A Passion for Poison

by Carol Ann Lee

  That first visit was difficult for all of them, Graham included. Winifred could not recall afterwards how the conversation went or what was said, only that it was ‘rather awkward and stiff and then very emotional by turns’.245 They were all stricken by the physical change in Graham and noticed the lethargy in his movements and slurred speech. Graham explained that this was due to his medication, before going on to detail its medical properties and additional side effects. He told them that he loathed taking the sedatives but had no choice; occasionally the drugs would be forcibly administered.

  During that first visit, Graham suddenly made a revelation. It was Sandra who recalled most clearly how the conversation ran. Her cousin leaned forward in his seat and said quietly but without any emotion: ‘I gave Molly 20 grains of thallium the night before she died. I put it on a trifle. I knew she would die the next day because I gave her so much. And I gave Daddy antimony. They’re completely different poisons. One stops the kidneys from working – that’s antimony. The other disintegrates the bones.’246 He sat back again. ‘That’s why they didn’t find out.’247

  For a moment no one spoke. Then his aunt asked, ‘But . . . how on earth did you have the nerve to go with your daddy to collect Molly’s death certificate?’

  Graham’s response was immediate: ‘Because they would never have found out. I wasn’t stupid enough to give them both the same. Daddy’s symptoms were different, and if he’d died, people would just have thought he’d pined away because of Molly’s death.’248 He paused. ‘I am sorry for all I’ve done.’249

  None of the family knew what to do with this appalling information, and if there were any discussions between them about speaking to the police, these came to nothing. There was a collective sense among the relatives that Graham was mentally ill, hence his incarceration in Broadmoor, and that he would only be released if he were deemed no longer a danger to anyone. Nothing could bring Molly back either, and Graham had made a private confession, having clearly had the opportunity to tell the police that he was responsible for his stepmother’s death, yet chose to remain silent on the matter. The information stayed within the family unit for the time being.

  Although Winifred never mentioned having been present during that conversation, she recalled her brother apologising several times for the actions that had led him to Broadmoor and felt that he was completely sincere when he said it. The fact that he expressed remorse gave her hope for the future.

  Graham told at least one other patient that he had killed his stepmother. A man whom Winifred refers to in her memoir by the pseudonym ‘Joseph Fuller’, and with whom she spoke at length about her brother’s time in Broadmoor, afterwards told her that not only had Graham admitted killing Molly, but that he had wanted people to know he was guilty in order to gain infamy. Fuller clearly remembered how Graham had delivered the information with perfect serenity before adding, ‘She was my first successful murder victim by poison.’250

  Fuller, committed after pleading guilty to writing threatening letters, was an alcoholic in his late 50s who had been referred for psychiatric treatment and aversion therapy but received neither. He remained in Broadmoor for five years nonetheless, where he slept two doors down from Graham on the admissions block. He remembered Graham as ‘a small lad, about five feet or so, tall, slim and pale, but always very smart in his Broadmoor issue sports jacket, open neck shirt and grey flannels’.251 They struck up a friendship of sorts, and in conversation – usually dominated by politics and poison – Fuller found Graham ‘very intense’, animated and mentally mature for his age.252 Fuller realised that Graham’s reluctance to socialise was partly due to his disdain for anyone he regarded as beneath his own level of intelligence.

  Within a very short time of Graham’s confession to Fuller, there would be an inquiry at Broadmoor into the death of another inmate. This particular man had incurred Graham’s wrath, leading many to believe that he was to be Graham’s second ‘successful murder victim by poison’.

