A Passion for Poison

by Carol Ann Lee

  Although most of his acquaintances in adult life regarded him as asexual, with little or no interest in either men or women, Graham always described himself as heterosexual. His first infatuation was at the age of nine with a girl at his primary school.112 Family and friends remember his first, and perhaps last, girlfriend was ‘Jean’, who worked at Willesden library. Fred dismissed the relationship: ‘Not once in his life have I known Graham to have any interest in a girl except a girl in a library. And then only because of the books on his favourite subjects, which the library could supply.’113 If there was some truth to that, those closest to Graham believed he had genuine feelings for Jean, as she did for him, with Winifred recalling: ‘She actually went to see him in Broadmoor a couple of times. She was a lot older than he and has since married.’114 Dr McGrath also referred to Jean: ‘From her he got his toxicology books and also forged notes when he wanted to truant. In return he gave her small doses of tartar emetic to make her sick enough to justify a few days off work.’115 Chris Williams remembered more: ‘We were both a bit keen on a girl called Jean at the library where he got his books. When I got tickets to a Dickie Henderson TV show at Wembley, Graham gave her something to make her sick at work, so she could get time off and come with me. He told me it was called antimony. It all seemed so innocent then.’116

  Fred was later unable to recall whether Graham ‘started poisoning Molly or me next; maybe he started on both of us at the same time. Whichever way it was, Molly began to have these frequent attacks of sickness, diarrhoea and excruciating pains.’117 While on remand in 1962, Graham told Dr Blair that he began poisoning Molly first. He gave no motive, but the fact that she had twice warned local pharmacies about his poison obsession may have accounted for it.

  His poisoning of Chris and Molly took place simultaneously; he started adding two or three grains of tartar emetic to his stepmother’s food from June to August 1961. The doses gradually became less frequent but larger, often as much as ten grains after he realised that she was ‘developing a resistance for it, just as other people develop a resistance for arsenic’.118 His police statement confirms that he also administered smaller quantities to his sister and father: ‘I started experimenting at home, putting sometimes one, sometimes three grains on prepared foods, which my mother, father and sister ate. I must have eaten some of this poisoned food occasionally because I became sick as well. I know that after eating these prepared foods my family were all sick. My mother went to our doctor about her sickness.’119

  That summer, Molly was not only suffering the symptoms of poisoning at the hands of her stepson, but she was also involved in a serious road accident when the bus she was on ran over an iron bar, which ‘shot through the floor’.120 Molly was thrown from her seat and hit the ceiling. She sustained only ‘two black eyes and a stiff neck’, according to her sister-in-law, but any other signs of injury were almost certainly concealed by the effects of continual poisoning.121

  It was the latter that brought her to her doctor’s surgery on the morning of 5 August 1961. Molly was referred for immediate examination at Willesden general hospital where, over the course of ten days, various tests were carried out, but, as Fred phrased it, ‘they could find nothing organically wrong with her.’122

  Molly was due to be discharged on 16 August. Prior to that, Fred returned home from the factory at midday to prepare lunch for himself and Graham. Winifred was at work; Graham offered to help. Father and son sat down to a meal of corned beef, pineapple and tomatoes. Within half an hour of returning to work, Fred was beset by crippling stomach pains. He spent the rest of the afternoon in the staff toilets, incapacitated with sickness and diarrhoea. ‘I was so ill I thought I would die,’ he recalled. ‘I really thought I was a goner.’123 When he finally arrived home, dizzy and aching all over, the trouble receded. He assumed he had contracted food poisoning, most likely from the corned beef.

  Molly left hospital but there was to be no respite. ‘Her first day home she was sick again,’ Win recalled. ‘She would not go back to the hospital. But Molly believed that Graham, who was always mucking about with poisons, had poisoned her. But I don’t think she told the hospital about this.’124 Fred, too, was plagued by recurring bouts of illness, usually beginning after meals, none of which were prepared by Graham. ‘The first time I felt ill for 24 hours,’ he stated. ‘I didn’t feel sufficiently ill to go to see a doctor, it passed off after 24 hours. I didn’t call in a doctor . . . Throughout the whole of 1961 I didn’t call in a doctor when I had any of these attacks. Sometimes the feeling of sickness passed off very quickly. I have suffered in the past from skin trouble. I have not suffered from anything else at all. I have never had any stomach pains before.’125 None of the attacks were as severe as the first, but they were still debilitating.

