A Passion for Poison

by Carol Ann Lee

  In the strangest of ways, Graham Young was responsible for bringing about the most important and wide-ranging inquiry into the laws regarding the mentally ill during the entire 20th century. Broadmoor ‘biographer’, Dr Harvey Gordon, recently commented that the effects of Graham’s case were ‘considerable and still reverberate to an extent today’.737 As a result, a complex of forensic units providing medium security was established where newly released Broadmoor patients could be transferred to provide a more successful – and safer – transition for rehabilitation within the wider community.

  Epilogue

  POISON BY DEGREES

  F

  ROM ST ALBANS’ Crown Court, Graham was sent to HMP Wormwood Scrubs in West London, where two months earlier there had been a sit-down protest by 350 prisoners. It was part of a wider campaign for better conditions and improvements in legal rights; the Scrubs had long been regarded as having one of the most punishing and brutal regimes in the country. Graham was expected to spend several weeks there on the hospital wing under close observation, partly due to his threat to kill himself. Psychiatric tests would be carried out, after which a decision would be taken on which prison would suit him best.

  At first, Graham’s main concern was whether Madame Tussauds had been in touch to ask for his measurements in order to create his waxwork for the Chamber of Horrors. He was delighted when he learned that this particular ambition had been achieved and his effigy would stand alongside his heroes William Palmer, Dr Harvey Crippen and John Reginald Christie. But his mood changed when he was shown the serialisation of his father’s story in the Sunday Mirror. Fred was quoted as saying that if he could have got his hands on his son (‘this bloody monster’), he would have ‘cheerfully strangled him’ and that ‘I never want to hear his name mentioned.’738 Those who knew him thought Graham genuinely distressed. He wrote to his aunt and uncle that the break with his father was ‘final’, and he was ‘terribly sorry for all the trouble he had brought on the family’ but he knew they would stick by him.739

  His sister admitted that her feelings were ‘very confused and ambivalent’, not least because the courts had thought him sufficiently disturbed to send him to Broadmoor ten years before, but latterly had decided he was sane.740 Soon after his arrival in Brixton she wrote to him, making it clear that she would always be his sister but felt sickened by his crimes. Graham was again devastated, replying that he wished she had ‘more faith’ in him.741 ‘I can’t believe in you,’ she wrote back, but she would stay in touch with him regardless.742

  The stories that appeared sporadically in the press did little to help. In August 1972, the Sunday People announced: ‘From his top security prison cell, double killer Graham Young is still managing to spread poison . . . verbal poison.’743 According to unnamed staff, Graham and another prisoner had repeatedly threatened two officers who were subsequently transferred to another part of the prison. Their colleague told the reporter: ‘Young is an extremely dangerous man. Unlike many killers, he is very intelligent, and quite capable of influencing other inmates. With a life sentence hanging over his head, Young feels he doesn’t have anything to lose.’744

  That same month Graham put in an application for leave to appeal against his conviction and sentence but was told within a fortnight that it had been turned down. As a result, he was being transferred to the prison known as Britain’s Alcatraz where – with one brief exception – he would live out the remainder of his days: HMP Parkhurst on the Isle of Wight.

  Part of almost one square mile of penal establishments, which included the prisons of Albany and Camphill, Parkhurst was situated two miles north of the island’s capital, Newport. Originally a military hospital, its first prison inmates, in 1838, were 102 boys under the age of 15, who were previously incarcerated on the rotting hulk of the prison ship HMS York, anchored in the Solent. Some of the boys were bound for Australia’s correctional facilities. In 1856 the prison received its first short-term adult male prisoners and the population switched from youth to adults in accordance with the laws regarding the punishment of children. Parkhurst received a large number of female convicts from London’s Millbank gaol in 1863. One year later, the last juveniles were transferred to Dartmoor prison and five years later, all female inmates were sent to a new women’s-only prison at Woking. Parkhurst then became a gaol for men and over the years its buildings were adapted and extended. Capital punishment was never carried out there, but the regime had a reputation for severity. In 1963 work began on the special security block, which was in effect a prison within a prison, completely self-contained, and which provided accommodation for inmates convicted of particularly notorious crimes, including the Great Train Robbers and the Kray twins. Parkhurst was the scene of an infamous riot in 1969, when 28 inmates and 35 officers were injured; one officer had his throat cut but survived, while another suffered a fractured skull and a third had his arm broken.