  Chapter Seven

  THOU MIXTURE RANK, OF MIDNIGHT WEEDS COLLECTED

  O

  N 9 JULY 1962, the Daily Express reported that the ‘Poison Boy’ had been the subject of discussion at the latest meeting of the Berkshire education committee: ‘Graham still has a year’s schooling to do. Mr Trevor Whitfield, Berkshire education director, said yesterday, “We have not yet been approached by the Broadmoor authorities but we feel we should be prepared to handle this case. We have visiting tutors for children who cannot attend schools – usually for health reasons – and Young would be in this category. Special facilities could be provided for him if the Broadmoor authorities believe they would be useful.”’253

  Winifred was informed that Graham’s IQ score was the second highest in Broadmoor, surpassed only by an inmate who was a former mathematics professor. Consultations with the Berkshire education committee resulted in their director of special services, Dudley Fiske, being tasked with finding a private tutor for Graham. But the few teachers deemed suitable were unwilling to take on the job and discussions regarding a solution reached the Minister of Health, Enoch Powell, whose views on race and immigration made him one of Graham’s few living idols. Eventually a tutor was found: former wartime naval officer ‘Taffy’ Williams, described by inmate Peter Thompson as ‘a tall, fuzzy-haired Welshman’ who was so fervently patriotic that whatever the subject he taught – even German – he would find a way to introduce his motherland into the lesson.254 A special ‘school room’ to allow other inmates to attend was set up in the admission block, but Graham was rarely there and the number of pupils tended to hover at no more than ten. Those who did attend enjoyed the classes, but one inmate recalled that, as far as Graham was concerned, the lessons were ‘of little use to him – Graham had forgotten more than the Welshman could teach him.’255 He successfully sat his O levels as a result, however, before flatly refusing to attend any more classes. Much to the surprise of the county education officer, Graham’s decision was supported by Broadmoor’s senior staff, who unanimously declared their belief that he would seek out those subjects that interested him among the books in the hospital library. They were correct – but the consequences were devastating.

  Patients were allowed to send two letters per week and could receive any number that passed the screening process. Graham wrote regularly to all his family, apart from his father, and in his earliest letters to his sister, he frequently expressed fury at the loud snoring of another patient, John Berridge.

  Resident in Broadmoor since the summer of 1959, Berridge was a former member of the RAF and had been stationed in West Germany during the mid-1950s. He claimed that he had been approached there by a Communist agent, to whom he gave confidential information in exchange for money. He then returned home on leave to South Wales, where his 42-year-old father Leonard reacted to the news of what he had done by threatening to expose him to the government. At 6am the following morning – 25 April 1959 – John Berridge took a 12-bore shotgun into his parents’ bedroom, shooting both his father and mother Irene, 38, to death. Tried at Pembrokeshire assizes, John Berridge was found guilty but insane. On 22 June 1959, aged 19 years old, he was sent to Broadmoor, where on 6 August 1962, he was discovered unconscious on his bed. A post-mortem found traces of cyanide in his stomach; Berridge must have ingested it the night before his death and the question uppermost on everyone’s lips was not why but how.

  Growing along the vegetable plots in the farmland surrounding Broadmoor were many laurel bushes and a person well-versed in poison would know that it was possible to distil cyanide from laurel leaves. A mere teaspoon would be enough to annihilate half of the inmates. A still was found in one of the vegetable plots and had been used by someone to make moonshine from potatoes – it could easily have been put to use for distilling cyanide instead. The authorities strongly doubted that Berridge himself had done so, hence their suspicions arose that the cyanide had been administered deliberately by another patient. Several inmates claimed to h
ave done the deed but were clearly incapable of doing so. Following preliminary investigations, every inmate, bar the 30 men housed behind the locked double wood-and-steel doors of Block 6, the maximum-security wing, were questioned. The 70 men on Berridge’s own block were examined more closely, yet without definitive proof.

