husband. Two weeks later, the third husband’s body was exhumed and a post-mortem was performed, which showed fatty degeneration of the liver, a sure sign of poisoning. Various tissues were removed for analysis. At the same time, the body of Oliver James Leonard, her second husband, was also exhumed. He had died the previous year supposedly of heart disease, but his liver also showed fatty degeneration, so various other tissues were removed for analysis too.

Extensive tests showed that both men had died of phosphorus poisoning; indeed, the tissues of both men glowed in the dark. In March 1958, Mary Wilson was tried in Leeds. Her defence team asked if Damiana pills, a popular nerve tonic at that time, which the men might have taken, could explain the presence of phosphorus in the bodies. The answer was no, as the pills also contained strychnine and none of this had been found. Mary was found guilty and sentenced to death, but this sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

Euthanasia or for personal gain?

Dr John Bodkin Adams was a physician and alleged poisoner. He was born in Northern Ireland and trained as a doctor. He became a general practitioner in Eastbourne, and may have murdered several of his patients. He was tried in 1957 after one of his patients, Edith Alice Morrell, died in suspicious circumstances. Like many elderly patients grateful for the ministrations of their doctors, she had made him a beneficiary of her will. She died of an overdose of morphine, but the jury found the doctor not guilty, not least because of the poor case advanced by the prosecution. However, after the case, the doctor was struck off the Medical Register for some years. Many considered that he had practised a form of euthanasia, but others believe he murdered at least nine old ladies for personal gain.

Some poisoners do it just for kicks. Male nurse, Benjamin Geen, of Banbury, was diagnosed as a psychopath with a narcissistic personality trait. He murdered two patients and took 15 others to the brink of death because he loved the excitement and thrill of trying to revive them after he had injected them with drugs that resulted in respiratory failure and so required emergency resuscitation. Following his trial in 2006 he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

In January 2008, a Czech nurse was on trial, accused of the murder of seven patients and the attempted murder of another ten in the summer of that same year. He administered huge doses of heparin, a drug used to prevent and break down blood clots, and his patients suffered massive haemorrhages. He too was motivated by the thirst for action.

A final failed conspiracy

In March 1917, at the Old Bailey in London, Alice Wheeldon, her two daughters, and Alfred George Mason, the husband of one of the daughters, were found guilty of a murder conspiracy. It was claimed that they had intended to poison the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. Their trial and conviction were based largely on the evidence of two ‘agents provocateur’ and even today raise questions of a set-up.

Mason, a chemist and druggist who lectured on pharmacy at a technical school in Southampton, had supplied to the Wheeldons phials containing a preparation of curare and a solution of strychnine. The intention was definitely murder, but the defence claimed that the poisons were intended to kill dogs.

The unmarried daughter, Hettie Wheeldon, was acquitted but the others were all found guilty and sentenced to imprisonment. Wheeldon was sentenced to ten years, Mason to seven years and his wife Winnie to five years. In later years the extreme left-wing leanings of the Wheeldon family and their communist activism came to light, so maybe they did intend to assassinate the Prime Minister on the golf course, with a poison dart, after all.