  The first few years of Graham’s incarceration were unremarkable. Notorious prisoner Charles Bronson, who was sent to Parkhurst in 1976, has a possible explanation for that. He recalls that although the other inmates ‘hated’ Graham because they feared his reputation as a poisoner, he pitied him: ‘It was obvious to any rational man that Graham Young was mad. All that prison did was keep him drugged out of his head. His life was a constant daze. He was a very dangerous man but he should have been in an asylum, not a prison. I always felt sorry for him as I know the long-term effects of isolation. It’s as painful as any form of torture.’745

  The death of Graham’s beloved uncle, Jack Jouvenat, in January 1977 unbalanced his behaviour. After once more threatening prison staff, he was placed under observation by two experienced senior prison medical officers: Dr David Cooper and Dr Jim Dexter at Wormwood Scrubs, where he was also examined by the ex-director of the prison medical service, Dr Ian Pickering, who was then consultant psychiatrist at Rampton. As the re-assessment of Graham’s mental health continued, Dr Patrick McGrath was invited to offer his opinion. Dr McGrath’s views were unchanged since his previous examination of Graham as a youth; he diagnosed process schizophrenia and found him to have suffered, over a two-year period, persecutory auditory hallucinations and paranoid delusions. Nonetheless, the possibility of returning Graham to Broadmoor was deemed unfeasible due to the hostility towards him from staff and patients.

  For the time being, he remained in Parkhurst where IRA prisoners held a rooftop protest in March 1979, complaining about rations and conditions at the prison. Approximately 100 inmates were on hunger strike. Extensive damage was done to the buildings, including C-wing, where those inmates with several psychological problems were treated. The protests lasted for several days until the demonstrators surrendered peacefully but C-wing remained closed as a result for the next 14 years.

  Seven months later, in October 1979, Graham was transferred to Park Lane advance unit in Liverpool.746 In bleak surroundings just outside the town of Maghull, the site originally housed a hospital, then a convalescent home for workhouse children. It was taken over by the Red Cross during the Great War, when shell-shocked soldiers were treated there. In 1933 the building then known as Moss Side became a special hospital. As a result of the severe overcrowding in Broadmoor, construction began on Park Lane, adjacent to Moss Side, in 1974. It opened in stages until its completion ten years later, operating independently from Moss Side. In later years, two inquiries uncovered appalling abuse meted out towards patients from staff in an institution that was described as ‘brutalising, stagnant and closed’.747 The Guardian noted: ‘Even by the chequered standards of the special hospitals as a whole, [its] profile is profoundly negative and its history a catalogue of controversy, mismanagement and ill treatment of its patients.’748

  Three experts – Professor Robert Bluglass, Dr James Higgins and Dr Christopher Hunter – were engaged to advise on Graham’s mental state. Park Lane’s medical director, Dr Malcolm MacCulloch, also spoke with Graham at length and provided an insightful analysis that exa
mined his entire history with perhaps a better understanding than ever before. Dr MacCulloch found:

  In discussing his childhood he told me that he was a boy of intellectual pursuits with very few close friends, a very studious child who learned that knowledge is power. His first motivation became the pursuit of knowledge and his parents became alarmed and sought to divert him to boyish pursuits and the relationship then deteriorated. By ten, his interests had settled on medical sciences, chemistry, pharmacy, pharmacology, pharmacodynamics, general medicine, toxicology, pathology, forensic medicine. He thus came to have an intense emotional investment in the subject [and] wanted to qualify in medicine but had bitter opposition from his father. His father blamed the death of his mother on Graham, or at least Graham felt so, and also on the incompetence of the medical profession. The father banned all medicine-type books from the house and accused Graham of having a twisted mind, therefore Graham carried on covertly and came to hate his father and decided to punish him, first by killing the stepmother by poisoning her slowly. As we went along, I learnt that the different kinds of colour of dress are important in Graham’s life: black is aggressive, brown is aggressive, blue is tranquil, green is flamboyant. He came to tell me how he came to look at death as an ideal state. Death is neat and orderly, sterile. He said of his victims that he thought of them being better off when they were dead. He himself felt that he had more in common with death than with life and he saw himself as an agent of mortality, an agent of death.