  When Winifred Young heard that the patient who had so irritated her brother was dead from cyanide poisoning, she wondered fearfully whether Graham was responsible. She asked him about it during her next visit and was only slightly reassured when he denied it. He did, however, admit to having distilled weak hydrocyanic acid from the Portuguese laurel that grew in Broadmoor’s gardens, and a report from the hospital states that on three occasions Graham was ‘caught teaching other inmates how to produce poisons by fermenting food in sealed containers’.256 Thirty-eight-year-old Sidney Henry, another patient and friend of Berridge, doubted that Graham was to blame. Henry was released from Broadmoor in February 1964 and told crime writer Richard Whittington-Egan that Berridge himself claimed to have received a phial of cyanide in a bag of sugar from an agent in the KGB. Whittington-Egan doubted the story and regarded Graham as a more likely suspect. In the Broadmoor archives, John Berridge’s death is recorded in a single word: suicide.

  Graham remained as obsessed as he had always been by poison. He made no secret of it, even to his family when they visited. His aunt Win recalled: ‘On every occasion the conversation always turned to poison. His sister Winifred used to visit Graham about three times a year too, and I know that he has had several conversations with Winifred about poisons.’257 If he wasn’t talking about poison, then he would soon mention the various ailments of his fellow inmates. ‘He took a great interest in sick patients. One doctor told me, “He had all the patients diagnosed before I even got to the ward to examine them. I had to brush up on my medical knowledge before I talked to Young.”’258 Graham received a small number of other visitors and they also remembered the endless loop of his conversations; even those discussions that seemed innocuous were generally found to have the same underlying theme, as Frank Walker recalled: ‘He used to say to me that he wanted matches. Which, at that time, didn’t ring a bell to me. But I presume that you can make poison out of matches, can’t you?’259 And indeed, Walker subsequently discovered that phosphorus was poisonous.

  During their first visits, Graham’s family remembered that he had one other obsession: his trial. He pressed Win to bring him every newspaper clipping she could find in which he was mentioned, but she refused, feeling very disturbed by how proud he was of the publicity he had received. Her daughter Sandra confirms: ‘He would talk about the press reports. He wanted to see them. He hadn’t been allowed to read them. He kept on about this on several occasions.’260

  Apart from poison, and discussing the other patients, Graham’s greatest interest remained Hitler and the Nazis. One of his most prized possessions was a brick from Hitler’s former home at the Berchtesgaden; it was given to him by an elderly lady who became a regular visitor after reading about his trial. A former social worker, she had travelled to Austria and Bavaria, where she had acquired the brick, then parcelled it up for Graham, who was at first perplexed and then thrilled when she explained its provenance. Within a short while, he had grown a wispy moustache and swept his hair to one side in imitation of Hitler; he wore a swastika armband and on a chain around his neck hung a brass swastika that he had made himself in the workshop. He would lift the pendant to his lips and kiss it repeatedly to the disgust of most of the other inmates. His family continued to ignore his worshipping of the Nazis, with Winifred pointedly telling him that the moustache made him look more like an uptight bank clerk than the former führer.

  This behaviour marked the start of Graham’s most fractious period in which he refused to cooperate with the authorities in any sense and rarely interacted with the other inmates, preferring instead to listen endlessly to Wagner’s music and repeatedly read Lord Russell of Liverpool’s Scourge of the Swastika and William L Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. His grandmother Hannah had left him

  £50 in her will and he spent some of it on books, music and funding the National Front. He wore the Party’s badge on his lapel and was a vocal supporter of Enoch Powell, leading to furious rows with his sister.

  Graham refused to participate in communal activities and preferred sitting with a book in an annexe near the common room until everyone retired to their rooms for the night. He refused to accept that he was mentally ill, referring to his fellow inmates as ‘goons’.261 His Broadmoor notes record that, for some time after his admission, he remained withdrawn, emotionally ‘unmoveable’ and prone to expressing paranoid ideas.262 He also suffered from hallucinations each night just prior to falling asleep, and these together with his other behaviours led doctors to consider the possibility of schizophrenia. Although ECT was mooted, it was never administered, and Graham’s treatment was restricted to one-on-one therapy and sedatives.