  Months later, Fred came to realise that each bout occurred on a Monday morning, ‘after I had been out for a Sunday evening pint of beer in one of the local pubs. I used to take Graham along with me because his mother was in hospital and his sister was courting. He used to sit on the pub wall outside with a soft drink and I would join him. I realise now he must have been taking any opportunity – perhaps when I went to the toilet – to slip something into my drink.’126

  Winifred escaped her brother’s toxic attentions until the end of the summer. She was in her own happy little bubble, working as a secretary in a music publisher’s office on London’s Denmark Street and in a relationship with her future husband, Denis Shannon. She often ate with his family in Harlesden, saving her from the poisoned repasts at home. Nonetheless, one afternoon in August she was on her way to meet Denis at a cinema in Willesden, when she was overwhelmed by nausea: ‘I was violently sick outside Neasden station. It probably took an hour from the time I [unknowingly] ate the poison until I began to feel the effects.’127 She managed to reach Denis, who was shocked by the ‘terrible white shade’ of her skin.128 Fortunately, the sickness vanished as swiftly as it had begun.

  Graham turned 14 in September 1961. He later acknowledged that this was when his interest in toxicology ‘became so intense it unbalanced me’.129 His police statement echoes the fact that ‘it had become an obsession with me and I continued giving members of my family small doses of antimony tartrate on prepared foods.’130 On at least one occasion he added antimony sodium tartrate to the Sunday roast, leaving his father and stepmother clutching their stomachs. All those close to the family tried to work out what was happening in the Young household, with a persistent virus seeming the most likely. If there were any qualms about Graham, no one said anything. Besides, Graham himself was sick on occasion, either making himself deliberately ill to deflect suspicion or accidentally ingesting poison.

  Banned from one pharmacy on Neasden Lane, Graham visited Edgar Davies, only a few yards away. Michael Hodgetts was on duty that day, 20 November 1961. He served the boy who, without so much as a glance around the shop, approached his desk. The subsequent entry in the poison register recorded a sale of one ounce of potassium tartrate to G Harvey. Graham called again a couple of days later, conceding that, at 17, he was indeed small for his age, adding that he needed certain items ‘to do chemical experiments’. Hodgetts sold him 1½ grams of atropine sulphate and Graham once more signed the register as ‘G Harvey’.131

  On Monday, 29 November, Graham saw an opportunity to put one of his purchases to use. As he was getting ready for school, he spotted his sister’s half-made cup of tea on the dresser and added a small quantity of belladonna to the milk. After he left for school, Molly finished making the tea and carried the cup up to her stepdaughter’s room. Winifred took a few sips but abandoned it because of the bitter taste, which she mentioned to Molly, who threw away the dregs and destroyed the cup.

  The poison Graham had added to his sister’s morning cuppa was deadly nightshade, known by its scientific name, Atropa belladonna – translating in Italian as ‘beautiful woman’. Used for many years as a liniment to treat neuralgia, drops from the plant are used to dilate
the pupils of the eye, thereby allowing for better examination of the condition. Belladonna has been cosmetically used for the same effect, but it is also a constituent in some cough mixtures, and used as a sedative, for motion sickness, in suppositories for haemorrhoids and to counter the symptoms of opium poisoning. When administered as a toxin, belladonna causes the pupils to dilate, heart rate to increase, excessive dryness of the mouth and throat, and delirium. It can lead to paralysis, coma and, eventually, death.

  Unaware of the poison she had ingested, Winifred headed to work. As the tube whistled through the tunnels on its journey below ground, she began to feel dizzy and disorientated. It was, she recalled, ‘a rather extraordinary sensation. I felt absolutely unable to control my eyes. Everything was sort of coming and going and when I got out of the train, I remember bumping into people and walking into walls.’132 At Tottenham Court Road station, someone helped her along the platform and up the stairs. She managed to reach her office and sat down heavily at her desk, trying vainly to focus on a newspaper: ‘As I stared at the paper, the print seemed to grow larger and larger. It was an extraordinarily frightening experience – the print getting larger and larger. Then, just as suddenly, it began to recede – to go back and become smaller and smaller.’133

  Curiously, these sensations mirrored those experienced by her brother during his pubescent night terrors, except of course he had not ingested poison.

