A Passion for Poison

by Carol Ann Lee

  ‘He seemed terribly lonely,’ she remembered. ‘There was something even a little pathetic in the sad little pride he took in his smart appearance.’416 He usually wore the same few items of clothing: black, pointed shoes with laces, corduroy trousers and a dark green shirt with a lighter green tie. But one day Diana was queuing in a café in Hemel Hempstead and Graham sidled up next to her, wearing a handsome military-style raincoat. ‘What do you think?’ he asked, patting the buttoned flaps of his jacket. ‘How do you like my new coat?’

  ‘It’s lovely,’ she replied, and he beamed at her.417 They developed something like friendship – but not quite, and she often felt uneasy around him in a way she could not describe. He told her that he visited his sister twice a week in Hemel Hempstead and was a regular at a pub he referred to as the Great Harry and also at the Halfway House on Newhouse Road corner, where he would meet a physician friend from West Hertfordshire for a pie and a pint or read a book while enjoying a beer. On occasion, she and Graham shared a genuine laugh, such as when he left the stores for a few minutes and asked her, when he returned, if she had missed him; Diana teasingly replied that he wasn’t to get it into his head that she fancied him. For the first time she saw him laugh properly, but otherwise it was difficult to get on unfeigned friendly terms when she felt ‘his talk was always of death, wars, spooky films, murders, etc. I found all his talk was morbid.’418

  Sometimes Graham bought a transistor radio into the stores but tuned it into a station that seemed to play only the most solemn music, never pop or the biggest hits of the summer: ‘Knock Three Times’, ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ and ‘Get It On’. He no longer wore the swastika he had fashioned himself in the handicrafts workshop in Broadmoor, instead favouring a skull-and-crossbones ring as his only piece of jewellery, but he still talked incessantly about the Nazis and their ideology. Even something as innocuous as the office Christmas party brought Hitler to the forefront of his mind when he heard it was compulsory for everyone to wear fancy dress to the Swan in Boxmoor.

  ‘Oh, Diana,’ he said excitedly, ‘can you imagine me sitting in the back of the Rover bus with all my ribbons and medals on my uniform and my little Hitler’s moustache, coming from the Market Square?’

  She rolled her eyes: ‘They’d bloody well chuck you off before you get to the Swan!’

  He grinned, ‘I wonder what Laurie and Eileen said if I walked in the Halfway House like that.’

  He gave a rare deep chuckle and said, ‘Should I come as Dracula with my two front teeth?’ He mimicked fangs and a ghastly smile, then shook his head, ‘No, I think I’d rather be Hitler.’419

  The Halfway House was one of Graham’s most regular haunts, largely because of its convenience – literally at the end of the road from his workplace. One of the barmaids there, Selina Wilson, saw nothing of the face Graham showed to Diana Smart or other female colleagues; she felt that he was a misogynist because ‘whenever I went to take his glass for a refill, he would ignore me and pretend he had finished drinking. But when the landlord himself appeared, he would leap up and ask for another pint.’420 Graham’s closeness to his female relatives, especially his aunt Win, and his tenuous female friendships past and then present, ultimately belie the idea that he detested women. Undoubtedly, he had difficulties in forming anything more than a friendship with the females he met through work or in his spare time, and he never took part in the ribald camaraderie that sometimes occurred at Hadlands. In her memoir, Winifred refers to the press speculation about her brother’s apparent lack of interest in women, simply feeling that he found most company – male or female – disappointing, because few people were able to keep up with his intelligence or wanted to discuss the subjects that so engrossed him. In her view, he was almost certainly heterosexual and could have enjoyed a relationship had he been able to meet a woman on his intellectual level. There were hints that he yearned for companionship; he once asked Diana if she thought he had nice eyes, and when she in turn enquired about whether or not he had a girlfriend, he told her that he had had girlfriends in the past but was now happy in his own company.