  Dr MacCulloch described how, during his many long interviews with Graham, it had become apparent that he was not in fact as ‘emotionally cool’ as might have been expected but was instead ‘highly sensitive’. Nonetheless, he found it extremely difficult to show his emotions. The medical director noted:

  He has got a deeply embedded resistance to discussing his inner feelings and a deep revulsion of discussing matters which are sexual or emotional, although he does turn out to be deeply emotional. This is evidenced by extreme anger which he can manifest readily and it is apparent in his previous history in relation to his victims and he had also manifested it here. Sometimes when his wishes are frustrated he has become very angry. He does work over his experiences many times and has come back to a discussion from previously and has sought to put right points which he thought I may have misunderstood . . . He shows chronic uncertainty. There are some asthenic qualities in his personality and elements of ambitiousness ‘to be the greatest poisoner ever’ and there is quite a bit of moral pride. He is deeply against Pavlov whose experimentation on animals he abhors. I pointed out to him his inconsistency in that he had given ‘aconite’ to mice as a child but he brushed this off by saying he had become disgusted by what he was doing and stopped it. I think he has a deep affection for animals. He is self-critical in that he tends not to excuse himself and is peculiarly a man of conscience.749

  On 2 June 1982, all the reports, tests and observations of Graham’s mental health were brought together when a multidisciplinary conference was held at Park Lane. Over the course of exactly 20 years, he was found to be suffering from a mental illness that saw him confined to Broadmoor, where doctors believed him to have made a full recovery; then when his crimes brought him before the law again, he was deemed sane and sent to prison, but later returned into a psychiatric environment. Now, finally, the decision was to ‘recommend that Graham be returned to whence he came and repay his debt to society and his victims in the normal way’.750 There would be further, sporadic consultations over the years, but in June 1982, he was transferred once more to Parkhurst.

  Also arriving in Parkhurst that year was paedophilic child-killer Ian Brady, then a quarter of a century into his lifelong sentence. Brady later compiled a study of serial killing that was controversially published in 2001. Graham loomed large in the book, which contained several factual errors but nonetheless provided some further insight into his character ten years after his second period of imprisonment. The familiar tropes were there: the intelligence, the obsession with poison and Nazi Germany, smoking, reading, and the persistent habit, revived again, of growing a Hitler-style moustache which he trimmed so often that the skin around it beaded blood. Graham had never been particularly keen on music, other than a love of Wagner, which was another Hitler-led affectation, but Brady recalls him listening repeatedly to Ray Charles’ 1950s smash ‘Hit the Road, Jack’ and Jeff Wayne’s debut album, a progressive rock adaptation of H G Wells’ War of the Worlds.

  The two prisoners found a friendship of sorts over their mutual circumstances, admiration of the Nazi ethos and chess. Brady liked to claim that Graham – who always favoured the black pieces – never won a match against him, but the opposite was true. Otherwise, his observations were clinically precise: he described his fellow inmate as asexual, excited only by the power afforded to him by his deadly experiments with poison. Graham’s moods were extreme; he would be in the depths of despair or on top of the world. During the former, he would sit in his almost bare cell ‘as though it were the Berlin Bunker, listening rapturously to Götterdämmerung, a doomed figure with his grandiose dreams in ruins’.751 Brady writes of him frequently suffering depression or being ‘in the throes of a schizophrenic fugue’, when he could be seen displaying ‘an air of general abandonment, hair prematurely grey, features jaundiced and drawn, his frame physically shaking, wrecked by the daily high dosages of prescribed drugs’.752 Brady observed that when in deep melancholia Graham ‘repressed a great deal and had developed an acute anxiety neurosis. Highly aware that his peers were shrewdly suspicious of him and in constant fear of being poisoned, he nevertheless genuinely yearned for their approval and trust. Failure to achieve this emotional goal compounded his frustration and anxiety.’753