  Winifred’s behaviour drew the attention of her boss. He put her into a taxi with another member of staff acting as escort and told them to head straight to the Middlesex hospital. It was 11:30am when they arrived. ‘I spent the best part of the day there, undergoing several tests,’ Winifred recalled.134 She was seen by Dr Maddocks, who confirmed: ‘She came complaining of some unsteadiness; she was unable to read as she complained of dryness of the mouth. On examination, her heart rate was fast, she had widely dilated oval pupils, she was unable to accommodate, she could read perfectly at 25 feet but not at 10 inches. Those are symptoms of atropine poisoning. Atropine is a registered poison.’135 Dr Maddocks passed Winifred a mirror and told her to look at her eyes. ‘The pupils were enormous,’ she recalled, ‘and almost entirely covered the irises.’136 He kept her under observation for two hours, noting, ‘The normal dose of atropine that is given is half to one milligram. This would be given for medicinal purposes by mouth. I would have thought that she received more than this, but I cannot say how much . . . Belladonna is the same as atropine.’137

  Winifred was aghast when Dr Maddocks gave her his diagnosis. Then she remembered the bitterness of her tea that morning, wondering if Graham had used it in one of his experiments: ‘It never crossed my mind, of course, that he could possibly have done it deliberately.’138 By the time she arrived back at the office it was 3:30pm. Winifred was fuming. She telephoned her father, complaining that Graham had been messing about with chemicals again. Fred defended his son to Winifred, certain that he would not disobey his orders about experimenting. Nonetheless, when Graham arrived home from school, Fred and Molly asked him a few questions. Graham was indignant, insisting that it was Winifred’s own fault – she had probably used the teacups for mixing her shampoo. Then he began to cry and fled to his room.

  But when Winifred arrived home, Graham confronted her in a rage, telling her she was ‘wicked’ to suggest he would put poison in her tea.139 He was so distraught that she ended up apologising. He then sat and listened with his father and stepmother as Winifred described her symptoms. ‘I knew that it was the effects of the belladonna,’ he recounted calmly to detectives some months later. ‘I was asked by my mother if I knew anything about it but I denied it. After this I gave the remaining belladonna to my friend [Chris].’140

  The incident soon reached the Jouvenat household, where Win was growing ever more concerned about her beloved nephew. Hoping to explain her thoughts tactfully, she called on Fred and Molly to discuss the dangers of Graham’s chemistry experiments, but ‘I was more or less told to mind my own business.’141 Unbeknown to his family, Graham had in his possession a poisoner’s arsenal of atropine, antimony, arsenic, digitalis, tincture of aconite and thallium – enough, it was later said, to kill 300 people.

  Chapter Four

  A POISON IN A SMALL DOSE IS A MEDICINE

  W

  HEN THE EDGAR DAVIES’ shop bell rang one afternoon in December 1961, pharmacist Michael Hodgetts recognised the boy strolling towards him. It was the third time Graham had called, but Hodgetts had no intention of serving him again, having felt distinctly uncomfortable before. His resolve strengthened when Graham told him what he wanted. ‘He asked me to supply him with tincture of aconite,’ the pharmacist recalled. ‘I did not give it to him, it is also a poison. I took steps to get some forms which have to be filled in to get such a poison. These forms have to be taken to the police station. I told him that and gave him the forms and told him he had to get them signed by the police.’142 Tincture of aconite was more toxic than the substances Graham had asked for previously. Although Hodgetts believed that the boy was 17 as he claimed, he felt concerned about the experiments he claimed to be conducting.

  Graham left empty-handed but continued spiking the food and drinks served at home. ‘We were all suffering bouts of unusual sickness,’ Winifred confirmed. ‘Molly suffered most of all, my father and myself. I can remember being sent home from work on several occasions. Molly suspected Graham, but I could not bring myself to believe it.’143 Graham’s attacks of vomiting were much less frequent than the rest of the family, but enough to convince his sister that their stepmother was wrong about him.