  Graham’s probation officer, Susan Vidal, raised the subject in her notes, musing:

  [He] quite often goes to a local pub where he sits and drinks and smokes, getting into superficial conversation with the barmaid or barman, and possibly striking up conversation with other people in the pub . . . I would imagine his relationships with women on a sexual level are non-existent. This is something we have not discussed and I could imagine that he might be deeply hurt if he developed a relationship with a girlfriend which then fell through. Very early in our contact he did once mention the possibility of marriage. This was in relation to a suggestion from me that he put his name on the local housing list for a batchelor [sic] flat.

  A few weeks later she wrote: ‘He clearly values our sessions and would, I think, like to have more of my time . . . I think it is likely that Mr Young has already become quite attached to me and I feel that we may have to work through this before I can make our contact fortnightly instead of weekly.’421

  Graham’s frequent trips to the pub continued to concern his sister, who recalled: ‘He was drinking heavily and I had a row with him about it. He used the White Horse at Leverstock Green and King Harry and the Rose and Crown in Hemel Hempstead. He used to sit in there and read whilst he had his pint. After my having a row with him about his drinking he never came back to my house again after drinking. He still visited me.’422 Winifred was worried, as Dr Udwin had been, that Graham used alcohol as a crutch; she thought that he might be fearful, among other things, of his colleagues discovering he had been in Broadmoor, but when she raised the matter, he led her to believe that Hadlands knew all about his past, telling her that it had come up when he first visited the factory and they asked why there were no stamps on his insurance card; he told Winifred that he had explained the Hadlands job would be his first because he had suffered a nervous breakdown after leaving school. He added that he had told them they were welcome to look into his background, that they had done so, and he had been surprised, therefore, when he was offered the job.

  In her 12 May 1971 report on her meetings with Graham, Susan Vidal also referred to his increasing dependence on alcohol. On a positive note, she felt that he had ‘slowly relaxed and accepted me as a person to whom he could talk’, ‘spoken about his offence and circumstances leading up to it’ and had ‘been extremely conscious not to break the conditions of his licence and has let me know whenever anything unusual has occurred’. He had made a couple of friendships through Hadlands but she judged these in less successful terms than he did, feeling them to be ‘fairly transitory’ and which might even have ‘tended to push him back into his shell a little’. She was pessimistic about his alcohol intake and especially, ‘his liking for cheap wine. I do not know to what extent he drinks VP cherry wine, but he always seems to have a bottle handy . . . the danger that exists at the moment is that if left too much to his own devices the loneliness he experiences will drive him into a bottle. My colleagues in Hemel Hempstead will have a copy of this report and I assume that they will take note of what I have said.’423

  Miss Vidal sent a copy of her report to the other agencies involved in Graham’s release. Upon reading it, Mynett noted optimistically that their client’s mental health ‘seems to be more relaxed than he was two and a half months ago. I have not examined him for bodily health, having no qualifications to do so. Nothing unusual in Graham Young’s conduct has occurred.’424

  Mynett was sorely mistaken. The ‘excellent health’ of Graham’s kindly superior in the stores, Bob Egle, had begun to falter.425 On 1 June 1971, he suffered sickness and diarrhoea unlike anything he had previously experienced. Because, far from relaxing into normality, Graham’s mind had once again become a vortex of poisonous obsession.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE MOST HEINOUS NATURE AND BLACKEST DYE

  ‘A

  STRONG AND HEALTHY man’ unti
l the summer of 1971 was how detectives from Hertfordshire constabulary described Bob Egle in their report to the Director of Public Prosecutions.426 Dorothy Egle had never known her husband to be ill and told police officers that ‘Bob had only been treated for a couple of bouts of influenza during the whole of the time we were married. Since then, until the time of his illness, he had no reason to consult a doctor. He was always an active man, fond of gardening and liked to be out “doing something” in the way of physical activity.’427

  Coincidentally, Dorothy had been ill over that Whitsun weekend, the last in May 1971, when she suffered severe sickness and headaches. That in itself was not unusual: ‘I frequently suffer with headaches and sickness,’ she admitted, but it lasted for several days, during which time Bob began feeling unwell.428 He arrived home from work on Tuesday lunchtime complaining that he had diarrhoea and felt sick and that Ron Hewitt had been ill the week before. He was better the following morning and returned to work, but on Thursday he had stomach cramps and diarrhoea again. ‘He was taking codeine tablets about this time for headaches,’ Dorothy recalled, ‘but he was not one for telling me how severe they were.’429 Bob managed to eat dinner that evening, but from then on, he no longer had lunch in the work canteen, preferring instead to eat at home.

