A Passion for Poison

by Carol Ann Lee

  Thallium remained of little interest until two very different uses for thallium acetate and thallium sulphate were found: the former could be administered orally to remove excessive body hair while the latter was developed as a pesticide. But many of those who were given thallium medically as a depilatory or for treatment of ringworm of the scalp also showed symptoms of severe thallium poisoning: joint pain, numbness in limbs, agonising sensitivity of the feet and insomnia. Accidental overdoses and mistakes in dispensation led to the phasing out of thallium acetate treatment after the Second World War. Thallium pesticides were banned in the US in 1972 but are still sold in other parts of the world.

  Used maliciously or in error, thallium can also induce the sensory abnormalities of paraesthesia, polyneuritis, delirium, convulsions, muscle weakness and intense abdominal pain, leading to coma and death due to cardiac arrest or respiratory failure. Symptoms typically appear within hours or after days or weeks, depending entirely on the amount and frequency of the dose. A teaspoon of thallium sulphate has the power to kill more than 20 people. Difficult to detect, a diagnosis requires confirmation by chemical analysis. Odourless, colourless and tasteless, it is soluble in water and alcohol. Alopecia is the most obvious symptom of chronic thallium poisoning, with complete baldness generally reached within a month. Skin also becomes dry, scaly and white, while transverse bands appear on the fingernails and toenails, usually three or four weeks after ingestion. Thallium can be excreted in urine for two months or more after its administration.

  During the Second World War, thallium was used in the Netherlands as a means of killing the Nazi oppressors; in one instance, the Dutch workforce of an arms manufacturer deliberately added thallium to the water supply of the factory, killing all its German controllers. Decades later, it was used as a coating on American missiles during the Gulf War. On a much smaller scale, thallium has rarely been the poison of choice for the lone murderer, although there are a number of instances where rat poison containing thallium has been used to kill: in Australia, Yvonne Fletcher murdered two husbands via a thallium-infused pesticide, and Caroline Grills killed several members of her family with rat poison. Similarly, in Russia, Vyacheslav Solovyov used thallium as a constituent of rat poison to kill several relatives including his wife and a police investigator. More recently, Florida chemist and ardent Nazi admirer George Trepal added thallium to bottles of Coca-Cola belonging to neighbours whom he disliked; matriarch Peggy Carr died four months after being poisoned in 1988. Operating undercover, detective Susan Gorek befriended Trepal and his wife, attending the murder mystery weekends they liked to help organise. During one visit to their home, she noticed a copy of The Pale Horse on their coffee table. The police investigation, which took two years to complete, thereby earned itself the moniker ‘Pale Horse’. George Trepal was found guilty and sentenced to death. He remains on Florida’s Death Row.

  In England, to date, there has been only one case of deliberate and malicious thallium poisoning pursued in the courts: Graham Young.

  On Good Friday 1962, Graham spiked his stepmother’s evening meal with 20 grains of thallium in its crystalline form.150 It was a huge dose, but Molly had endured such a relentlessly systematic campaign of poisoning that she had built up a hardy resistance. She complained of a stiff neck all week and on Saturday morning woke up with pins and needles, feeling generally unwell. Fred left for work and Winifred had arranged to help Denis decorate his mother’s front room while she was on holiday.

  At 10:30am, Molly called in to see Win, who worked at the Cooperative grocery on Willesden High Street. Graham was with her, but Molly looked pale and sickly. Win asked her what was wrong: ‘She said to me, “I am feeling ill. I’ve been to the doctor, Dr Wills in Neasden Lane. I have pins and needles in my arms. The doctor tells me I have no reflexes in my legs.” She was crying. She said, “I am on my way to Willesden general hospital.” I wanted to go with her, but she would not let me. Graham went with his stepmother to look after her.’151 The two of them travelled to the hospital by bus. When Molly was kept in, Graham returned home to collect her nightclothes and toiletries. ‘Graham came back at 2pm to the shop,’ Win remembered. ‘He said, “They kept Molly in the hospital. They suspect polyneuritis.” He went home.’152

  An apocryphal story recounts how Fred arrived home from work to find Molly in the garden, writhing on the lawn while Graham watched from his bedroom window. The story is hokum, as Fred explained: ‘When I came home that afternoon, Graham was alone in the house. He said, “Mum’s in hospital.” I was just debating with myself whether to go straight along there or wait until the evening visiting hour when a policeman knocked at the door. He said I was wanted at the hospital immediately. By the time I got there, Molly was dead.’153

  Molly was two months past her 40th birthday, which she had been too ill to celebrate. Win recalled hearing the news after she returned home from work at 5pm: ‘My brother Fred came up to our house in a taxi and informed me that Molly was dead. I believe it was about 3:30pm that day when she died.’154 Winifred was aghast when she arrived home, and Graham appeared to be distraught: ‘He kept crying. Molly had a lot of musical boxes in her room and he kept going in there, opening the boxes, making them play and crying. He went with my father everywhere that week. He went with father to the funeral directors, and to get the result of the post-mortem and to make the arrangements for the cremation.’155

  A post-mortem was conducted by Dr Donald Teare, the pathologist who had investigated the deaths of Timothy Evans’ wife and baby at 10 Rillington Place. Teare identified ‘compression of the spinal cord due to acute prolapse of the cervical disc’ as the cause of death, thought to be a result of the accident Molly had been involved in the previous year.156 ‘We all thought her death had or could have had something to do with that,’ Win told detectives. ‘Graham appeared to be very upset at his stepmother’s death.’157

  Fred was in no state to plan a funeral by himself; depleted by his own illness, the loss of another young wife was almost more than he could bear. Graham helped, suggesting cremation rather than a burial for Molly, and his father agreed. Between Molly’s death on Saturday and her funeral at Golders Green crematorium on Thursday, 26 April, Fred was repeatedly sick, whether from trauma or his son’s ‘experiments’.

