Criminal Poisoning: Investigational Guide for Law Enforcement, Toxicologists, Forensic Scientists, and Attorneys (8 page)

1.2.27. Ryan Thomas Furlough, “The Poisoner for Love” (2003)

Poisoners do not necessarily have to be medical personnel, or very old, to carry out a crime. Ryan Furlough was an 18-year-old high school student, in Ellicott City, Maryland, who was in love with the girlfriend of his friend Benjamin Vassilev. In a letter, Ryan wrote, “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of her. . . . I will never give up until I have the key to her heart.” Soon afterward, he concocted a plan to make him the only recipient of the girl’s affections. Using his parents’ credit card, he purchased cyanide from an Internet source. On January 2, 2003, he invited Benjamin to his house to play video games and offered him a can of soft drink laced with the deadly poison. Almost immediately after drinking it, Benjamin went into convulsions. Ryan called the paramedics, but when they arrived they were unaware of the real cause of the symptoms, and Ryan did not offer any helpful information. The victim died soon after arriving at the local hospital. An autopsy revealed the real cause of death and an investigation ensued. Ryan was convicted of the murder on May 17, 2003, and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.

1.3. CONCLUSION

This chapter is but a brief overview of only a few of the more infamous people who chose to use poison as their weapon to achieve nefarious ends.

We can only imagine the hundreds of individuals who have also used such a weapon but whose crimes have gone undetected.

To read more about infamous poisoners, I recommend the concise work by Michael Farrell
Poisons and Poisoners,
cited in the Suggested Reading section.

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Criminal Poisoning

1.4. REFERENCES

Adam HL:
Trial of Dr. Lamson. Notable British Trials
. Wm. Hodge & Co., London, 1913.

Adam HL:
Trial of George Henry Lamson. Notable British Trials
. Wm. Hodge & Co., London, 1951.

Alstadt JR:
With Love to Yourself and Baby: The Story of the Poisoned Candy Murder Case
. Dorrance Pub. Co., Pittsburgh, 2001.

Bereanau V, Todorov K:
The Umbrella Murder
. Pendragon Press, Cambridge, UK, 1994.

Bombaugh CC: Female poisoners: ancient and modern.
Johns Hopkins Hosp Bulletin 1899;(101–102):148–153.

Cullen T:
The Mild Murderer: The True Story of the Dr. Crippen Case
. Houghton Mifflin, New York, 1977.

Gaute JHH, Odell R:
The Murderer’s Who’s Who.
Methun, Inc., New York, NY, 1979.

Good J, Goreck S:
Poison Mind.
St. Martin’s Paperbacks, New York, NY, 1996.

Holden A:
The St. Albans Poisoner: The Life and Crimes of Graham Young
. Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1974.

Kaplan J (ed.):
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations,
17th ed. Little Brown & Co., New York, NY, 2002.

Kershaw A:
Murder in France
. Constable & Comp., London, 1955, pp. 68–89.

Lewis D:
The Rugeley Poisoner: A Biography Looking Back at Dr. William Palmer, the “Prince of Poisoners.”
Artloaf, Stafford, UK, 2003.

McLaren A:
A Prescription for Murder: The Victorian Serial Killings of Dr. Thomas Neill Cream
. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993.

Meek WJ: The gentle art of poisoning.
Phi Beta Pi Quarterly,
May 1928.

Nash JR:
Encyclopedia of World Crime.
Crime Books, Inc., Wilmette, IL, 1990.

Olsen G:
Bitter Almonds: The True Story of Mothers, Daughters, and the Seattle Cyanide Murders
. Warner Books, New York, 1993.

Read S:
On the House: The Bizarre Killing of Michael Malloy
. Berkeley, 2005.

Roughead W, ed.:
Trial of Dr. Pritchard. Notable British Trials.
Wm. Hodge & Co., London, 1925.

Sauke K:
Death of Halloween
. Cork Hill Press, Indianapolis, IN, 2003.

Smith S: Poisons and poisoners through the ages.
MedicoLeg J
1952;20:153–166.

Stewart JB:
Blind Eye: How the Medical Establishment Let a Doctor Get Away with Murder
. Simon & Schuster, New York, 1999.

Triplett W:
Flowering of the Bamboo
. Woodbine House, Kensington, MD, 1985.

Watson K:
Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and Their Victims
. Hambledon and London, New York, 2004.

Whittle B, Ritchie J:
Prescription for Murder: The True Story of Mass Murderer Dr.

Harold Frederick Shipman
. Warner Books, London, 2001.

Young W:
Obsessive Poisoner: The Strange Story of Graham Young
. Robert Hale & Co., London, 1973.

Poisoners Throughout History

27

1.5. SUGGESTED READING

Bagchi KN:
Poisons and Poisoning: Their History and Romance and Their Detection in Crimes
. Kshentamani-Nagendralal Memorial Lectures for 1964, University of Calcutta, Calcutta, India, 1969.

Cabannes A, Nass L:
Poisons et sortileges
[Poisons and Spells], Parts I & II. Librairie Plon, Paris, 1903 (in French).

Ensley J:
The Elements of Murder: A History of Poison.
Oxford University Press, New York, 2005.

Farrell M:
Poisons and Poisoners: An Encyclopedia of Homicidal Poisonings.
Robert Hale, London, 1992.

Lewin L:
Die Gifte in der Weltgeschichte
[Poisons in World History]. Verlag Von Julius Springer, Berlin, 1920 (in German).

Mangin A:
Le Poisons
[Poisons]. Alfred Mame & Sons, Tours, France, 1869 (in French).