  His physical appearance continued to change as a result of his emotional state and medication. Increasingly sallow-skinned and bloated, he developed a habit of rapid finger-tapping and fidgeting while his speech also became slurred and slow. He told his relatives that consultations with psychiatrists interested him and even led him to attempt self-analysis. He was fascinated by one doctor’s revelation that the subconscious took over during sleep, causing a person to behave differently, because the conscious mind formed a barrier to subconscious urges during waking hours. Graham’s response to the doctor was: ‘But I do things when I’m awake that normal people would only do while they’re asleep.’263 When he told the doctor that he was carrying out instructions given to him by voices in his head, the doctor explained this as his alter ego, and that his subconscious and consciousness had become one, leaving him without a moral compass. Graham explained that the voices in his head commanded him to use poison as a means of murder on a mass scale. Much later – after his release from Broadmoor – he claimed that these voices urged him to present himself as a model patient in order to gain early release to fulfil his mission.

  Graham expressed remorse to his family several times. On one occasion Winifred asked him if he truly understood the wickedness of his actions, to which he replied earnestly, ‘Oh yes, I do – and if I could go back and undo it, I would.’264 He offered an explanation that sounded very much as if it had been put to him by a doctor: that he had poisoned his immediate family because he so longed for the love he had known as a baby with his aunt and uncle. But that failed to account for his poisoning of Chris Williams, or indeed his workmates in years to come. Sandra had always been convinced that Graham had known exactly what he was doing and that if his remorse was genuine, he would no longer have any interest in poison. Most of the books he borrowed or obtained while in Broadmoor were directly about the subject, or in some way connected. Winifred was initially pleasantly surprised when he told her he had a new obsession: Roman and Italian history. But his conversation about both revolved around the myriad cases of poisoning in the Roman Empire and assassinations by the same means in early Italy.

  His fixation was evident in the most mundane matters. Patients were allowed to purchase coffee, tea, sugar, biscuits and other items from the canteen to keep in screw-top jars. Fuller noticed that Graham had removed the labels from his canisters, replacing ‘tea’ with ‘potassum cyanide’, ‘sugar’ with ‘strychnine’, ‘powdered milk’ with ‘strophanthin’ and labelling others ‘sulphuric acid’, ‘chloroform’ and ‘vitrol’. Rather than forbid the practice, staff teased him about it.

  In addition to Dr Patrick McGrath, Graham saw several other doctors while in Broadmoor. The psychiatrist in charge of his case was Edgar Leon Udwin, who had joined the hospital staff shortly before Graham’s own arrival. Born into a Jewish family in Johannesburg, South Africa, on 28 March 1918, Udwin arrived in London after the Second World War, beginning his post-university life with a six-month stint at Hammersmith graduate hospital. Following his
marriage in 1949, Udwin and his bride chose to remain in England. Deciding that psychiatry was his true vocation, he joined Horton hospital, Epsom, as a registrar in 1949, when the premises were being renovated from the shell of a war hospital into a modern psychiatric unit. Udwin made a vital contribution to its success and stayed in his post for 13 years until leaving for the position of consultant at Broadmoor. In his free time, he ran a clinic for children with severe learning difficulties. Like McGrath, he took a special interest in Graham, whom he regarded as particularly challenging. Udwin noted that during Graham’s first weeks in Broadmoor:

  his behaviour became so deviant that he had to be moved from the Admission Ward to Monmouth House and there he remained a centre of disaffection for a very considerable time.265 His small size and his youth led him to foment disorder in non-violent ways in order to preserve some sort of prominence. He was always in small bits of mischief, always threatening to concoct the most horrifying poisons because he had learned that this upset patients and staff and even talked about black magic to the more impressionable patients to upset them further. He formed alliances, always with older and rather stupid men whom he could influence. For instance, at one point he participated in sending me a message regarding the ease with which nicotine could be got out of cigarettes and used as a poison. At a later stage he got amongst a group of psychopaths and had to be warned not to stir up mischief and finally he had to be removed from them but later he was tearful and asked to get back.266