Silent Witnesses (29 page)

Caminada suddenly remembered the case of a criminal called Jack Parton—the circumstances of the case seemed to match his modus operandi. Parton had been a pub owner but had lost his licence for drugging his customers and allowing his friends to rob them while they were unconscious. Following this, he had gone into fight promotion, running crooked fights all over town. The only problem was that Jack Parton was too old to fit the description of the criminal. However, he had an eighteen-year-old son called Charlie, who did. Caminada managed to track down the younger Parton and arrest him on the charge of murder, robbery, and administering a stupefying drug. Charlie claimed to have an alibi, but during his inquiries Caminada discovered from
a local pharmacist that a young man answering Charlie's description had recently been in and stolen a bottle of chloral hydrate.

Charlie was charged with Fletcher's murder and tried at Liverpool's George Hall. He claimed that it was a case of mistaken identity, but too many people had seen him—including the cab driver and the pharmacist. A respected witness also came forward, stating that he saw Parton pouring the contents of a vial into a glass of beer. He was found guilty and sentenced to death, though due to his youth, this was commuted to life imprisonment. There can be little doubt that Fletcher's death was a tragic accident—Charlie was certainly a far from honest young man, but it seems clear that his intention had been to drug and rob his victim, rather than to kill him. Sadly the trick he had learned from his father was a dangerous one, and in this case it went awry.

Yet another case of someone underestimating the deadliness of the substance they secretly administered occurred in England in 1954. It also serves to demonstrate the extremely unpleasant effects of yet another poison: cantharidin. Arthur Kendrick Ford was a forty-four-year-old wholesale pharmacist who became infatuated with two of his colleagues: twenty-seven-year-old Betty Grant and seventeen-year-old June Malins. In order to help him gain the girls' affections, he decided to use the well-known aphrodisiac Spanish fly on them. This was a preparation made from the ground-up bodies of a particular beetle. The active ingredient is a substance called cantharidin that the beetles secrete naturally. Ford discovered that his employers kept a supply of cantharidin and he was easily able to steal some. He added a small amount to some coconut ice and then gave some to the girls, as well as eating a portion himself.

If he had expected all three of them to be overcome with pangs
of lust, he was tragically disappointed. Even in relatively small quantities, cantharidin is a powerful blistering agent and is actually used in dermatology to burn off warts. Within a few hours, Ford and the girls all fell seriously ill and were rushed to the hospital. Betty Grant and June Malins died in agony shortly afterward, the drug having literally burned their insides away. Ford himself survived, though only just. When the postmortems brought to light traces of cantharidin in the bodies, Ford was interviewed and soon confessed what he had done. He was tried for manslaughter at the Old Bailey later that year, found guilty, and sentenced to five years' imprisonment—a lenient sentence considering that his bizarre fantasies and stupidity cost two innocent lives.

Hycleus lugens,
also known as the “blister beetle,” which secretes cantharidi

One of the most infamous modern-day poisoners, a man who seems to have positively reveled in the practice for its own
sake, is a man called Graham Frederick Young, who was born on September 7, 1947. He was fascinated with poisons from childhood, and as young as fourteen he began to poison his own family, experimenting with the different effects of varying doses. He had managed to acquire both antimony—an extremely toxic metal, which when ingested causes headaches, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and depression—and digitalis (foxglove), which is commonly used in heart medication but which can negatively affect the heart if taken in too large a quantity, as well as causing breathlessness and vomiting. He had obtained them from a local chemist by lying about his age and saying that he required them for science experiments in school.

Then, in early 1962, Graham's stepmother became ill. Her condition grew progressively worse, and she died suddenly in April that same year. Graham's Aunt Winnie later became suspicious; she had known Graham all his life and was well aware of his fascination with chemistry in general and with poisons in particular. When his father, Frederick Young, began to suffer with severe stomach cramps and vomiting, he was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with antimony poisoning. Graham's chemistry teacher also found quantities of the poison in his desk at school, prompting him to call the police. Graham was arrested on May 23, 1962. Under questioning he eventually admitted to the attempted murder of his father, sister, and a school friend. However, since his stepmother's remains had been cremated, they could not be analyzed—as a result her death had to be recorded as being due to complications arising from injuries she had sustained in a car accident.

