Silent Witnesses

by Nigel McCrery

  Hycleus lugens, also known as the “blister beetle,” which secretes cantharidi

  One of the most infamous modern-day poisoners, a man who seems to have positively reveled in the practice for its own sake, is a man called Graham Frederick Young, who was born on September 7, 1947. He was fascinated with poisons from childhood, and as young as fourteen he began to poison his own family, experimenting with the different effects of varying doses. He had managed to acquire both antimony—an extremely toxic metal, which when ingested causes headaches, nausea, vomiting, dizziness, and depression—and digitalis (foxglove), which is commonly used in heart medication but which can negatively affect the heart if taken in too large a quantity, as well as causing breathlessness and vomiting. He had obtained them from a local chemist by lying about his age and saying that he required them for science experiments in school.

  Then, in early 1962, Graham’s stepmother became ill. Her condition grew progressively worse, and she died suddenly in April that same year. Graham’s Aunt Winnie later became suspicious; she had known Graham all his life and was well aware of his fascination with chemistry in general and with poisons in particular. When his father, Frederick Young, began to suffer with severe stomach cramps and vomiting, he was admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with antimony poisoning. Graham’s chemistry teacher also found quantities of the poison in his desk at school, prompting him to call the police. Graham was arrested on May 23, 1962. Under questioning he eventually admitted to the attempted murder of his father, sister, and a school friend. However, since his stepmother’s remains had been cremated, they could not be analyzed—as a result her death had to be recorded as being due to complications arising from injuries she had sustained in a car accident.

  Graham subsequently underwent psychiatric assessment and was found to be suffering from a psychopathic disorder. He was detained in England’s Broadmoor Hospital under the Mental Health Act with a recommended minimum stay of fifteen years. After only nine years, however, it was considered that he had recovered sufficiently and was no longer a danger to the public, and he was released.

  In fact, although he appeared to be a model prisoner, Young busily studied medical texts during his time at the hospital, improving his knowledge of poisons. He seemingly even managed to continue to experiment on both patients and staff, one of whom (a patient called John Berridge) actually died. This went undetected at the time and it was later conjectured that, due to his expert knowledge, Young was able to extract cyanide from the leaves of laurel bushes planted on the hospital grounds.

  After being discharged from Broadmoor in 1971, Young got a job at John Hadland Laboratories in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, not far from his sister’s home northwest of London in Hemel Hempstead. Although his employers received references about Graham’s “rehabilitation,” they were not told that he was a convicted poisoner. The company manufactured thallium bromide-iodide infrared lenses for military purposes. This might have proved convenient for Graham since thallium, a heavy metal related to lead and mercury, is highly toxic. Unfortunately for him, no thallium was actually stored on site. However, once again he was able to obtain supplies of antimony and thallium by lying to a chemist, this time in London. Not long afterward a man named Bob Egle, who was Graham’s foreman, became ill and died. Graham had been in charge of making tea. Subsequently a number of other workers also became ill, suffering from severe nausea, some requiring hospitalization. The outbreak was so widespread that it was at first assumed to be some kind of virus and was nicknamed the Bovingdon Bug.

  Over the next few months, Graham managed to poison around seventy people, mostly using thallium obtained from the chemist. Fortunately there were no further fatalities, but quite a number of people did fall seriously ill. In all around thirty doctors were consulted during this period, but none of them recognized that poisoning was involved. This is likely due to the fact that the symptoms of thallium poisoning can quite easily be confused with those of common viruses such as influenza. Besides, the scale of the poisoning was so outrageously large that such an idea would have scarcely seemed credible. This, combined with the fact that thallium salts are odorless, colorless, and almost tasteless—as well as easily soluble in water—means that in many ways it is a perfect poison. However, it is very seldom used for the purpose; indeed Graham Young appears to have been the first poisoner to do so.