Nash JR:
Encyclopedia of World Crime.
Crime Books, Wilmette, IL, 1990.

Osius TG: The historic art of poisoning.
Univ. Michigan Med Bull
1957;23(3):111–116.

Thompson CJS:
Poison Romance and Poison Mysteries
. The Scientific Press, London, 1899.

Thompson CJS:
Poison Mysteries in History, Romance, and Crime.
J.B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1924.

Thompson CJS:
Poisons and Poisoners—With Some Historical Accounts of Some Famous Mysteries in Ancient and Modern Times.
Harold Shaylor, London, 1931.

Thompson CJS:
Poison Mysteries Unsolved: “By Person or Persons Unknown.”

Hutchinson & Co., London, 1937.

Types of Poisons

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Types of Poisons

“Poisons and medicines are oftentimes the same substance given with different intents.” —Peter Mere Latham In this chapter I discuss the nuances of poison as a weapon. What is a poison? What advantages does this type of weapon offer over the more traditional types of death-inflicting instruments? Many substances have been used for homicidal purposes, and they can come from animals, plants, or minerals.

See
Fig. 2-1
for just a few examples of substances that have been used by actual poisoners.

2.1. DEFINITIONS

At the outset it might seem simple enough to define what a poison is; however, legally it is not quite as simple as it first appears. In the courts it has oftentimes been difficult to agree on the definition of “poison.”
Scientific American
once humorously defined a poison as

“any substance in relatively small quantities that can cause death or illness in living organisms by chemical action. The qualification ‘by chemical action’ is necessary because it rules out such effects as those produced by a small quantity of lead entering the body at high velocity.”

Humor aside, in the courtroom a great deal of discussion will ensue concerning whether a substance in question is really a poison. Is aspirin a poison? Most would agree that it is a medicinal agent, because people take this substance to relieve pain and fever. However, in sufficient dosages aspirin can be an agent that results in death. So what is a poison?

Although definitions may differ according to the laws of various states, to From: Forensic Science and Medicine: Criminal Poisoning, Second Edition By: J. H. Trestrail, III © Humana Press Inc., Totowa, NJ

29

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Criminal Poisoning

Figure 2-1

follow are some of the definitions of poison that have been cited in the legal literature:

“
Poison:
Any substance, either taken internally or applied extrnally, that is njurious to health or dangerous to life.” (Stedman’s Medical Dictionary, 27th ed., 2000, p. 1416)

“
Poison:
Any substance that, when relatively small amounts are injested, inhaled, or absorbed, or applied to, injected into, or developed within the body, has chemical action that causes damage to structure or disturbance of function, producing symptoms, illness, or death.” (Dorland’ Illustrated Medical Dictionary, 29th ed., 2000, p. 1422)

Probably the most astute concept of what constitutes the difference between a poisonous and a nonpoisonous substance was stated by the famous 16th-century alchemist Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim (Paracelsus) (1493–1541), when he wrote:

“What is there that is not poison, all things are poison and nothing (is) without poison. Solely the dose determines that a thing is not a poison.”

(Deichman, Henschler, & Keil, 1986)

In this statement, Paracelsus was able to get to the very core of the argument of what determines, or defines, a poison, which is that anything can be a poison—it merely depends on what dose causes deleterious effects. Certainly the relaxation that might come from drinking a relatively small amount of an alcoholic beverage when compared to a death that may result from ethanol Types of Poisons

31

intoxication (e.g., as experienced by a fraternity initiation) is merely dose-related outcome. The same principle applies to the medications that we routinely take to keep our bodies in healthy balance. Toxicology is nothing more than the subject of pharmacology (the study of the actions of drugs) pushed too far, into the “dark side” as it were. As the famous British toxicologist Alfred Swaine Taylor, MD (1806–1880) wrote:

“A poison in a small dose is a medicine, and a medicine in a large dose is a poison.” (Taylor, 1859, p. 2)

When plotting out a dose vs effect curve, one will see the following points: the minimum lethal dose (MLD), which is the lowest dose that has been documented to have resulted in a fatality; the LD50, which is the dose that results in a lethal outcome in 50% of a test population; and the LD100, which is the dose that will kill 100% of a test population. People will die at different doses of poisons, owing to their ability to resist or detoxify the toxic substance. Many factors can alter the response of an individual to a dose of poison, including the duration of the exposure, the animal test species, the individual’s gender, nutritional status, age, health status, susceptibility to the material, genetic makeup, and ability to adapt; and the presence of other chemical substances already in the body. These factors help explain how some individuals can tolerate a dose of poison at a level high enough that it would kill other individuals (
see
Fig. 2-2
).

One must never forget that although administering too much of a substance can kill, so can administering too little. For those individuals whose lives depend on medication, elimination of the necessary medication or a reduction in the dosage (subtherapeutic dosage) can bring about death. Drugs such as insulin, digoxin, anticoagulants, or anticancer drugs can bring about such a negative effect if the dosages are reduced. For the investigator, a patient’s death may appear to be the result of the patient’s noncompliance with the prescribed dosage, when in fact it is the result of foul play. An example of such a crime would be the case of the Kansas City pharmacist Robert R.

Courtney, who, between 1992 and 2001, reduced the amount of anticancer drugs in the prescriptions he dispensed to his customers, in order to increase his profits. His scheme involved some 98,000 prescriptions and almost 4200

patients. For this despicable crime, Courtney was sentenced in 2002 to 30 years in prison with no parole.

2.2. CHARACTERISTICS OF “IDEAL” POISONS

There are certain characteristics to an “ideal” poison, and homicidal poisoners will select their murderous compounds to encompass as many of