A Taste for Poison Read online

  About the Author

  Dr Neil Bradbury is Professor of Physiology and Biophysics at the Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science, where he teaches and conducts research on genetic diseases. A full-time scientist and educator, Bradbury has won numerous awards for his unique approach to teaching physiology. He has presented his research around the world and authored more than 80 scientific articles and book chapters. Born in Manchester and educated in Britain, he currently lives in Illinois with his wife and two border collies. A Taste for Poison is his first book.

  Copyright

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  First published in the US by St. Martin’s Publishing Group, part of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC 2022

  This edition published by HarperNorth 2022

  1 EDITION

  Copyright © Neil Bradbury 2022

  Cover layout design © David Wardle

  Neil Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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  Source ISBN: 9780008484552

  Ebook Edition © January 2022 ISBN: 9780008484569

  Version 2021-12-02

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  Dedication

  To my wife and daughters, and to my parents

  for teaching me right from wrong

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Note to Readers

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART I: BIOMOLECULES OF DEATH

  Introduction

  1. Insulin and Mrs. Barlow’s Bathtub

  2. Atropine and Alexandra’s Tonic

  3. Strychnine and the Lambeth Poisoner

  4. Aconite and Mrs. Singh’s Curry

  5. Ricin and Georgi’s Waterloo Sunset

  6. Digoxin and the Angel of Death

  7. Cyanide and the Professor from Pittsburgh

  PART II: MOLECULES OF DEATH FROM THE EARTH

  8. Potassium and the Nightmare Nurse

  9. Polonium and Sasha’s Indiscriminate Intestine

  10. Arsenic and Monsieur L’Angelier’s Cocoa

  11. Chlorine and the Killer Nurse of Lufkin

  Epilogue: The Garden of Death

  Appendix: Pick Your Poison

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  About the Publisher

  Epigraph

  As a rule, women are the great poisoners, although I do recall with pleasure the case of the gentleman solicitor in Wales who poisoned everybody in sight. He couldn’t stop himself. He was very genteel. He came up with the most memorable line in the annals of true murder. As he handed one of his guests a poisoned scone, he said, “Excuse fingers.”1

  —SIR JOHN MORTIMER, BARRISTER, AUTHOR

  AND CREATOR OF RUMPOLE OF THE BAILEY

  PART I

  Biomolecules of Death

  Introduction

  I love the old way best, the simple way of poison, where we too are strong as men.

  —EURIPIDES, MEDEA, 431 BC

  Within the annals of crime, murder holds a particularly heinous position. And among the means of killing, few methods generate such a peculiar morbid fascination as poison. Compared with hot-blooded spur-of-the-moment murders, the planning and cold calculations involved in murder by poison perfectly fit the legal term “malice aforethought.” Poisoning requires planning and a knowledge of the victim’s habits. It requires consideration of how the poison will be administered. Some poisons can kill within minutes; others can be given slowly over time, gradually accumulating in the body but still leading inexorably to the victim’s death.

  This book is not a catalog of poisoners and their victims, but rather explores the nature of poisons and how they affect the body at the molecular, cellular, and physiological levels. Each poison kills in its own unique way, and the varied symptoms experienced by the victims often give clues as to the nature of the poison used against them. In a few instances such knowledge has led to appropriate treatment and full recovery. In other cases knowledge of the poison is not of therapeutic benefit, because there is simply no antidote.

  The words “poison” and “toxin” are often used interchangeably, though strictly speaking they are not the same thing. Poisons are any chemicals that cause harm to the body, and can be natural or man-made, whereas toxins usually refer to deadly chemicals made by living things. If you are on the receiving end of either though, the difference is somewhat academic. The word toxikon comes from ancient Greek, meaning “a poison into which arrows are dipped,” and describes plant extracts smeared onto arrowheads to induce death. When the word toxikon was combined with the Greek term logia, meaning “to study,” we ended up with toxicology, or the study of toxins. The word poison is derived from the Latin word potio, which simply means “drink.” This slowly morphed into the Old French word puison or poison. The first appearance of poison in the English language appeared in 1200, meaning “a deadly potion or substance.”

  Poisons obtained from living organisms are often mixtures of many chemicals. For example, crude extracts from the deadly nightshade plant (also known as belladonna) are quite dangerous, but from these extracts comes the purified chemical atropine. Similarly, foxglove plants are also poisonous, but the single chemical digoxin can be purified from the plant.

  Historically some poisons have been created by mixing together several different poisons, as seen in aqua tofana, a mixture of lead, arsenic, and belladonna.1

  How does a chemical sitting in a bottle doing no harm to anyone end up as a poison inside a dead body? Whatever the poison may be, there are three distinct stages that occur before death: delivery, actions, and effects.