Graham subsequently underwent psychiatric assessment and was found to be suffering from a psychopathic disorder. He was
detained in England's Broadmoor Hospital under the Mental Health Act with a recommended minimum stay of fifteen years. After only nine years, however, it was considered that he had recovered sufficiently and was no longer a danger to the public, and he was released.

In fact, although he appeared to be a model prisoner, Young busily studied medical texts during his time at the hospital, improving his knowledge of poisons. He seemingly even managed to continue to experiment on both patients and staff, one of whom (a patient called John Berridge) actually died. This went undetected at the time and it was later conjectured that, due to his expert knowledge, Young was able to extract cyanide from the leaves of laurel bushes planted on the hospital grounds.

After being discharged from Broadmoor in 1971, Young got a job at John Hadland Laboratories in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, not far from his sister's home northwest of London in Hemel Hempstead. Although his employers received references about Graham's “rehabilitation,” they were not told that he was a convicted poisoner. The company manufactured thallium bromide-iodide infrared lenses for military purposes. This might have proved convenient for Graham since thallium, a heavy metal related to lead and mercury, is highly toxic. Unfortunately for him, no thallium was actually stored on site. However, once again he was able to obtain supplies of antimony and thallium by lying to a chemist, this time in London. Not long afterward a man named Bob Egle, who was Graham's foreman, became ill and died. Graham had been in charge of making tea. Subsequently a number of other workers also became ill, suffering from severe nausea, some requiring hospitalization.
The outbreak was so widespread that it was at first assumed to be some kind of virus and was nicknamed the Bovingdon Bug.

Over the next few months, Graham managed to poison around seventy people, mostly using thallium obtained from the chemist. Fortunately there were no further fatalities, but quite a number of people did fall seriously ill. In all around thirty doctors were consulted during this period, but none of them recognized that poisoning was involved. This is likely due to the fact that the symptoms of thallium poisoning can quite easily be confused with those of common viruses such as influenza. Besides, the scale of the poisoning was so outrageously large that such an idea would have scarcely seemed credible. This, combined with the fact that thallium salts are odorless, colorless, and almost tasteless—as well as easily soluble in water—means that in many ways it is a perfect poison. However, it is very seldom used for the purpose; indeed Graham Young appears to have been the first poisoner to do so.

Eventually, as was inevitable, there was another fatality. Graham's colleague Fred Biggs suddenly became very seriously ill and was rushed to the London National Hospital for Nervous Diseases. He suffered in agony for several weeks before he eventually died. The company doctor noticed that Young had an unnatural interest in Biggs's death and alerted the police, who began an investigation. Young's previous conviction for poisoning immediately came to light. He was arrested in southeast England in Sheerness, Kent, on November 21, 1971. When the police searched him, they found thallium in his pocket, while a search of his apartment turned up antimony, thallium, and aconite. His diary was also recovered; it recorded the doses Young had administered to people, their effects, and whether
he was going to allow an individual to live. He liked playing God.

Young was sent to trial on June 19, 1972, at St. Albans Crown Court, and pleaded not guilty. Over the ten days the trial lasted, the press nicknamed him the Teacup Poisoner. However, he maintained that the diary the police had discovered was simply notes for a crime novel that he was planning to write. But there was yet more evidence against him to be presented. Naturally, in any investigation like this, establishing a cause of death through examination of the bodies of the deceased is extremely important. Such an examination had not been carried out in the case of either Bob Egle or Fred Biggs. The police had therefore obtained an order for the exhumation of Biggs's body. This was not possible in Egle's case as he had been cremated, but nevertheless police recovered the container that housed his ashes. When its contents were analyzed, they were found to contain nine milligrams of thallium—a very large dose. In fact, despite all its apparent advantages, Young's choice of thallium as a poison had one flaw: although organic poisons would have been destroyed by the cremation process, a metal such as thallium survives unscathed. This became the first time in British legal history that evidence was procured from the exhumation of ashes. An autopsy on Biggs also revealed traces of thallium. On the strength of this evidence, Young was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He died in his cell in Parkhurst in 1990, at only forty-two years old.