  Later, Winifred came to believe that the bouts Graham suffered were unintentional, due to his love for the dripping that Molly collected from the Sunday joint. One Sunday after lunch he called at the house on Links Road and was sick all over Win’s doorstep. His aunt had already instructed her daughter Sandra not to touch any food or drink when she called on Graham and his family. She was unable to speak to her husband about it, because he defended Graham vigorously. But Win grew so worried that she even threw away a cake made by Molly’s sister who worked in a bakery.

  Graham’s schoolfriends knew the truth but were frightened. Clive Creager recalled:

  Gradually, as he realised I could appreciate what he was doing, he began to tell me and to hint to me that he was poisoning people. And his mother was sick. Over a period of time, it became that I knew that he was doing it and he knew that I did and he didn’t even try to hide it. He often used to discuss it and would tell me how ill his mother was or what poisons he was using. And towards the latter part, I remember he showed me a graph. One axis of the graph was what he said was the state of her illness and the other axis was when he was giving her poison.144

  Clive began avoiding Graham as much as possible: ‘He was dangerous. He was evil and I was afraid of him.’145

  At the beginning of 1962, Molly’s health deteriorated. ‘It was her ill luck to be at home all the time and to have to prepare the meals and to eat with Graham,’ Winifred realised. ‘When he arrived home from school, Molly always had her tea with him. Then dad would arrive home and have his tea and I would get in around six-ish. Dad also used to go home from work for his dinner, which he usually ate around midday or one o’clock.’146 Molly’s ailments saw her weight drop from 11 stone to seven; her hair fell out in clumps and she walked with a stoop due to excruciating back pain. Graham was solicitous, making Molly lie on the sofa while he looked after her. Winifred stated in bemused hindsight: ‘Although he was deliberately poisoning Molly and was able to study her reactions with a callousness quite beyond the reach of a normal human being, he was at the same time concerned and worried about her. He even used to go to the chemist’s to get medicine for her.’147

  Throughout everything, Molly’s greatest concern was for her husband, who panicked when she fell ill, having lost his first wife. Nor did Molly want him to blame Graham for her sickness. Fred himself suffered three or four serious attacks of sickne
ss and diarrhoea between January and April 1962, usually after the evening meal. Graham later admitted to giving his father five grains of tartar emetic once or twice daily; he noticed with interest that this produced a new symptom – retention of urine. In his police statement, he declared: ‘Since the beginning of this year, I have on occasions put antimony tartrate solution and powder on foods at home, which both my mother and father have taken. They have become ill as the result of it. My mother lost weight all the time through it and I stopped giving it to her about February of this year. I stopped using it altogether then.’148 Graham may have stopped using antimony tartrate in his stepmother’s food, but he did so only because he had found another poison: thallium.

  ‘I’ve been looking it up. Thallium is mainly used nowadays for rats, I believe. It’s tasteless, soluble and easy to buy. There’s only one thing – poisoning mustn’t be suspected.’149

  These lines are spoken by a character in Agatha Christie’s The Pale Horse, published in Britain six months prior to Graham’s procuring of thallium. Later questioned about the possibility of using the novel as inspiration, he was dismissive. Nonetheless, thallium was virtually unheard of in the UK until The Pale Horse appeared. Christie created a villain who administers thallium and victims who suffer such strange ailments that they seem to be supernaturally cursed.

  Curiously, the man who discovered the element developed a keen interest in spiritualism himself. William Crookes, the 29-year-old publisher and editor of the Chemical News, announced in a March 1861 edition of the periodical that he had found a new element that showed as a bright green line in the spectrum of residues from a sulphuric acid plant. Using a spectrometer, he was able to demonstrate the presence of the element, which he named thallium, from the Latin thallos, meaning ‘green shoot’. Crookes was surprised to hear, one year later, that a French physicist, 42-year-old Claude-Auguste Lamy, had discovered thallium and had isolated it in its purest form, revealing its chemical similarity to potassium. For a time, it seemed that Lamy would be credited with discovering thallium, but both men were awarded medals for their work in identifying and isolating the new element. While working on thallium, Crookes became immersed in spiritualism, largely due to the death of his beloved younger brother. Although he became one of the most well-known and respected scientists of his time, his unashamed interest in the occult brought disapprobation and scorn from his fellow scientists. He managed to repair his tattered reputation to the extent of being named president of the Royal Society but remained secretly involved in spiritualism and was a member of the Ghost Club with Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle.