A Passion for Poison

by Carol Ann Lee

  In turn, Mynett stated that his visit to Broadmoor was made following several telephone conversations with Rosalyn Brown and that during the meeting:

  I learned from Dr Udwin that Young had been confined in the institution for a considerable number of years for administering poison to relatives. He described him as the ‘original boy poisoner’. This was the only information which Dr Udwin would supply to me. I was unable to obtain from him any of the background history which I considered necessary in order to carry out my duties. I felt that it was necessary to have this information and as a result of enquiries which I made I was able to obtain certain relevant details. These are included in my record of information on this man which are now in the hands of the probation service at Hemel Hempstead.352

  Asked to clarify the situation further, in a letter dated March 1972, the principal probation officer of Buckinghamshire Probation and After-Care Service stated that he had consulted Mynett, who had provided him with details ‘from memory’, since the Record of Supervision was no longer in his possession. The first meeting with Graham and Rosalyn Brown had been ‘informal and verbal, no papers were passed over to Mr Mynett and no information about background was given’. Regarding Mynett’s visit to Broadmoor, Rosyln Brown had met him alone initially and gave ‘brief verbal information about the offence for which Young has been in Broadmoor’. He then saw Dr Udwin for a discussion lasting five to ten minutes. During this time, Mynett was provided with ‘brief factual information’ and told to be vigilant for any indications that Graham was becoming dependent on alcohol.

  The letter states:

  Dr Udwin said he would see Young every month himself. The case was not, in Mr Mynett’s view, discussed fully. Mr Mynett was particularly anxious to ascertain his powers and responsibilities as a supervisor and to obtain some documentary support for supervision. He was certainly told that, if in any difficulty, he could make immediate contact with Dr Udwin who would, if necessary, recall Young at once. Mr Mynett then saw the social worker again and requested further information. He was given the file to read but gained the impression that this was a concession reluctantly given. Mr Mynett says that it was the social worker and not the doctor who made reports available for reading. Mr Mynett feels there was a general reluctance to give information that was regarded as highly confidential. Mr Mynett’s notes on the record were made from his memory of the reading of the file at the hospital. At no time was any written report or case history or copy of these given to Mr Mynett.353

  In the files on Graham’s case in the National Archives is a letter dated 5 February 1971 – one day after Graham’s release from Broadmoor. In the letter, Robert Mynett addresses Dr Udwin, making it clear that he feels the information he had been given to date was unsatisfactory:

  Thank you for your letter of 3rd February. Unfortunately, the one that informs me of the Home Office authority for Young’s discharge gives me no indication of the Section of an Act of Parliament under which this young man is released. This means that I have no idea of the procedure should he be in trouble and no idea of the strictures that can be placed upon him. Unofficially I assume that he has been released under Section 66 of the Mental Health Act 1959, at the discretion of the Secretary of State, but unless I am informed of this officially, either from yourself or the Home Office, I am unable to take any action under that Section.354

  The decision to release Graham was made after taking into consideration many factors apart from the findings of Broadmoor’s psychiatric team. Chief among these was Graham’s age and how young he had been at the time of his crimes. Acting under the mistaken belief that he had never killed anyone, the authorities also had to take into account the fact that others had committed graver offences yet received more lenient sentencing. The possibility that he might become institutionalised was another key factor.

  The full extent of Reginald Maudling’s involvement in the matter has never been revealed, and it is possible that some of the intricacies of the decision were made on his behalf. Nonetheless, the Home Secretary held the right to consult the Mental Health Review team and other medical opinions before rubber-stamping Graham’s release. He chose not to exercise this option, instead accepting Dr Udwin’s recommendation on its own merits. But writer Anthony Holden makes the point that there were two files at the Home Office’s C3 division, which was responsible for admissions to and discharges from Broadmoor. One contained Udwin and McGrath’s recommendations that Graham should be released. The other held details of his past and the reports made by Fysh and Blair, in which they expressly stated their concerns that Graham was likely to remain a danger to others in perpetuity. According to Holden, the second file was never consulted in relation to the first, and nor were two others: one which contained all the reports compiled by the staff of Broadmoor in regard to Graham, and another which held the records of the senior nursing staff in charge of the ward where Graham was housed.

  The latter included a staff member’s account of an encounter with Graham, who openly boasted of his ambition to become a famous poisoner and his chilling declaration: ‘When I get out, I’m going to kill one person for every year I’ve spent in here.’355

  Graham had served eight years of his recommended 15 or more in Broadmoor. In the strangest of coincidences, within a year of his release he would face exactly eight charges of poisoning.

  Chapter Ten

  POOR, VENOMOUS FOOL, BE ANGRY AND DISPATCH

  ‘T

  HE STRANGEST OF them all,’ was how Joseph Fuller described Graham in relation to the rest of Broadmoor’s population at the time of their incarceration. ‘He was totally insane and, in my opinion, incurable . . . To meet him in the street, you’d think of him as a nice, intelligent, if intense young man . . . but he was as mad as a hatter.’356 While Graham was discharged from Broadmoor on 4 February 1971, Fuller had to wait another two years before the Home Secretary authorised his release.

  Graham’s family had been collectively unconvinced that he would actually be released when the date came around; Winifred wrote to her father with the news that Graham was indeed home, but her letter didn’t reach him in Sheerness for a couple of days. One month later, a Broadmoor official knocked on Fred Young’s door to inform him that Graham was expected to be discharged from hospital imminently. A disgruntled and unimpressed Fred replied that his son had already been to stay with him. Scotland Yard had been informed before Graham’s own father, and they had previously passed the news on to Thames Valley police that he was in their area of Slough.

  It was Thursday when Graham left Broadmoor and he had arranged to spend the weekend with his sister in Hemel Hempstead. His course in Slough began the following Monday. ‘Again I had trouble with him over his getting drunk,’ Winifred recalled, justifying Dr Udwin’s concern about Graham’s reliance on alcohol. He had again accompanied Denis to the pub, where he held forth in eloquent if inebriated fashion on the logistics of the Great War, Hitler’s leadership of Nazi Germany and the inadequacies of the British government’s dealing with the situation in Ulster. Graham declared that if he were prime minister, he would instigate pogroms and utilise every ounce of force in the British Army. Heath could learn a great deal from Hitler’s handling of insurgence in Warsaw: raze the place to the ground, brick by brick. True, he admitted while accepting another pint from one of Denis’ friends, a lot of innocent blood would be shed but that was war, where the end justified the means, which in this case meant destroying the IRA. Denis and Winifred reluctantly agreed that their decision to suggest Graham find himself lodgings had been the correct one and on Saturday they helped him move into a hostel on Slough’s Bath Road.

  Affiliated to the training centre two miles away, the hostel offered single rooms with breakfast and evening meals during the week and full board at weekends. Thirty-four-year-old divorcé Trevor Sparkes was among the other residents; he had been on the storekeeping course since 8 January 1971. ‘For two weeks I was the only person on this particular course,’ he rec
alled. ‘Then I was joined by a chap, Graham Young.’357 The two men struck up an immediate friendship, spending their days on the course at the government training centre and their evenings drinking either at the hostel or at the Grapes pub in the centre of Slough. The only time they were apart for any significant period was at the weekends, when Sparkes went home to his parents’ house in Welwyn Garden City. He was a keen footballer and usually played every Saturday and Sunday before returning to the hostel.

  Sparkes found Graham to be ‘a very intelligent person, in fact bordering on a genius. He was very interested in war history, medicine, which he seemed to be well versed in, and politics. He used to frequently visit the public library in Slough and also at weekends, he did not go home, a library somewhere in London.’ Sparkes also mentions in his witness statement that Graham made his own fireworks ‘which were very effective’.358

  Those elements – excessive drinking, frequent trips to the library to borrow books on war and medicine, and breaking up shop-bought fireworks to make them even more explosive – indicated that Graham remained essentially unchanged. He had managed to convince the authorities otherwise and would go on doing so for some months to come, but in truth his inability and unwillingness to jettison his obsession for poison had already manifested, and did so within 48 hours of his discharge from Broadmoor.

