A Passion for Poison
Page 1
Also by Carol Ann Lee
Non fiction
The Pottery Cottage Murders (with Peter Howse)
Somebody’s Mother, Somebody’s Daughter
The Murders at White House Farm
Evil Relations: The Man Who Bore Witness Against the Moors Murderers (with David Smith)
A Fine Day for a Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story
One of Your Own: The Life and Death of Myra Hindley
The Hidden Life of Otto Frank
Roses from the Earth: The Biography of Anne Frank
Fiction
The Winter of the World
Children’s books
Anne Frank and the Children of the Holocaust
Anne Frank’s Story
First published in the UK by John Blake Publishing
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First published in hardback in 2021
Hardback ISBN: 978-1-78946-431-3
Trade paperback ISBN: 978-1-78946-5631
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-78946-432-0
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Text Copyright © Carol Ann Lee, 2021
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‘The whole story is too terrible.
You’ll be disgusted and amazed.’
GRAHAM YOUNG,
POLICE INTERVIEW NOTES, 1972
CONTENTS
Introduction: A SHORT HISTORY OF POISON
I: 6 July 1962 THE OLD BAILEY
II: 1947–1962 NEASDEN
III: 1962–1971 BROADMOOR
IV: 1971–1972 HADLANDS
V: 1972–1990 PARKHURST
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ENDNOTES
Introduction
A SHORT HISTORY
OF POISON
I
T’S NOVEMBER 1971, It’s November 1971, the turning to ash of an already grey year. Hostilities in Northern Ireland are still on the rise; decimalisation means older people are asking ‘What’s that in real money?’ every time a transaction is made; President Nixon watches as half a million people march on Washington DC to protest against the war in Vietnam; ultra-violent films Straw Dogs and A Clockwork Orange pack the cinemas; kids are glued to Magpie, Mr Benn, The Clangers and Crackerjack, while their parents favour Z-Cars, Opportunity Knocks, Look: Mike Yardwood! and The Onedin Line; and glam rock makes its shimmering, androgynous debut on Top of the Pops, in the form of Marc Bolan, all bombast, boots and feather boas.
Even in a dull year, the arrest of a Hertfordshire storeman called Graham Young seems unlikely to make much of an impact on British history. But here we are, on a dismal afternoon in Hemel Hempstead, where that same young man – reasonably tall, dark-haired, slim of limb and sharp of feature – sits in the police station on central Combe Street. Cigarette hooked between his nicotine-stained thumb and forefinger, he asks the detective sitting opposite, ‘Do you know “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”, Superintendent?’ He then recites Oscar Wilde’s famous verse: ‘Yet each man kills the thing he loves/By each let this be heard/Some do it with a bitter look/Some with a flattering word/The coward does it with a kiss/The brave man with a sword.’
He pauses, then admits, ‘I suppose I could be said to kiss.’
We will find out in due course why the crimes of this unprepossessing young man effected change in several crucial aspects of our laws, forensic science and institutions, but Graham Young’s choice of words echo those of dramatist John Fletcher, whose comedic 1617 play The Chances is subtitled ‘The Coward’s Weapon, Poison’. Murder by poisoning is the method most favoured by fiction writers for the killing of one character – or more – by another. Stealthy, arcane and chillingly abstract in allowing the killer to be miles from the victim when the death blow is delivered, poison is the ink that flows through many a crime writer’s pen, a symbol of sin and treachery. And very often, those stories are inspired by real-life murders, for poisoners are strangely unique among their homicidal peers, possessed of a macabre decadence that imbues their crimes with an eerie, inappropriate nostalgia.
The history of poison is as old as time itself. In the prehistoric world, hunters dipped their arrows in snake venom while the ancient indigenous people of South America fashioned poison darts from plant sap and the venom of frogs (there are over 200,000 poisonous animals, including fish, spiders, bees, snails and birds, whose feathers are toxic to the touch). The Greek word toxicon refers to poison arrows and has given us the words ‘intoxicated’ (sickened by poison arrows) and ‘toxin’. These poison arrows appear in the works of Greek philosopher Aristotle, who refers to the nomadic Scythians and their weapons, infused with a blend of decomposing blood liquid waste and fluid from rotting snakes, which could result in septicaemia. Aristotle also mentions his fellow Greek philosopher Socrates, sentenced to death in 399BCE for allegedly corrupting Athens’ young people. Socrates chose poison as a form of execution and died among friends after imbibing hemlock, a plant said to have turned deadly after Jesus’ blood was spilled upon it where it grew on the hillside of his crucifixion.
Earlier still, we find ‘recipes’ for poison written in hieroglyphics on one of the world’s oldest medical documents, the Ebers Papyrus. The first known Egyptian pharaoh, Menes, took a keen interest in poison and one of the most famous self-inflicted deaths in history is Cleopatra’s alleged suicide using asp venom. The father of Chinese herbal medicine, Shen Nung, experimented with 365 herbs before one killed him, while the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang, poisoned himself in his search for the elixir of life. Poison was the weapon of choice for assassins of the ancient civilisations of Greece, Persia and India, where Mughal emperors would present their enemies with poison-infused robes and criminals were sentenced to death using toxins.