Of course, poison is not only used by lone criminals. It has also long been used by governments as a convenient way of eliminating troublesome citizens or perceived enemies of the
state, and this practice continues even today. Two classic modern cases involve Georgi Markov and Alexander Litvinenko; it is alleged that they were poisoned on the orders of secret services.

Georgi Markov was a well-known Bulgarian writer. The story collections
A Portrait of My Double
(1966) and
The Women of Warsaw
(1968) established him as one of the most talented young writers in Bulgaria. He also wrote a number of plays, though many of these were banned by the communist censors.

In 1969 Markov left Bulgaria to stay with his brother in Italy. It was only supposed to be a short visit, but while there he decided to remain in the West, eventually moving to London. There he found work as a broadcast journalist, working for the Bulgarian section of the BBC World Service, the American-sponsored Radio Free Europe, and the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. He had previously held a privileged position in Bulgarian society—as a talented writer he was admitted into a specially chosen intellectual group who had meetings with Bulgarian President Todor Zhivkov between 1964 and 1968. This meant he was able to reveal things that it seems certain Zhivkov would rather had remained secret; his sarcastic comments about Zhivkov probably did not go down well with the Bulgarian authorities either. In 1972 Markov's works were withdrawn from all Bulgarian libraries and bookshops, and his membership of the Union of Bulgarian Writers was suspended. He was sentenced (in absentia) to six and a half years' imprisonment for defecting to the West.

There were a couple of failed attempts on Markov's life in 1978, one in Munich in the spring when poison was put in his drink at a dinner event, and another in the summer while
he was on the island of Sardinia. The third attempt succeeded, through a method as ingenious as it was horrible. On September 7, 1978 (which happened to be the sixty-seventh birthday of Todor Zhivkov), Markov was walking across Waterloo Bridge on his way to work when he suddenly felt a sharp pain, like a tiny bite or sting, on the back of his right thigh. He spun around and saw a man picking up an umbrella from the ground—he had seemingly accidentally stabbed Markov's leg with the end of it. The man apologized hastily before running across the road and jumping into a waiting cab.

During the day, Markov noticed that a small red lump had formed where the umbrella had hurt him. He mentioned this to a few colleagues at the BBC but otherwise thought nothing much of it. That evening, however, he developed a fever and had to be admitted to the hospital. In spite of the doctors' best efforts, his condition rapidly deteriorated, and three days later, on September 11, 1978, he died, at the age of forty-nine.

The Metropolitan Police asked for a postmortem to be carried out. Markov's death had been caused by ricin poisoning. Ricin is a protein derived from castor oil and ranks as one of the deadliest known toxins—just a single gram is enough to kill around 40,000 people. A pathologist discovered a spherical metal pellet no larger than a pinhead embedded in Markov's leg; further analysis revealed it to be composed of 90 percent platinum and 10 percent iridium, with minute holes 0.35 mm in diameter drilled through it. Experts from the military science facility at Porton Down established that these cavities had contained ricin and discovered that they had been sealed with a specially designed coating. This substance melted at 98.6°F—the temperature of the human body. Obviously when Markov was “accidentally”
jabbed with the umbrella, he was in fact being injected with this pellet. Once inside his body, the coating gradually melted, releasing the ricin into his system. Even if the doctors had realized what had happened, they could have done nothing to save him, because no known antidote exists for ricin.