  Eventually, as was inevitable, there was another fatality. Graham’s colleague Fred Biggs suddenly became very seriously ill and was rushed to the London National Hospital for Nervous Diseases. He suffered in agony for several weeks before he eventually died. The company doctor noticed that Young had an unnatural interest in Biggs’s death and alerted the police, who began an investigation. Young’s previous conviction for poisoning immediately came to light. He was arrested in southeast England in Sheerness, Kent, on November 21, 1971. When the police searched him, they found thallium in his pocket, while a search of his apartment turned up antimony, thallium, and aconite. His diary was also recovered; it recorded the doses Young had administered to people, their effects, and whether he was going to allow an individual to live. He liked playing God.

  Young was sent to trial on June 19, 1972, at St. Albans Crown Court, and pleaded not guilty. Over the ten days the trial lasted, the press nicknamed him the Teacup Poisoner. However, he maintained that the diary the police had discovered was simply notes for a crime novel that he was planning to write. But there was yet more evidence against him to be presented. Naturally, in any investigation like this, establishing a cause of death through examination of the bodies of the deceased is extremely important. Such an examination had not been carried out in the case of either Bob Egle or Fred Biggs. The police had therefore obtained an order for the exhumation of Biggs’s body. This was not possible in Egle’s case as he had been cremated, but nevertheless police recovered the container that housed his ashes. When its contents were analyzed, they were found to contain nine milligrams of thallium—a very large dose. In fact, despite all its apparent advantages, Young’s choice of thallium as a poison had one flaw: although organic poisons would have been destroyed by the cremation process, a metal such as thallium survives unscathed. This became the first time in British legal history that evidence was procured from the exhumation of ashes. An autopsy on Biggs also revealed traces of thallium. On the strength of this evidence, Young was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He died in his cell in Parkhurst in 1990, at only forty-two years old.

  Of course, poison is not only used by lone criminals. It has also long been used by governments as a convenient way of eliminating troublesome citizens or perceived enemies of the state, and this practice continues even today. Two classic modern cases involve Georgi Markov and Alexander Litvinenko; it is alleged that they were poisoned on the orders of secret services.

  Georgi Markov was a well-known Bulgarian writer. The story collections A Portrait of My Double (1966) and The Women of Warsaw (1968) established him as one of the most talented young writers in Bulgaria. He also wrote a number of plays, though many of these were banned by the communist censors.

  In 1969 Markov left Bulgaria to stay with his brother in Italy. It was only supposed to be a short visit, but while there he decided to remain in the West, eventually moving to London. There he found work as a broadcast journalist, working for the Bulgarian section of the BBC World Service, the American-sponsored Radio Free Europe, and the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. He had previously held a privileged position in Bulgarian society—as a talented writer he was admitted into a specially chosen intellectual group who had meetings with Bulgarian President Todor Zhivkov between 1964 and 1968. This meant he was able to reveal things that it seems certain Zhivkov would rather had remained secret; his sarcastic comments about Zhivkov probably did not go down well with the Bulgarian authorities either. In 1972 Markov’s works were withdrawn from all Bulgarian libraries and bookshops, and his membership of the Union of Bulgarian Writers was suspended. He was sentenced (
in absentia) to six and a half years’ imprisonment for defecting to the West.

  There were a couple of failed attempts on Markov’s life in 1978, one in Munich in the spring when poison was put in his drink at a dinner event, and another in the summer while he was on the island of Sardinia. The third attempt succeeded, through a method as ingenious as it was horrible. On September 7, 1978 (which happened to be the sixty-seventh birthday of Todor Zhivkov), Markov was walking across Waterloo Bridge on his way to work when he suddenly felt a sharp pain, like a tiny bite or sting, on the back of his right thigh. He spun around and saw a man picking up an umbrella from the ground—he had seemingly accidentally stabbed Markov’s leg with the end of it. The man apologized hastily before running across the road and jumping into a waiting cab.