  The gathering after the funeral was not without incident. Molly’s brother-in-law, John Miller, who lived in Fulham, attended her wake at the house on North Circular Road. Fred recalled: ‘Graham’s Uncle John – actually my wife’s sister’s husband – became violently ill after putting some mustard pickle on his ham sandwich. Fortunately, he was the only one to eat the pickle and he recovered sufficiently to drive himself home later.’158 When Graham was eventually taken into custody, Win received a telephone call from the police welfare service: ‘[She] told me not to touch the mustard pickle or Andrews Liver Salts, as they contained antimony. Graham had apparently told her. This mustard pickle was that which was on the table at the meal after Molly’s funeral.’159

  Molly’s ashes were scattered at Golders Green. ‘Graham was apparently very upset,’ Sandra recalled. ‘He cried a lot. I can remember at Aunt Molly’s funeral, he cried a lot. About a week after this my uncle Fred became seriously ill.’160 Before then, however, Fred asked his son and daughter to join him at the kitchen table, where he told them: ‘We must all muck in and help to keep the home running. I’ve worked all the overtime for the past ten years to pay off the house and now it’s mine. If anything happens to me, at least you will have a home. I am in a good superannuation fund and you will not be left destitute.’161 While Fred later surmised he had just signed his own death warrant, telling Graham he had ‘something to come when I died’, his daughter believed the conversation had no influence on her brother’s actions.162

  Winifred had her last serious bout of illness the following day, Friday: ‘I was quite bad, I was ill for a morning until about 2pm. I couldn’t go to work. The symptoms were pretty much the same, although I wasn’t
sick this time.’163 She had drunk a cup of tea at breakfast but hadn’t noticed a tang. However, Graham admitted that after Molly’s death, ‘I started putting antimony tartrate on foods at home and in milk and water.’164

  His words become more significant when read in tandem with his father’s statement. The next day, Saturday, 28 April, Fred and Graham called on the Millers in Fulham. Fred’s brother-in-law had recovered from his illness and Fred returned home reassured. He picked at the midday meal but felt nauseous afterwards. ‘By that time I was hardly eating anything, only milk and water,’ he recalled, still unaware that Graham had poisoned both substances with antimony tartrate.165 He forced himself to work on Monday, but on Thursday he called the doctor, despite believing his illness was due to being ‘upset through losing my wife. I was upset about losing my wife. I thought it was everything coming on top of me.’166 He remained in bed until his appointment the following day. Dr Wills could find nothing wrong and agreed with Fred that the grieving process was still so raw that he might well be experiencing physical illness as a result.

  That evening, Friday, 4 May 1962, while their father slept fitfully in bed, Winifred and Graham watched television together. Graham had already chosen a BBC programme to watch following Dr Kildare and The Rag Trade. After the news, at 9:25pm, they settled down to watch They Hanged My Saintly Billy, based on Robert Graves’ 1957 study of the ‘prince of poisons’, William Palmer. Graham was rapt, apparently glued to the screen as lead actor Patrick Wymark slyly bade his fellow drinkers to ‘choose your poison!’.

  For a time, Win provided food for her brother and his children. ‘Graham used to carry these meals to his father,’ she recalled. ‘Fred suffered severe vomiting, diarrhoea, loss of appetite. Every time he ate, he was sick.’167 On Wednesday, 9 May 1962, Fred felt so ill that he began to be fearful. He managed to reach the surgery, where Dr Lancelot Wills saw him immediately: ‘He was pretty bad. He was vomiting and feeling rather distressed and giddy and I called an ambulance for him to go to hospital for further investigation.’168 Dr Wills was of the opinion that Fred’s vomiting and diarrhoea was ‘precipitated by shock following his wife’s death or by peptic ulcer’.169

  Upon hearing that his father had been rushed to hospital, Graham tried to convince everyone that Fred had poisoned himself out of longing to be reunited with Molly. That he attempted to pass off the illness as a slow suicide was evident in his later comment to Win, ‘I am not silly. Father was supposed to die from a broken heart because of her death.’170 His words chilled Win to the bone, leaving her reeling at the revelation that Graham had intended to kill his father.

