A is for Arsenic (39 page)

Meanwhile Molly's symptoms were getting worse, and she was hospitalised on more than one occasion. The repeated doses of antimony compounds were not having their desired effect, though, and Young suspected that Molly was developing a tolerance to the poison. He decided to change tactics, and on 20 April 1962 he added 1,300mg of a thallium salt to her evening meal. The following day she woke up with a stiff neck, and pins-and-needles in her hands and feet. Her symptoms got worse over the course of the day, and when Fred came back from a lunchtime pint he found Molly in the garden, writhing in agony, as Graham watched her from the kitchen window. Molly was rushed to hospital, but she died later the same day. Molly's death was attributed to natural causes, and an inquest was not thought necessary. Graham Young helpfully suggested that her remains should be cremated.

Thinking that he had got away with it, Graham now turned his attention to his father Fred. He would accompany his father to the pub on Sunday evenings, and slip a dose of antimony into his pint when he went off to the toilet. Fred
soon became very ill, and he was eventually hospitalised, where he was diagnosed with either arsenic or antimony poisoning. By now 15 years old, Graham offered advice to the doctors on how they could distinguish between the two poisons. The family was now genuinely suspicious of Graham, and his father banned him from his hospital bedside.

Back at school, Young was attracting the attention of his teachers through his incredible knowledge of chemistry, the only subject he excelled at despite being a bright student. His fascination with poisons worried the staff, and the long-term illness of Graham's school friend Chris Williams began to look suspicious. A psychiatrist was called in, who questioned Young on the pretext of a careers interview. She grew convinced that he was a psychopathic poisoner, and the following day the police were called. Graham Young's arrest led to the discovery of a stash of poisons and poison books in his bedroom. On questioning, he also confessed to having more secret stores of chemicals hidden not far from the family home.

Graham Young was charged with poisoning Chris Williams, and Fred and Winifred Young (no mention was made of Molly's death). He was sent to Broadmoor high-security psychiatric hospital, with no question of his release for 15 years without the express permission of the Home Secretary – at the time, he was the third-youngest admission in the hospital's history. During his time at Broadmoor Young appeared to reform and became a model patient, in spite of several poisoning incidents that occurred during his stay. The first, the suicide of John Berridge using cyanide, occurred within a month of Young's arrival. Although Young was never conclusively proven to have been responsible, he was believed by fellow inmates to have distilled cyanide from the leaves of the laurel bushes that grew abundantly around the perimeter of the hospital grounds. It couldn't be proven that this was the source of the cyanide, but the laurel bushes were cut down all the same. Young is also thought to have added toilet detergent to the nurses' coffee, and sugar soap (a powerfully alkaline cleaning product) to the tea urn. Luckily both of these additions were discovered before anyone took a drink.

Young's apparently reformed behaviour was a show, put on so he could obtain an early release. The chief psychiatrist was fooled and declared him to be no longer a threat. But before he was released, Young told a nurse ‘I'm going to kill one person for every year I've spent in this place.' At the time he had been in Broadmoor for eight years; it was less than a month after his release before he began to put his plan into action.

Young got a job at Hadland's, a company that produced cameras and photographic equipment. At his interview for the position he explained his eight-year absence from society as being due to a mental breakdown, from which he was now fully recovered. The interviewers sought (and received) confirmation from Young's psychiatrist that he was completely well; no one told Hadland's the real reason for this gap on his curriculum vitae, or where he had been.

Coincidentally, thallium was a key ingredient in the glass of the camera lenses produced at Hadland's, though no thallium compounds were kept on site – Young had to travel to London to obtain his stocks. At work Young took on the responsibility of collecting his colleagues' tea from the tea trolley in the corridor. Each employee had their own mug, and for a brief part of his journey back from the tea trolley Young was unobserved. He always carried poison with him.

Young did as he had promised and poisoned eight people after leaving Broadmoor; two of his victims, Bob Egle and Fred Biggs, died. These eight people were examined by a combined total of 43 physicians during their illnesses, from GPs to specialists, and not one of them diagnosed poisoning. Young used both antimony and thallium compounds during his time at Hadland's. The symptoms displayed by his victims included vomiting, stomach pains, pains in the feet developing to pains all over the body so great that even the weight of bedclothes became unbearable, paralysis to the extent that victims could not speak, terrifying hallucinations and mental confusion. Fred Biggs started to go blind.

Bob Egle survived eight days of agony after he drank his poisoned tea before he died. His death was attributed to
broncho-pneumonia complicated by Guillan-Barre syndrome, a disease of the nerves so rare that one of his kidneys was preserved for further study. Bob Egle's body was cremated, but later examination of his ashes and his preserved kidney showed traces of enough thallium to cause his death. Fred Biggs lasted 20 days before finally succumbing to the poison in his body. Biggs's post-mortem was conducted in the full knowledge that he had been poisoned with thallium, but initially no trace could be found in his remains. Days later, after further tests on tissue from Biggs's body, thallium was finally identified.

The spate of illnesses at the factory had been nicknamed the ‘Bovingdon Bug' after the village where the factory was located. After Fred Biggs's death, managers at the factory became so concerned that they called in a team of doctors to investigate; a viral infection of unknown origin seemed to them the likeliest explanation (though they considered heavy-metal poisoning from nearby contaminated land as an improbable alternative). At a meeting called for all the employees to discuss the ‘bug', Young stood up and talked at length about thallium and its symptoms. He suggested thallium was far more consistent with the symptoms displayed by the victims than the doctors' theory of a virus affecting the nerves. His behaviour was suspicious, to say the least; Young was also one of the few people working in the store room who was completely unaffected by the ‘bug'.