  During the day, Markov noticed that a small red lump had formed where the umbrella had hurt him. He mentioned this to a few colleagues at the BBC but otherwise thought nothing much of it. That evening, however, he developed a fever and had to be admitted to the hospital. In spite of the doctors’ best efforts, his condition rapidly deteriorated, and three days later, on September 11, 1978, he died, at the age of forty-nine.

  The Metropolitan Police asked for a postmortem to be carried out. Markov’s death had been caused by ricin poisoning. Ricin is a protein derived from castor oil and ranks as one of the deadliest known toxins—just a single gram is enough to kill around 40,000 people. A pathologist discovered a spherical metal pellet no larger than a pinhead embedded in Markov’s leg; further analysis revealed it to be composed of 90 percent platinum and 10 percent iridium, with minute holes 0.35 mm in diameter drilled through it. Experts from the military science facility at Porton Down established that these cavities had contained ricin and discovered that they had been sealed with a specially designed coating. This substance melted at 98.6°F—the temperature of the human body. Obviously when Markov was “accidentally” jabbed with the umbrella, he was in fact being injected with this pellet. Once inside his body, the coating gradually melted, releasing the ricin into his system. Even if the doctors had realized what had happened, they could have done nothing to save him, because no known antidote exists for ricin.

  Castor beans, from which ricin is derived. The poison works by inhibiting the ability of the cells to make protein. The pulp from just eight beans would cause dangerous levels of toxicity in an adult.

  Although both Bulgaria and Russia were suspected of being involved in the assassination, there was little that the British authorities could do. To this day, Markov’s killer has still not been brought to justice, though since the fall of communism in Bulgaria, there is renewed interest in the case.

  The case of Alexander Litvinenko is even more recent and again involves the use of a new and extremely unpleasant poison. Litvinenko had worked for both the KGB and that organization’s successor, the FSB. In November 1998 he, along with several FSB colleagues, publicly accused his superiors of ordering the murder of a Russian oligarch called Boris Berezovsky. As a result, in 1999 Litvinenko was arrested and charged with exceeding his authority. In 2000 he was released, but fearing arrest under new charges, he fled Russia with his family and was granted political asylum in Britain (having been refused it by the United States). He became a writer and journalist while also secretly working for MI5 and MI6 as a consultant.

  While in London, Litvinenko wrote several controversial books. In one he accused the FSB of staging a Russian apartment bombing in which over 300 people had died and which, at the time, had been blamed on Chechen separatists. He went on to claim that the FSB had been connected to other terrorist acts, saying that this had been part of a coordinated effort to bring Vladimir Putin to power.

  On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko suddenly became ill and was rushed to the hospital. He experienced severe diarrhea and vomiting and became physically weaker and weaker. He lapsed in and out of consciousness. He died on November 22, with doctors still unable to determine the exact cause of his illness. (They had even suspected thallium poisoning for a time, but tests ruled this out.) It was only after his death that they were able to ascertain that he had been poisoned with radioactive polonium-210. This is extremely hard to detect, since unlike most radioactive isotopes, it does not admit gamma rays, only alpha particles, which are not picked up by the majority of radiation detectors. The investigation into Litvinenko’s death turned up a Russian agent named Andrey Lugovoy as a prime suspect, but when the British government requested his extradition, the request was refused. Lugovoy himself denied any connection with Litvinenko’s death and in turn accused the British security services. As such we will probably never know who poisoned Litvinenko, or on whose orders they acted. According to Professor Nick Priest, a Middlesex University environmental toxicologist and radiation expert, Litvinenko was probably the first person ever to die of the acute a-radiation effects of polonium-210. With his death, poisoning had entered the nuclear age.

  7

  DNA

  DNA technology could be the greatest single advance in the search for truth, conviction of the guilty, and acquittal of the innocent since the advent of cross-examination.