  Fred was taken to the casualty department at Willesden general hospital where his wife had died less than a fortnight before. Dr Winston Ince examined him but was unable to reach any definitive diagnosis. He suggested a diet of Benger’s invalid food, which Graham promptly poisoned with antimony sodium tartrate. Watching her father trembling with pain at home that evening, Winifred felt ‘frantic, completely at my wits’ end as to what to do with him. I did think at one stage that he might be sick as a result of grieving over Molly’s death. But as he continued to show no signs of improvement, I asked Auntie Win to go with me to our local doctor again.’171

  The two women visited the surgery the following day, where they were received by Dr Wills. Winifred told the GP that she believed her 14-year-old nephew was poisoning their father. Dr Wills dismissed the idea. ‘He insisted my brother was only emotionally upset,’ Winifred recalled. ‘He would not believe me when I insisted he was being poisoned.’172 As a precaution, Dr Wills contacted Willesden general hospital and arrangements were made for Fred to be admitted to a ward later that day.

  Win had no intention of letting her niece remain at home with Graham. She insisted that Graham should stay where she could keep an eye on him; Winifred left to stay with her boyfriend’s family in Harlesden. Win was shocked by the deterioration in Graham’s behaviour. One night she opened the door to put the milk bottles out and found Graham on the doorstep, standing in silence, staring at her. Sandra had a similar experience: hearing a knock, she answered the door only to find Graham standing there in a sort of trance. He refused to speak to her and passed through the house like a ghost. He also had a habit of staring at them while they watched television and wouldn’t speak at all.

  Win was determined never to allow Graham to visit his father alone. On every visit, he would pull up a chair, then take notes before telling his father how his symptoms would develop. Winifred was flabbergasted by her brother’s behaviour, describing it as ‘completely callous and totally detached, as though he were in no way connected with the suffering figure in the bed – just watching and studying him as though he were an insect or a small animal being experimented upon by a scientist.’173 Family friend Frank Walker was present on another occasion when Graham began arguing with doctors, causing Fred to erupt: ‘Get that boy away from me!’174

  On Sunday, 20 May 1962, matters began coming to a head. The London Hospital Medical College contacted Willesden general hospital: samples of Fred Young’s blood and scalp hair had been examined by their Department of Forensic Medicine, whose tests revealed traces of antimony in the urine and traces of arsenic in the blood. The entire family gathered around Fred’s bedside as the doctors explained the results. All eyes turned to Graham, completely oblivious and pondering aloud, ‘How ridiculous, not being able to tell the difference between arsenic and antimony poisoning.’175 Winifred felt a sharp prickle of unease in her veins.

  On the journey home, Graham kept insisting it was ridiculous that the surgeons were unable to distinguish between antimony and arsenic poisoning. He launched into a description of each, and by the time they had reached the house on Links Road, no one was in any doubt that Graham knew far more than he should. Win felt churned up, as worried for her nephew as for her brother, believing Graham to have been reckless in his experiments rather than deliberately dangerous. Finally, she asked him to be honest with her about it. Graham promised he had done nothing wrong.

  But at the first opportunity, Win searched the room where Graham slept, and his clothing. They failed to check his overcoat, where he kept several phials of poison, and found only a codeine tablet and a homemade plasticine voodoo doll. When Win visited her brother again, while Graham was at school, she kept silent on the matter, even when Fred told her that the doctors had confirmed it was antimony poisoning and he had permanent liver damage. Without blaming Graham, Fred asked his sister to see that his son didn’t visit again. ‘I don’t want him here,’ he said quietly.176

  Win intended to consult Dr Wills before Fred was discharged, with a view to finding out what he thought about Graham. But other events took precedence. When Graham told his schoolfriends that his father was in hospital so soon after his stepmother’s death, Clive Creager spoke to his parents, insisting that Graham had brought about Molly’s demise and Fred’s illness. At the same time, Graham’s science master, Geoffrey Hughes, had been keeping him under observation since the start of the new school term, having noticed something strange in his manner. Hughes knew about the illnesses within Graham’s circle and frequently spotted him poring over medical textbooks.

  At the end of lessons on Monday, 21 May 1962, Hughes checked inside Graham’s desk. He was astonished to find vials and small bottles of toxic substances, together with notes on infamous poisoners and macabre sketches. Hughes sought out headmaster Henry Merkel, who in turn telephoned Dr Lancelot Wills and asked him about the mysterious illnesses plaguing the Young family. The two men agreed that there was only one option.

  The following day was Tuesday, 22 May 1962. After registration, Graham was sent for a careers interview with a representative from the child guidance unit. The man waiting for him was, in fact, an educational psychologist working for the police. He flattered Graham by mentioning his great gift for chemistry, adding that if he put more effort into his maths, then a university scholarship might be possible. He asked Graham if his
father was likely to support a career in the pharmaceutical industry; Graham replied eagerly that he would ask him, then chattered about his love for chemistry and toxicology. Graham left the meeting convinced that he had a glittering pharmaceutical career ahead of him.

  That evening Winifred joined the family at Links Road for a meal. Graham was eager to tell his sister about the supposed careers meeting. As Winifred listened, she was struck by the change in her brother’s behaviour; he seemed ‘more normal than he had in a long time – laughing and joking over the tea table’.177 His bright manner was at odds with the fact that, for the past few days, he had been steadily inhaling ether and ‘the moment he entered a room, the smell emanating from him was almost overpowering’.178