The Poisoner's Handbook

By Deborah Blum

 My book, The Poisoner's Handbook, comes out in paperback this week. It was published a year ago, and I had the pleasure of joining Women in Crime Ink as a blogger shortly later.

It's been a wonderful year to be the author of a story about 1920's forensic detectives figuring out how to catch poison killers. The book was named one of the top 100 books of 2010 by Amazon. I've visited more than 15 cities to talk about it, and I am actually booked to continue talking about through October of this year. I do sometimes show up wearing the Victorian poison ring that I purchased in honor of the book.

"Where did women actually get those rings?" my son asked me. "Did they go to the jeweler and ask to see the rings kept under the counter?"

As you may guess, my family and friends worry a little about my ongoing obsession with poison, murder, and the more sinister aspects of chemistry. I'm awfully prone upon hearing the name of a poison - say, mercury - to relate the story of 1920's film star Olive Thomas (Mary Pickford's sister-in-law) who was killed by mercury. And don't get me started on arsenic. My neighbors have promised my husband that they are looking out for him. My husband now drinks his coffee at a distance.

But I continue to find the subject endlessly fascinating. Poisoners themselves, with their devious ways and cold-hearted plotting, tell us a lot about who we are, often at our worst. Poisons themselves are a reminder that we need to navigate with care and knowledge through the chemical world in which we live.

Of course, poisons really are fascinatingly wicked chemical compounds and many of them have fascinating histories as well. In honor of the paperback publication, I thought I'd share with you a few of my favorites:

1. Carbon Monoxide: It’s so beautifully simple (just two atoms--one of carbon, one of oxygen) and so amazingly efficient a killer. There’s a story I tell in the book about a murder syndicate trying to kill an amazingly resilient victim. They try everything from serving him poison alcohol to running over him with a car. But in the end, it’s carbon monoxide that does him in.

2. Arsenic: This used to be the murderer’s poison of poisons, so commonly used in the early 19th century that it was nicknamed the inheritance powder. It’s also the first poison that forensic scientists really figured out how to detect in a corpse. It stays in the body for centuries, which is why we keep digging up historic figures like Napoleon or U.S. President Zachary Taylor to check their remains for poison.

3. Radium: I love the fact that this rare radioactive element used to be considered good for your health. It was mixed into medicines, face creams, and health drinks in the 1920's. People thought of it like a tiny glowing sun that would give them its power. Boy, were they wrong. The two scientists in my book, Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler, proved in 1928 that the bones of people exposed to radium became radioactive, and stayed that way for years.

4. Nicotine: This was the first plant poison that scientists learned to detect in a human body. Just an incredible case in which a French aristocrat and her husband decided to kill her brother for money. They actually stewed up tobacco leaves in a barn to brew a nicotine potion. Their amateur chemical experiments inspired a very determined professional chemist to hunt them down.

5. Chloroform: Developed for surgical anesthesia in the 19th century, this rapidly became a favorite tool of home invasion robbers. If you read newspapers around the turn of the 20th century, they’re full of accounts of people who answered a knock on the door, only to be knocked out by a chloroform soaked rag. One woman woke up to find her hair shaved off, and undoubtedly sold for the lucrative wig trade.

6. Mercury: In its pure state, mercury appears as a bright silver liquid, which scatters into shiny droplets when touched. No wonder it’s nicknamed quicksilver. People used to drink it as a medicine more than 100 years ago. No, they didn’t drop dead. Those silvery balls just slid right through them. Mercury is much more poisonous if it’s mixed with other chemicals and can be absorbed by the body directly. That’s why methylmercury in fish turns out to be so risky a contaminant.

7. Cyanide: One of the most famous of the homicidal poisons and, in my opinion, not a particularly good choice. Yes, it’s amazingly lethal--a teaspoon of the pure stuff can kill in a few minutes. But it’s a violent and obvious death. In early March of last year, in fact, an Ohio doctor was convicted of murder for putting cyanide in his wife’s vitamin supplements.

8. Aconite: A heart-stoppingly, deadly natural poison. It forms in ornamental plants that include the blue-flowering monkshood. The ancient Greeks called it the queen of poisons and considered it so evil that they believed that it derived from the saliva of Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the gates of hell.

9. Silver: Swallowing silver nitrate probably won’t kill you, but if you do it long enough it will turn you blue. One of my favorite stories involving a silver bullet concerns the Famous Blue Man of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus who was analyzed by one of the heroes of my book, Alexander Gettler.