  Poison can be delivered to a victim through four routes: ingestion, respiration, absorption, or injection. That is, they may be eaten or drunk and enter the body through the intestine; inhaled into the lungs; absorbed directly through the skin; or injected into the body, either into muscles or the bloodstream. How a killer gets the poison into a victim’s body depends on the nature of the poison. Although poisonous gases have been used to kill, they involve a degree of technical difficulty that makes them impractical to utilize, and often makes it hard to target a specific individual. Absorption through the skin or mucous membranes of the eyes and mouth can be quite effective: The killer does not have to have any contact
with the victim or even be around when the poisoning takes place. Simply smearing the poison on something the victim will touch can be sufficient to cause death. Mixing with food or drink provides an easy route for most poisons. This works especially well for solid crystalline poisons that can simply be sprinkled onto a meal or dissolved in a drink. However, some poisons must be injected into the body. Sometimes this is because the poison is a protein that would simply be broken down by the stomach and intestines if it was eaten. Of course the killer must be close enough to the victim to inject the poison.

  Now we turn to the crux of poisons: How do they disrupt the inner workings of the body? Exactly what poisons do is incredibly varied, and their actions reveal much about human biology. Many poisons attack the nervous system, disrupting the highly sophisticated electrical signaling that controls the normal functions of the body. Undermining the communication between parts of the heart can easily be seen to stop the heart from beating and cause death. Interrupting the regulation of the diaphragm, the muscle that controls breathing, can similarly cause death by shutting down respiration and causing asphyxia. Other poisons get inside the cells of the body by pretending to be something that they are not. Disguising their true nature, and having almost, but not quite, the same shape as a vital component of the cell, these poisons can be incorporated into the cell’s metabolism but are unable to perform the right biochemical functions. With the poison acting as a counterfeit molecule, the whole of the cell’s chemistry grinds to a halt and the cell dies. When enough cells die, so does the whole body.

  It is not too hard to imagine that if different poisons work in different ways, the symptoms experienced by the victims would also be different. For most ingested poisons, irrespective of how they work, the first response is often vomiting and diarrhea, in a physical attempt to remove the poison from the body. Poisons that affect the nerves and electrical signaling of the heart will be experienced as heart palpitations and, sooner or later, cardiac arrest. Poisons that affect the cells’ chemistry often cause nausea, headaches, and lethargy. It is stories of the actions of poisons and their dreadful consequences that fill the rest of this book.

  While most people would consider poisons to be lethal drugs, scientists have used the exact same chemicals to tease apart the inner molecular and cellular mechanisms of cells and organs, using this information to develop new drugs that treat and cure a wide range of diseases. For example, studying how the poisons in the foxglove plant affect the body has led to the development of drugs to treat congestive heart failure. Similarly, understanding how belladonna affects the body has helped create drugs now routinely used in surgery to prevent postoperative complications, and even to treat soldiers exposed to chemical warfare. From this it can be seen that a chemical is not intrinsically good or bad, it’s just a chemical. What differs is the intent with which the chemical is used: either to preserve life—or to take it.

  1

  Insulin and Mrs. Barlow’s Bathtub

  Both Williams of Rochester and Woodyatt of Chicago had patients who died of hypoglycemic shock after receiving an overdose of insulin.

  —THEA COOPER AND ARTHUR AINSBURG, BREAKTHROUGH, 2010

  MIRACLE DRUG TO MURDER WEAPON IN THIRTY YEARS

  What does the word “poison” conjure in your mind? Extracts from poisonous plants, toxins from venomous snakes, or maybe mad scientists making deadly chemicals deep in an underground bunker? Not all poisons have such exotic pedigrees. Sometimes what makes things toxic is exactly what allows them to be used for good.

  This apparent contradiction between a chemical being both toxic and tonic was first appreciated in the medical revolution during the Renaissance. Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (fortunately better known by his nickname Paracelsus), the great sixteenth-century alchemist and physician, cautioned: “It is the dose that makes the poison.” Perhaps nowhere is there a better example of this than in our first poison: a chemical that has lifesaving properties in small doses but is deadly when applied in large amounts.

  The chemical in question is insulin, and its absence, or an inability of the body to respond to it properly, leads to the disease diabetes mellitus.1 Before the widespread availability of insulin, a diagnosis of diabetes was akin to a death sentence. The most optimistic prognosis was a few years of suffering, followed by death. Diabetes would transform a happy active childhood into one of ravenous hunger and insatiable thirst. In the decade before insulin’s discovery, the American doctors Frederick Allen and Elliott Joslin advocated severe fasting to prolong the lives of diabetic patients. It was a depressing process of slow starvation, with patients whittled down to little more than skin and bones.2 It was known that diabetics had sugar in their urine, and starvation certainly stopped that from happening. However, this approach was really just treating the symptoms, and there was little scientific evidence to support the diet as a viable therapy—but neither was there a rational alternative.