  Graham had introduced himself to Sparkes on the day he moved into the hostel: Saturday, 6 February 1971. That evening, he invited his new friend to his room, eager to discuss the routine of the hostel and the training course that lay ahead. He offered Sparkes a glass of water and they carried on chatting. But during the night, Sparkes was awoken by a violent urge to be sick and rushed to the toilet. The vomiting was accompanied by diarrhoea that lasted four days, accompanied by pain in his testicles. Sparkes left for Welwyn Garden City on Sunday morning, where he was playing in a cup match.

  ‘I started playing the match but by half-time I developed pains in my lower abdomen,’ he recalled. ‘I could only think that it was a pulled muscle and I carried on in pain through the second half and finished the match. I returned to the hostel that night. I was still in pain. I continued work during the following week and the pain started shifting down into my groin.’359 The question of which poison Graham had used, together with when and where he obtained it, vexed Hertfordshire constabulary when they came to investigate him at the year’s end; the earliest sale of poison to him they could find was on 24 April 1971, almost three months after Sparkes fell ill. On another occasion, Sparkes accepted bromide from Graham, but his recollection of that was hazy: ‘One time when I was coming home for an interview, he said to me, “You should take some bromide, it will settle your nerves,” and he mixed me up some in a tumbler and I drank it.’360 This time, Sparkes suffered no ill effects.

  Graham began his three-month course in industrial storekeeping on Monday, 8 February. The government training centre, where he was based, was open to everyone over the age of 18 who wanted to learn a skilled trade. Graham’s hours, recorded on clock card number 497 at the Buckingham Avenue plant, were 6am until 4:45pm every Monday through Thursday, while Friday was a shorter day: 8am until 3:30pm. Ernest Nicholls had been manager of the scheme since November 1966 and described Graham as ‘a very good trainee . . . very keen and industrious and made satisfactory progress through-out the course, and there were no complaints regarding his conduct, either in or out of the training centre.’361 The course itself was run by William (Ted) James, who had direct responsibility for the trainees. Trevor Sparkes remembered that Graham also struck up a friendship with his supervisor and visited him at his home, yet James does not appear to have been interviewed by the police during their late 1971 investigation. Curiously, the Hertfordshire constabulary report on the case, dated 1971, notes that ‘to many at the centre Young was known as Fred, being the usual abbreviation of his second Christian name.’362 He had never previously asked anyone to call him by his father’s name.

  Robert Mynett called on Graham at the Bath Road hostel at 9pm the following day, Tuesday, 9 February, to find out how he was settling down. They then met at weekly interviews over the coming month, with a short gap when Mynett himself was on holiday. Afterwards, their meetings continued at fortnightly intervals. He found Graham to be ‘a nervous person, always cooperative and anxious to keep his appointments with me’.363 Well-spoken and articulate, he was also clean and tidy. Mynett largely ignored Graham’s political spoutings but became concerned about the amount of ‘cheap British wine’ he consumed: ‘I noticed that he always had at least one bottle of wine in his room. More often than not, he would have one bottle open and another standing unopened on his chest of drawers. On one occasion he offered me a drink of VP British ruby wine, this I declined. Dr Udwin had indicated to me that there might be danger of Young becoming dependent on alcohol if he was allowed to frequent public houses. Accordingly, I reported his drinking to the authorities at Broadmoor.’364 Mynett’s other concern was his choice of ‘morbid’ reading material, much of which gave ‘graphic accounts of atrocities committed during the Second World War’.365

  More worryingly, during one of their meetings at the hostel where Graham knocked back several glasses of wine, he suddenly began talking about how ‘comparatively simple’ it was to manufacture a wide range of poisons and ‘that it did not require specialist equipment’.366 Mynett kept a detailed record of all his findings. Dr Udwin later told the Home Office that ‘in the early stages’ he had kept ‘in very close contact’ with Mynett regarding Graham’s progress.367 While Udwin also insisted that he saw Graham on several occasions and that he seemed ‘entirely settled’, the sum total of Graham’s follow-up care from Broadmoor comprised three meetings and (later) two telephone conversations with Udwin, in tandem with Mynett’s visits.368