  Justice Joseph Harris, New York State Supreme Court

  We have already mentioned DNA fingerprinting and its forensic applications elsewhere in the book (see Introduction). However, as it is without doubt the greatest advancement of our times in the field of forensic science, it merits further discussion. I am also going to indulge myself a little by discussing a couple of cases with which I was personally involved: one an infamous murder case from the 1980s, the other a historical mystery that I had a small hand in solving.

  Colette Aram was a bright sixteen-year-old girl from the village of Keyworth, just outside Nottingham, England. She came from a loving home and was well thought of by her peers. She had left school to train as a hairdresser and by all accounts loved what she did and was on track to become a success. Sadly, this was not to be. Shortly after 8 PM on October 30, 1983 (I will always remember the date because it was my birthday), she left her home on Normanton Lane in Keyworth to walk to her boyfriend Russell Godfrey’s house, just over a mile away. Normally he would have picked her up in his car but, as often seems to be the case when such awful events occur, fate intervened—on the night in question, his car was out of commission. Colette was last seen a little after 8 PM talking to friends at a junction between Nicker Hill and Platt Lane. She was walking in the direction of Willow Brook. A witness later reported having heard someone screaming and then a car driving off at high speed not long afterward. He looked out onto the street but saw nothing and, since he was used to hearing children shouting and screaming nearby, did not think it unusual or report it.

  When Colette hadn’t arrived at Godfrey’s house by 10:30 PM that evening, people started to become concerned. Finally, the police were called. It was a freezing cold October night, and a hard frost was already beginning to set in. After several fruitless hours, the search was called off until the next day. In fact, continuing it proved horribly unnecessary; the following morning a man driving to work along Thurlby Lane, less than two miles from where Colette lived, spotted something strange-looking in a field beside the road. Concerned, he turned his car around and went to investigate. What he had found was Colette’s naked body. She had been beaten, sexually assaulted, and then strangled. She had been dead for several hours.

  The murder investigation began at once, headed up by Detective Superintendent Bob Davy. An incident room was established on the Keyworth and Normanton playing fields, close to Nicker Hill where Colette had last been seen. Hundreds of police officers, including myself, were called in for a vast and wide-ranging inquiry. As a result, as is frequently the case with major inquiries, other previously unreported crimes—some extremely serious—came to light, and several people were arrested for offences unconnected to Colette’s murder.

  It transpired that a red Ford Fiesta had been stolen earlier on the day of the murder from the stables at Holme Pierrepont,
another small village in the area. This car was then discovered abandoned in Keyworth, while its keys were subsequently found hidden in a bush. When Colette’s body was found, her feet were free of mud and there were car tire marks leading out of the field. This suggested that any assault on her had probably taken place inside a vehicle, so the discovery of the car seemed highly significant to the murder squad. A thorough forensic examination of its interior turned up traces of both blood and semen.

  Two girls now came forward, each to report that she had been followed by a man in a red Ford Fiesta on the night Colette disappeared. One had felt so threatened that she had actually run into the house of a friend. The other, who was fourteen years old, had been approached by the man, but the fact that she had a large dog with her had been enough to make him think twice, and he drove away. Both girls gave a similar description of the suspect: a white male about 5 feet 10 inches tall, with dark wavy hair. This was definite progress for the inquiry. However, even more promising was information from the manager of the Generous Briton pub in the village of Costock. A man had visited the pub at approximately 9 PM on the night of the murder. He had ordered an orange squash, and she had noticed blood on his hands. When she pointed this out he went into the bathroom to clean them. This was highly fortunate; following a search of the bathroom, a bloodstained paper towel was recovered and kept as possible evidence. It would later prove extremely significant.

  On June 7, 1984, the case became the first ever to be featured on the now long-running BBC crime show Crimewatch, a fact that delighted the senior investigating officers. The program received over 400 calls offering information connected to the case, as a result of which the murder squad was able to eliminate over 1,500 suspects from its lists. Still, in spite of all of this useful information, they seemed no nearer to actually capturing the killer.