  Things changed in 1921, when Canadian researchers managed to identify and purify insulin from animal pancreases. The first patient treated with insulin was fourteen-year-old Leonard Thompson, a boy weighing only sixty-five pounds and drifting in and out of a diabetic coma. With insulin treatments, Leonard’s blood sugar levels fell dramatically toward normal, he started to regain weight, and his symptoms gradually disappeared. Although not a cure, insulin injections allow the millions of individuals with diabetes to live a full, and reasonably normal, healthy life. One of the most important things all patients with diabetes are taught is to recognize the symptoms of too little and too much insulin.

  It was a remarkably short time from the initial discovery and purification of insulin to its widespread use in treating patients with diabetes, with commercial insulin available in 1923, only two years after insulin’s discovery.3 A more sinister and tragic timetable shows that it took barely three decades to turn a lifesaving chemical into a deadly murder weapon.

  MRS. BARLOW’S BATH

  Detective Sergeant John Naylor was called to a semidetached house on Thornbury Crescent in Bradford, England, in the early hours of Saturday, May 4, 1957. As he entered the house, Naylor heard faint sobbing and found a distraught husband in the throes of grief, tightly gripping a picture of a woman. Naylor was directed to the upstairs bathroom by a police constable, and there, slumped in the bath, naked and dead, was the woman in the picture. Anxious neighbors stood close to the weeping husband in uncomfortable silence, convinced that his grief was genuine—but Naylor was not so sure.

  To all who knew her, Elizabeth “Betty” Barlow seemed happily married to her devoted husband, Kenneth. According to neighbors, they were extremely happy together and never argued. Elizabeth, nine years younger than Kenneth, was actually Barlow’s second wife, having married him in 1956 following the death of his first wife. In marrying Kenneth, Elizabeth also became stepmother to Barlow’s young son, Ian. Both Kenneth and Elizabeth had worked in various hospitals around the Yorkshire town of Bradford, Elizabeth as an auxiliary nurse, and Kenneth as a state registered nurse, which may have been how the couple first met.

  After the wedding Kenneth continued working as a nurse at Bradford Royal Infirmary, but Elizabeth left nursing and took a job in the ironing section of a local laundry. The work was fairly mundane, and clouds of steam constantly swirled around her, making her clothes damp and uncomfortable; but the pay was reasonable, and the job helped with the family finances. Fridays were Elizabeth’s half-day at work, and Friday, May 3, 1957, was no different. Noon was approaching, and as Elizabeth eagerly gathered her things to leave work, she mentioned to her friends that she was looking forward to a little time to herself so that she could wash her hair. On the short walk from the laundry to their home in Thornbury Crescent, Elizabeth stopped at the local fish-and-chip shop to pick up lunch for the family. At twelve thirty the hot fish and chips were unwrapped from their vinegar-soaked newspaper coverings and plated with bread and butter, all washed down with cups of tea.

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sp; After lunch Elizabeth busied herself doing some housework and washing the family’s clothes, while Kenneth spent his Friday afternoon taking care of his pride and joy by pulling the car out of the attached garage and giving it a thorough wash. Around four o’clock, Elizabeth went to visit Mrs. Skinner, her next-door neighbor, who would later testify that Elizabeth appeared cheerful and “full of life.” “As a matter of fact, she showed me a set of black underwear she [bought], and joked about it,” Mrs. Skinner recalled.

  That evening the family moved to the living room to relax. Elizabeth lay on the sofa for a short time but became increasingly restless, eventually telling her family she was going to go lie down for a while. At 6:30 p.m., as she climbed the stairs, Elizabeth called out to Kenneth asking him to come get her in an hour, as she wanted to watch a television program with him. As it turned out, Elizabeth would never watch television again. Fifty minutes later Kenneth climbed the stairs to let his wife know that the show was about to start, but Elizabeth had already changed into her pajamas and gotten into bed, telling her husband that she felt “too comfortable to move.” Kenneth ambled back to the living room alone to watch television for the next half hour, before taking a glass of water up to his wife to see how she was doing.

  In the bedroom Kenneth found Elizabeth still in bed and feeling very tired. He would later testify that his wife told him that she was “too tired to say goodnight to her stepson.” It was still a bit early for Kenneth to retire for the evening, and he wanted to give his wife some time alone to rest, so he went back downstairs to finish watching television. Shortly before nine thirty, Kenneth heard Elizabeth calling him from their bedroom. As he climbed the stairs and entered their bedroom, Kenneth was disturbed to find that his wife had vomited on the bed. The couple changed the sheets, and Kenneth took the soiled bed linens downstairs, where he placed them in the kitchen washtub. Not only was Elizabeth complaining of being tired, but she was now “feeling too warm,” and decided to lie on top of the newly made bedcovers.