Ancient Roman law contains the first legislation against poisoning. The dictator Sulla issued the Lex Cornelia de Maiestate in response to the rash of assassinations; no less than six emperors were poisoned to death. Claudius’ wife Agrippina poisoned him to advance the career of her son, Nero, who then employed a woman named Locusta to act as his personal advisor on the matter; with her expertise, he was able to dispose of his mother, brother and several wives. To gain the throne, Nero also poisoned his stepbrother. In all, 170 women were found guilty of maliciously administering poison during Roman rule, and one theory holds that the empire’s decline and fall was due to lead poisoning from the water pipes; there may be
some truth in that, since symptoms include depletion of mental skills and loss of libido, with some emperors displaying signs of madness and the population as a whole suffering decreased fertility.
Renaissance Rome saw the emergence of an infamous poisoning dynasty: the Borgias. Led by Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI), the family were ruthless in their determination to retain power within the Catholic clergy, dispatching their enemies – cardinals, bishops and noblemen – with such astonishing regularity that English essayist Max Beerbohm observed: ‘The Borgias selected and laid down rare poisons in their cellars with as much thought as they gave to their wines.’1 Recent research suggests that Lucrezia Borgia probably did not deserve her fearsome reputation, but her brother, Duke Cesare, was a serial poisoner who killed dozens of people. The Borgias liked to test toxins on the poor, experimenting with aconite, strychnine and other poisons. They eventually devised a concoction known as ‘cantarella’, thought to contain blister beetles and arsenic, which was served to victims in the wine that accompanied dinner.
Italy in the 16th century was the location of an extraordinary guild: the Council of Ten. Comprised of alchemists, the clique offered to commit murder by poison for a fee, keeping accounts in a thin ledger marked ‘Secreto Secretissima’ (top, top secret). Another Italian noblewoman, Catherine de Medici, was widely believed to have carried furtive knowledge about poisons with her to France, where she was known as the ‘Black Queen’ after marrying King Henry II. Her potions were kept in small vials hidden in cabinets within the royal residence, brought out for experiments on prisoners and animals. The King lived in fear of his wife, who was suspected of murdering his brother and her daughter’s prospective mother-in-law, the latter with poisoned gloves. By the end of the 16th century, France had become a veritable hotbed of poisoners; noble men and women, and the wealthy, were frequently the victims of arsenic plots. The substance became known as the poudre de succession or ‘inheritance powder’, and if given to a wet nurse in discreet quantities would kill a suckling infant rival.
In England, failed assassination attempts beset Queen Elizabeth I, including a Spanish plot to hire a go-between who would smear the pommel of her riding saddle with an opium-infused poison. On the other side of the world, Chinese emperors were so fearful of being murdered by such means that they pushed small squares of silver into their meals, which they would then scrutinise, believing that the presence of poison would cause the silver to tarnish immediately. But it was in France where poison continued to be a prolific threat to royals and nobility. The priests of Notre-Dame heard countless confessions involving poisons, leading to the establishment of a chambre ardente (‘burning chamber’), essentially a poisoners’ inquisition. Over 400 people were charged with murder as a result. At the heart of the matter was fortune-teller Catherine Deshayes. Known as ‘La Voisin’, Deshayes sold her unique brew of arsenic, opium, belladonna and aconite to wealthy women wanting rid of a husband or child. Found guilty of attempting to kill King Louis XIV, Deshayes was tortured and burnt at the stake.
It was women too, who were the focus of the secret poison societies that emerged in Italy around this time and provided them with toxins and advice on how best to dispense them. Another fortune-teller, Hieronyma Spara, ran a secret society in Rome that offered means and method to disgruntled wives. The most notorious peddler of poisons was Madame Giulia Tofana, who created her own deadly potion, which she named ‘Aqua Tofana’. She was a popular figure until a rumour spread that she had poisoned the water supply in Rome; under torture she confessed to murdering 600 people, including two popes. She and her daughter were executed in 1659, along with three helpers; other accomplices were bricked up alive inside the dungeons of Palazzo Pucci.
Madame Tofana’s potion was thought to contain arsenic, used both medicinally and murderously for centuries. Colourless, tasteless and odourless, it was administered as part of Chinese medicine hundreds of years ago and used by Greek physician Hippocrates in the fifth century BCE to treat stomach ulcers. Medieval alchemists, however, believed it could be used in an elixir to achieve immortality. By the 18th century it was once more employed in medicine when it appeared as an ingredient in Fowler’s solution, a remedy used to treat a wide variety of ailments, including asthma and syphilis. In 1890, arsenic was declared to be the best treatment for leukaemia and remains part of chemotherapy for acute forms of the cancer. The substance was also a popular element in women’s beauty, whether as an ingredient in face cream or something more unusual, such as the use to which it was put by Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of King Henry II of France (who was married to poison expert Catherine de Medici). The King’s senior by 19 years, de Poitiers drank a potion of liquid gold every day in order to maintain her looks, believing it to have magical properties if used circumspectly. In 2009, her remains were disinterred by French experts who were astonished to find gold in her hair and on the ground where it had seeped out of her cadaver.