The doctor in charge of the investigation questioned Young, and found his knowledge of medicine extended only to toxicology. Further investigations into Young's past finally revealed his time at Broadmoor. He was arrested, and during his time in police custody boasted that he had got away with the perfect murder in 1962 when he had poisoned his stepmother. The following day he made a full confession, and even criticised the treatment Jethro Batt, another poison victim, was receiving in hospital, suggesting that dimercaprol and potassium chloride should be given as an antidote.

A search of Young's room found bottles of poison in drawers and along the window ledge. He had an extensive library devoted to poisons, poisoners and toxicology. Under his bed
was the most telling piece of evidence, a diary, where Young had kept an account of who he poisoned, which poison he used, and when, as well as the results of his work. In the dock Young claimed that the diary represented notes for a novel he was writing. The jury took an hour to find Young guilty, with most of this time spent sorting out the many charges against him. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and died in prison in 1990.

At the time of Young's trial, Agatha Christie received some criticism for publicising the use of thallium as a means for murder. The
Daily Mail
listed the similarities between
The Pale Horse
and the Young case. Graham Young denied ever reading
The Pale Horse
– it would hardly have taught him anything he did not already know. The book was even referred to by the pathologist examining one of Young's victims, as information on thallium poisoning was scarce, and Christie was detailed in her descriptions. To be fair to Christie, she was not the first to feature thallium poison so prominently in a murder-mystery story. Ngaio Marsh uses thallium in her 1947 novel
Final Curtain
, and describes the green flame it produces as a method for detecting the poison. Though Marsh is accurate in many respects, her victims die far too quickly.

The
Daily Mail
may have been critical of Agatha Christie, but her accuracy was vindicated a few years later. In 1975 Christie received a letter from a woman living in South America. The letter-writer had realised that she was witnessing the slow poisoning of a man by his young wife, and recognised the symptoms of thallium poisoning because she had read
The Pale Horse
. The letter concluded, ‘But of this I am quite, quite certain – had I not read
The Pale Horse
and thus learned of the effects of thallium poisoning, X would not have survived; it was only the prompt medication which saved him; and the doctors, even if he had gone to hospital, would not have known in time what the trouble was.'

Another case occurred in 1977, a year after Christie's death. A 19-month-old child was taken ill in Qatar. Her symptoms stumped all the doctors that examined her. The child's condition worsened and her parents took her, barely conscious, to London to be seen by specialists, but still the illness was mystifying. Then a nurse, Marsha Maitland, who had been reading
The Pale Horse,
suggested thallium poisoning. Urine samples were sent to Scotland Yard's forensic laboratory for analysis, and the presence of thallium was confirmed. Treatment was started and in two weeks the child's condition had stabilised; in three weeks she was noticeably improved, and four months later she was almost fully recovered. The source of the poison was an insecticide the parents had used to kill cockroaches and rats in the drains and cess-pit on their property in Qatar. Unknown to her parents, the child had found and consumed some of the insecticide. The physicians treating the young girl published a paper in the
British Journal of Hospital Medicine
discussing the symptoms, diagnosis and treatment of the case. At the end of the report, the authors acknowledged their indebtedness ‘to the late Agatha Christie for her excellent and perceptive clinical descriptions, and to Nurse Maitland for keeping us up to date on the literature'.

Agatha and thallium

In
The Pale Horse
, Mrs Davis, who works for a customer survey company, notices that many of the people she had spoken to have died recently. Mrs Davis passes on a list of names to a priest in her final confession, before she too succumbs to a mysterious, fatal illness. Her list of names becomes the central clue in
The Pale Horse.
All of the people on the list had died recently, but the deaths were all thought to be due to natural causes. Attributed to pneumonia, brain tumours, toxic polyneuritis (damaged nerves), encephalitis (inflammation of the brain) and cerebral haemorrhage, the deaths seemed to bear no connection, and to have no single cause. The symptoms of two of the victims, Ginger Corrigan and Mrs Davis, are described in a little detail. Mrs Davis's symptoms began with ‘flu', so she takes a few days
off work, and during that time she appeared to make a recovery. Still not completely well, Mrs Davis returns to work, but two days later she can barely climb the stairs, has difficulty breathing and has a high fever. She dies the same day.

In an effort to trap the murderer, or at least discover their method, Mark Easterbrook poses as a client of the Pale Horse organisation, and his friend Ginger Corrigan volunteers to pose as an inconvenient ex-wife that Easterbrook wishes out of the way. To ensure nothing happens to Ginger, she hides herself away in a flat in London to watch events unfold. Meanwhile, Easterbrook attends a ceremony at the Pale Horse Inn in Much Deeping, miles from London. There are a few theatrical tricks but nothing to suggest that Ginger is in any danger. The ‘witches' at the ceremony do not even ask the name of the intended victim, and never leave the village – how could they possibly hurt Ginger? Yet somehow Ginger is affected. Her symptoms start with ‘a bit of a sore throat … I'm starting a cold I expect, or a touch of 'flu … aching all over'. A doctor is called, who diagnoses a touch of flu and sends her to bed. Later, the aching gets worse – ‘everything hurts'. By now Ginger cannot bear anything touching her. When her condition deteriorates further she is taken to a nursing home and diagnosed with broncho-pneumonia following influenza, but with some unusual symptoms. Later still, Ginger's hair starts to fall out.