10. Thallium: Agatha Christie put this poison at the heart of one of her creepiest mysteries, The Pale Horse, and I looked at it in terms of a murdered family in real life. An element discovered in the 19th century, it’s a perfect homicidal poison. Tasteless and odorless, except for one obvious giveaway, the victim’s hair falls out as a result of the poisoning!

Now that I’ve written this list, I realize I could probably name ten more. But, I don’t want to scare you.

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Toxicology: Poison, Drugs, and Chemicals

by Andrea Campbell

Q: Can you tell me more about toxicology and what a forensic toxicologist is all about?

A: The busiest department in a crime lab, hands down, has to be forensic toxicology. This science is essentially a specialty area of analytical chemistry, so think vials, jars, and lots of machinery to test them when you consider this area's discipline.

Toxicology, per se, is the science of adverse effects of chemicals, either natural or man-made, on living organisms. The job of a toxicologist is to detect and identify foreign chemicals in the body, with a particular emphasis on toxic or hazardous substances. There are several sub-groups of toxicology expert: a descriptive toxicologist performs toxicity tests to evaluate the risk that exposure poses to humans; a mechanistic toxicologist attempts to determine how substances exert deleterious effects on living organisms; and the regulatory toxicologist judges whether or not a substance has low enough risk to justify making it available to the public.

Toxins then, are materials that threaten the life of living things. Poisons are a subgroup of toxins. Toxic materials can come in many forms such as gas, liquids, solids, animal, mineral and vegetable. Toxins can be ingested, inhaled or absorbed through the skin and organs. Some toxins have medicinal value and, if this is the case, the amount that is taken is significant to health, but—if abused, may cause irreparable damage. Toxins may have antidotes, but some do not.

Some toxins may disguise or mask themselves, whereas some are identifiable by their symptoms. Here are a couple of examples of toxins and their symptoms:

Acids (nitric, hydrochloric, sulfuric) = Burns around mouth, lips, nose
Aniline (hypnotics, nitrobenzene) = Skin of face and neck quite dark
Atropine (Belladonna, Scopolamine) = Pupil of eye dilated
Arsenic (metals, mercury, copper, etc.) = Severe, unexplained diarrhea
Carbon Monoxide = Skin is bright cherry red
Cyanide = Quick death, red skin, odor of peach
Nicotine = Convulsion
Opiates = Pupil of eye contracted
And so forth.

The true incidence of poisoning in the United States is unknown. Approximately 2 million cases are voluntarily reported to poison control centers each year, and officially, a rather steady figure of about 700 deaths by poisoning is reported each year. Children under age 6 account for the majority of poisonings reported, but adults account for the majority of deaths by poisoning, most of which is intentional rather than accidental.

Some common reported poisons are: household cleaning supplies, antidepressant medications, analgesics (aspirin, acetaminophen), street drugs, cough and cold remedies, cardiovascular drugs, plants, alcohol, gases and fumes, pesticides, asthma therapies, industrial chemicals, sedatives, food poisoning, insects and other animals.

It is not easy to distinguish toxic from nontoxic substances. A key principle in toxicology is the dose-response relationship. The toxic effects of substances are not side effects. "Side effects" are defined as non-deleterious, such as dry mouth, for example. Toxic effects are the undesirable results of a direct effect, like the result of too much stress on the body; in other words, the body is upset by physical, chemical or biological agents and it manifests itself as a reaction. Toxic reactions are classified as one of three reactions: pharmacological—with injury to the central nervous system; pathological—with injury to the liver; and genotoxic—causing the creation of benign or malignant neoplasms or tumors.

For certification as a toxicologist, an individual must possess a Ph.D. or doctorate in one of the natural sciences. Undergraduate degrees must also be in either biology or chemistry, usually. Certification is bestowed by the American Board of Forensic Toxicology and the expert may use the title of “Diplomate,” which must be renewed every three years. Board-certified toxicologists will never face difficulties qualifying as an expert witness. State crime laboratories may not have a toxicologist on staff, their functions being performed by a criminalist, a biochemist, a forensic biologist or other technician. These personnel would typically have a Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in any of the sciences.

A forensic toxicologist is normally presented with preserved samples of body fluids, stomach contents, and organ parts. They will have access to the coroner’s report which should contain information on various signs and symptoms as well as other postmortem data. The toxicologist needs a thorough knowledge of how the body alters or metabolizes drugs because few substances leave the body in the same state as when they entered.

Hooray for toxicologists, an overworked group and a much needed discipline in the realm of forensic science.

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