  There were occasions when Graham flew into ‘violent, maniacal rages which further depleted his reserves of nervous energy and kept him thin and gaunt’.754 Such explosions left him feeling that his own death was imminent; he would draw up another draft of his will and solemnly and ominously tell everyone within hearing, ‘I shall return.’755 When in a more optimistic frame of mind, he was capable of creative thought and methodical planning, relaxing in his cell by reading The Times obituaries, remarking, ‘Better to be a live dog than a dead lion.’756 Brady passed on some of his favourite literary quotations to Graham, who was especially taken by the opening soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Richard III, in which the alleged murderer of the two princes in the tower declares: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent/Made glorious summer by this sun of York . . . ’ He was unfamiliar with Death’s Jest Book, a play by 19th-century poet and dramatist Thomas Lovell Beddoes, who later committed suicide, but asked Brady to write down the lines that resounded with him. These ran:

  The look of the world’s a lie, a face made up

  O’er graves and fiery depths, and nothing’s true

  But what is horrible. If man could see

  The perils and diseases that he elbows

  Each day he walks a mile, which catch at him,

  Which fall behind and graze him as he passes;

  Then would he know that life’s a single pilgrim,

  Fighting unarmed amongst a thousand soldiers

  It is this infinite invisible

  Which we must learn to know, and yet to scorn,

  And, from scorn of that, regard the world

  As from the edge of a far star.

  Graham features in the memoir of another Parkhurst inmate, gangland leader and armed robber Bobby Cummines, who first encountered him in the exercise yard in 1983. Charlie Richardson, an infamous East End criminal with a host of appalling offences to his name, pointed out a ‘furtive character, glancing round all the time’ with ‘a thin, long face, dark hair that came forward in a V, thin, cruel lips and staring eyes. His nose had a bit of a point on it. Those eyes were really scary.’ A swirling wind whipped up on that day in October 1983, blowing leaves around the nervous inmate and his guards. ‘Be careful if you have a cup of tea with him,’ Charlie
Richardson warned, as a twinkle appeared in his steely blue eyes. ‘That’s Graham Young . . . ’757 Handcuffed to two prison warders, Graham was led towards the vulnerable prisoners’ unit. Cummines, now a leading penal reformer, referred to Graham in his memoir as ‘the most evil man in Parkhurst’, an epithet that would have delighted Graham, had he known.758 Charlie Richardson was fascinated by him, but thought him ‘totally bonkers’.759 According to Cummines, neither the prison chaplain nor the prison warders would go near Graham unless unable to avoid him during the course of their work.

  Parkhurst medical officer Dr Stewart was approaching retirement in April 1990. One of his last tasks was to ensure that Graham, who was showing increasing signs of mental disturbance, should be examined by one of the Ashworth hospital (formerly Park Lane) medical experts with a view to transferring him once more into the secure psychiatric system. But Graham was deemed ‘untreatable’ and made to remain in Parkhurst. And it was there that he died four months later, having outlived his sister, who passed away in 1983, and his father, who died in 1987.

  Wardens making a routine visit to Graham’s cell on the evening of 1 August 1990 found him lying unconscious on the floor. Attempts were made to resuscitate him but to no avail. He was rushed to the prison hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival, having suffered a fatal heart attack. Inevitably, there were rumours that Graham had either poisoned himself or that he had been killed by prison officers or inmates, all of whom were wary, if not terrified, of him. An inquest into his death was held at Newport on the Isle of Wight in October 1990; pathologist Dr Neil Greenwood told the hearing that one of Graham’s coronary arteries had closed to the size of a pinhole, which could have been caused by something as simple as excitement or a fattening meal. Thus a jury found that Graham had died of natural causes. His passing was scarcely mentioned in the press, who had all but forgotten him. He was outlived by his beloved aunt Win, who died in 1999, and his cousin Sandra.