  On Friday, 4 June 1971, the family doctor called to see Dorothy, who was once more in bed with a crippling headache and nausea. Bob felt much the same, as he explained to Dr Robert Nevill when he let him into the house. The GP gave Dorothy an injection and prescribed antibiotics, telling Bob to rest and get plenty of fluids over the weekend but to call the surgery if his symptoms worsened. By Monday morning, Bob felt well enough to return to work, but by early afternoon he had another bout of diarrhoea and vomiting and told Geoffrey Foster he would have to go home until it passed.

  Graham had been in good spirits in the stores that morning. On Saturday he had paid another visit to John Bell & Croyden, posing again as student M E Evans in order to purchase antimony potassium tartrate and thallium acetate, ostensibly for laboratory work. Mrs Ruby Wooding served him in the dispensary; the sale stuck in her mind because it was the only time in the two years that she had worked there when a customer had requested poison. ‘A man aged between 25 years and 30 came to the counter,’ she remembered, ‘and asked to be supplied with three items. I can remember the two items listed in the register, antimony and thallous acetate, but I cannot remember the third item. I told him that I didn’t think we had any of these, but he insisted that he had got the antimony here before.’430

  Working alongside Mrs Wooding that day was Thomas Hutton-Mills, who noticed she was having ‘some difficulty’ with a customer and went to help. ‘It became apparent that [Graham] wanted some antimony tartrate and thallous acetate,’ he confirmed. ‘We told him that he must have authority and he said I’ve got it here previously.’431 Hutton-Mills checked the poison register and found the relevant entry: ‘Seeing this, I told Mrs Wooding to get the antimony tartrate (sodium or potassium) and thallous acetate from the stockroom downstairs. Mrs Wooding brought up these two items and I dispensed them.’432

  Graham had asked for 25 grams of both, but Hutton-Mills explained they had only ten grams of thallous acetate in stock. He dispensed it all, along with their remaining 23 grams of antimony sodium tartrate. As Schedule 1 poisons, the sale required the authorisation of the duty pharmacist, who had to record the transaction in the poison register. Albert Kearne thus asked Graham for identification and Mrs Wooding recalled that the young man produced ‘a card of some sort’.433 Kearne found it satisfactory and permitted the sale, after which Graham departed for home, jubilant at his success in obtaining two new poisons.

  Dr Udwin remembered seeing Graham in his outpatient clinic on 8 June. The psychiatrist was pleased to learn that his former patient had settled into his new job and wished to register with a local doctor, seemingly no longer worried about his Broadmoor experience being held against him. ‘During a long interview he seemed to me entirely well and surmounting the difficulties of re-establishing himself in an entirely satisfactory fashion,’ Dr Udwin later told the Home Office.434 Graham had also informed Udwin that he had applied for his provisional driving licence. Diana Smart’s husband had agreed to give him a couple of lessons, but these ended as swiftly as they began: while practicing reversing a van at Hadlands, Graham had accelerated too quickly and crashed into the stepladder Norman had been standing on moments before. The older man was furious, while Graham could do nothing but laugh.