  In another room at the hostel, Trevor Sparkes was still suffering the effects of his weekend illness and was in sufficient pain to book a doctor’s visit. Like Graham, he was registered with Dr Mark Binnie, whose surgery was on the same road as the hostel. No abnormalities were detected and Sparkes was given painkillers in an effort to subdue the strained feelings in his groin. But that weekend, when he was at his parents’ home, his face suddenly became swollen ‘like a balloon’.369 His mother sent for the doctor, who prescribed antibiotics, which reduced the swelling. The pains in his groin persisted, however, and during the next weekend away he came to regret his decision to play football: ‘During the course of the game I suddenly felt peculiar all over. I seemed to lose all control of my leg and thigh muscles and I had to go off.’370 The sensation subsided and he returned to the hostel.

  Graham had also been absent from the hostel that weekend. His Uncle Jack had experienced a long period of ill health, which included suffering from jaundice and problems with his gall bladder, which necessitated an operation. Graham travelled to Sheerness, then accompanied Win to Rochester, where his uncle was recovering from his operation in Bartholomew hospital. Afterwards, he saw his cousin Sandra at the house in Sheerness. She was now a mother of two boys – five-year-old Anthony and three-year-old Andrew – who quite happily clambered all over Graham. He enjoyed their company, but Sandra recalled his main topic of conversation was a detailed analysis of her father’s operation.

  On Thursday, 4 March, Jack suffered a relapse when his gallbladder stitches burst. Sandra remembers Graham arriving at Sheerness that day ‘in a shocking state ... ranting and raving’ about the doctors’ ‘stupidity’ and insisting that they ought to have realised a man with a history of bronchitis might burst his stitches.371 Graham wept copiously, much to Win and Sandra’s surprise, although they too feared that Jack might not survive. He travelled with his aunt and cousin on the bus to visit the hospital again. During the 45-minute journey, Graham kept up a steady discourse on the bubonic plague, until Sandra told him to shut up because he was upsetting her mother. He piped down and was quiet and solicitous for the remainder of his time in Sheerness, returning to Slough on the Sunday eveni
ng once they were all assured that Jack had made a good recovery. Normally Graham spent his weekends with Winifred in Hemel Hempstead, where for the most part he was no trouble, except for the odd occasion when he drank too much again.

  Trevor Sparkes continued to suffer a number of ailments and again visited Dr Binnie in the second week of March, when Graham had returned from his stay in Sheerness. Dr Binnie diagnosed a urinary infection and a substantial growth of E. coli, for which he was prescribed antibiotics. Sparkes’ health deteriorated further after an evening spent drinking VP wine with Graham. He had already been sick again on that particular afternoon, vomiting twice, before accepting his friend’s invitation to take his mind off things with a chat. ‘I was up most of the night with sickness and diarrhoea and eventually only got to sleep through exhaustion,’ Sparkes recalled. ‘I was still bad over the next four or five days, not being able to eat or keep anything in my stomach.’372 The hostel had its own sick bay, where Sparkes was given a bottle of milk of magnesia, but another week and a half would pass before the vomiting and diarrhoea subsided.

  Trevor Sparkes may not have been the only victim of Graham’s poisoning habit during his first weeks of freedom. In their report on his crimes during that year, Hertfordshire constabulary found that during his time at the training centre there was a ‘high incidence’ of sickness among the students and staff, although Graham denied administering poison to anyone there other than Sparkes.373 Further inquiries showed that five men and one woman were ill during this period with symptoms that suggested poisoning. Leonard Wickham and Charles Bull joined Graham in his room on 6 May to celebrate the fact that he would complete his course the following day. Graham opened a bottle of wine and handed the two men a glass each. Bull was fine after sipping from his glass, but Wickham almost immediately suffered vomiting and diarrhoea. He assumed that the alcohol had reacted badly with the valium he had recently been prescribed. But during the subsequent police investigation, Wickham was seen by a police surgeon, Dr Torrens, who found him to be ‘suffering from loss of hair’.374 Laboratory samples were taken, but due to the length of time that had elapsed, no trace of poison could be found, if that indeed was the cause.