Arsenic was often a feature in sensational trials during the Victorian era. Indeed, it was a part of many people’s daily lives, whether for good or bad, or simply (and literally) as part of the wallpaper. The introduction of life insurance schemes, coupled with the easy availability of arsenic, led to multiple murders and attempted murders involving the toxin. Poisoners seemed to abound in greater number than ever before: Florence Bravo, Madeleine Smith, Mary Ann Cotton, Florence Maybrick, Dr Crippen and William Palmer are just a handful of the infamous names at the forefront of this particular branch of murder. And yet again, it was women who seemed to present the deadlier threat, perhaps because divorce was harder and more expensive to obtain than arsenic. The government attempted to address the problem by introducing the Arsenic Regulation Act of 1851, wherein a clause suggested that only men should be permitted to purchase the substance. Nonetheless, poisoning was declared to have ‘become epidemic; the witchcraft, as it were, of modern times’.
In the end, science brought about the downfall of the ‘white widow-maker’. For centuries, physicians had been at a loss to know how to detect or treat arsenic poisoning; one technique involved throwing the contents of a suspected victim’s stomach into a fire to ascertain whether they smelled of garlic. But in 1836, English chemist James Marsh discovered a much more reliable method to detect traces of arsenic in human tissue. A French woman suspected of killing her husband with arsenic-laced cakes was the first poisoner to be proven guilty using the Marsh test, which developed as the years rolled by, resulting in a significant drop in deaths caused by deliberate arsenic poisoning.
Ironically, as science advanced to save lives that might otherwise have been lost to poisoning, on an industrial scale it led to millions of deaths. The use of toxins in warfare is centuries old; the ancient Greeks, Romans and Chinese were among those who employed burning sulphur to smoke out an enemy, while seventh-century Byzantines invented ‘Greek fire’, chemicals that could float and burn, destroying wooden ships and their crews with a substance described as ‘ancient napalm’. Two centuries later, poison was added to a new weapon invented by the Chinese: gunpowder.
But it was the early years of the 20th century that saw governments turning to poison on a mass scale. On 22 April 1915, just as the sun was setting over the Belgian fields of Ypres, the German army released their new weapon: 168 tons of chlorine gas. A Canadian officer recalled that it appeared as ‘a deadly wall’ that ‘rolled slowly over the ground, turning the budding leaves of the trees, the spring flowers and the grass a sickly white’.2 The wind carried the vapour to the Allied trenches, where it poured into the eyes and throats of the unsuspecting troops. The poison gas inflicted unimaginable pain, blindness and a feeling of being strangled or burned alive. Over 5,000 soldiers were asphyxiated.
Chemist Fritz Haber had worked throughout the war at developing what he called ‘a higher form of killing’.3 He took a personal interest in the deployment of chlorine gas at Ypres and went on to lead the evolution of even more noxious chemicals, including mustard gas and phosgen
e, which caused the sufferer to choke while his body burned and could also produce psychological terror. German-Jewish Haber was regarded as a hero in Berlin following the attack at Ypres; a party was held in his honour one month later to celebrate. But among those who were repelled by the uses to which Haber had put his brilliance was his wife, Clare, a renowned chemist in her own right. She called the poison gas ‘a sign of barbarity, corrupting the very discipline which ought to bring new insights into life’.4 As the party got under way, Clare shot herself through the heart, dying instantly.
Haber was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918. Fifteen years later, he was forced to flee his homeland when the Nazi Party came to power. He died of a heart attack while in exile; his laboratory and research papers were seized by the Nazis and used in the development of Zyklon B, a form of hydrogen cyanide that was shipped out to concentration camps across Europe, where it killed millions of Jews – including members of Haber’s own family – in the gas chambers. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, around 8,000 people a day were murdered by the gas, which took just 20 minutes to kill all the occupants of a single chamber.
Towards the end of the war, as Germany’s defeat loomed, Nazi leaders took to poisoning themselves with the use of cyanide pills. As a chemical compound, cyanide has been used for nefarious means since time immemorial, largely because of its efficiency, potency and speed of effect, but it is immediately detectable after death, giving off a distinctive smell during autopsy. There was one instance where its strength failed: Russian faith-healer Rasputin survived attempts to kill him in 1916 with the use of cyanide-topped cakes and poisoned wine; he was subsequently shot and thrown into the Malaya Nevka river. But in 1945 cyanide proved effective as a suicide pill, ending the lives of Hitler, his wife and his dog in their Berlin bunker, with countless military leaders, government officials and Nazi sympathisers following suit. The ‘architect’ of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler, killed himself with a cyanide pill during Allied capture, as did German military leader Hermann Goering on the eve of his execution at the Nuremberg Trials. Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels and his wife Magda murdered their six children in Hitler’s bunker on 1 May 1945 before jointly committing suicide with cyanide pills.