  Bob Egle returned to the stores on 10 June. Both he and his wife felt depleted by their recent illness and decided to take a week’s holiday in Great Yarmouth. They left on Saturday, 19 June, staying in a self-catered flat near the seafront. ‘During this time Bob was quite fit and well and had no recurrence of his illness,’ Dorothy recalled. ‘The only time I recall him mentioning anything about his health was one morning he said he felt a little giddy, but this soon passed off.’435 The break was exactly what they needed, and when Bob arrived for work on Monday, 28 June, he was in good spirits. Dorothy was therefore surprised and concerned when he appeared at her workplace in Hemel Hempstead the following day complaining that ‘his fingers were all numb at the ends’.436 As Bob drove them both home, he told his wife that he had been ‘feeling awful’ all day and that when he combed his hair ‘his head felt numb’.437

  Dorothy cooked a meal that evening but Bob couldn’t face it. He lay down on the sofa, complaining of a painful backache. At 9pm, he got up to accompany his wife to the paddock, where their daughter’s horse needed to be brought into the stable for the night. ‘He felt so ill and could not walk properly,’ Dorothy recalled. ‘He was staggering just as if he had had a lot to drink.’438 They had to give up their attempts to bring in the horse ‘because Bob was too ill to stop and catch it’.439 They made their way slowly back to the house, with Dorothy propping up her husband, who could not even manage a few steps unaided. They went straight to bed. ‘Bob had difficulty in undressing because he said he could not feel the buttons on his shirt and I took off his shirt and tie for him,’ Dorothy recalled. ‘I did not realise how ill Bob was at this time, thinking that he had just caught a germ. When I went to bed at about 11pm, Bob was groaning with his backache. He said that he had never had a pain in his back so bad. I gave him two codeine tablets and about an hour later when he was still in pain, I fetched him a hot-water bottle to place against his back.’440 She slept in one of the spare bedrooms that night at her husband’s suggestion; he knew she would be unable to sleep lying next to him. She kept waking up nonetheless and could hear him groaning. Twice she went in to him, and asked if they ought to call out Dr Nevill, but Bob dismissed the idea, insisting it was just ‘back trouble’.441

  At 6am, Dorothy got up again. Bob was still awake and told her he still had numbness in his hands and could not feel his feet. He felt as if there was something wrong with his legs but couldn’t describe the sensation other than an ache. Dorothy was now worried enough to go against her husband’s wishes and called the surgery in Kings Langley. Their doctor was on holiday, but locum Dr Peter Sparrow arrived at their home just before 7am. He found Bob to be suffering from peripheral neuritis: weakness of the legs, pain and diminished sensation of his extremities. Dr Sparrow wondered whether he was in the early stages of a post-infective polyneuritis, but he had no significant history of an infection over the previous few weeks and his temperature was normal. He gave Bob two small tablets to take, which Dorothy handed to her husband with a glass of water after the doctor had gone. She was shaken when Bob then immediately and very violently vomited ‘black liquid’.442

  Dr Sparrow returned to the house at 8am in response to Dorothy’s second call. He found Bob ominously worse and complaining of restlessness and unbearable pain everywhere. The doctor called for an ambulance and Dorothy accompanied her husband to Hemel Hempstead hospital, where he was placed in the Rutherford ward of the St Paul’s wing. ‘His back was troubling him much worse by
this time,’ she recalled. ‘He was rolling from side to side of the hospital bed. The pain was so severe that he said if something was not done to cure the pain he would jump out of the window.’443 Frightened and distressed to see her husband in such agony, Dorothy called for a nurse. She was told to leave the side ward while her husband was settled. When she was allowed in again, she was relieved to find him much quieter. Told that Bob would sleep for some time now, she left for home around 11am that morning.

  Later that day, Bob Egle was examined by Dr Anne Solomon. She found him still suffering ‘obvious pain . . . tone flaccid in both arms and legs, grip reduced . . . touch and pain sensation were reduced in the palms of both hands . . . light touch reduced over the feet and the front of the legs . . . Acutely tender on the dorsal and plantar surface of the phalanges, position and vibration sense normal.’444 A lumber puncture revealed a blood-stained fluid. It was hoped that the results of further tests would reveal the cause of Bob’s illness.