*"To me, a jolly good dose of potassium cyanide beats stupid old spinning electrons any day of the week" (Flavia de Luce in *Speaking from the Bones by Alan Bradley, 2013)
__1. The most apparently upright citizen can be a poisoner. But after that, no one will consider them upright. __
For example, in early December the 71-year-old wife of an Ohio judge was charged with attempting to kill her husband with antifreeze. And let's not forget the doctor at Houston's M.D. Anderson Cancer Center who was charged in July with slipping the same poison into a colleague's coffee.
__2. Easy access to bad poisons will not solve the problems of a troubled marriage. Or anything else. __
If we need proof of this, there's the case of University of Pittsburgh neuroscientist John Ferrante, who was charged this summer with murdering his wife after buying cyanide on his laboratory credit card. Or the case of Heidi Li, the Bristol Myers Squibb chemist, convicted earlier this year of killing her estranged husband with thallium stolen from her employer's chemical supplies.
__3. Mailing ricin to national leaders will bring you all kinds of unwanted attention. Even if you try to frame someone else. __
Earlier this month, actress Shannon Richardson, who had appeared in productions ranging from The Walking Dead to The Blind Side, confessed to mailing the poison ricin to both President Obama and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg this year. She was trying, she said, to both advocate for gun rights and to frame her husband. Perhaps she should have taken warning from the events earlier this year in which a Mississippi karate instructor was arrested on charges that he tried to frame an apparently despised Elvis impersonator by mailing ricin-laced letters to national leaders that contained clues to the other man. Perhaps the real point here is that ricin attracts some very strange people.
__4. Eye drop poisonings are not as funny in real life as they are in the movies.
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In the 2005 movie, Wedding Crashers, a fictional prank involves dripping eye drops into a drink and watching the explosive digestive upset that follows. If only it was that hilarious in reality. But in actuality -- as a crop of eye drop poisoningsthis year proved -- the blood vessel constricting compounds in "get the red out" drops instead sent victims to the hospital and the poisoners to jail.
5. In fact, real life poisonings are never as fun as they are in the movies.
To whit, this Arizona woman who is accused of poisoning her five children with prescription opiates this Christmas Day, killing her 13-year-old daughter."We pray for justice," her family said in a written statement.
__6. Not every poisoner is actually brought to justice. __
The most high profile poisoning case in Chicago this year was the discovery that a lottery winner had been killed with cyanide shortly after receiving his winning check. But although the poisoning was confirmed, the discovery -- which was made months after his death after relatives pushed forensic examiners into doing additional tests -- came too late to implicate the killer. Of course, Chicago and cyanide have a troubled history in this regard. The year 2013 marked the 30th anniversary of the cyanide mass murdersin the city (in which the poison was slipped into over-the-counter painkillers), and that murderer was never caught either.
7. Of course, not every suspected poison murder actually IS a poison murder. Or can be proved as one.
This year, the remains of the famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda were exhumed with the idea of finally proving that he had been poisoned by the Pinochet regime. But extensive tests did not confirm the long standing assassination theories. They found no evidence of poisoning, concluding that Neruda's 1973 death was due to prostate cancer diagnosed earlier that year.
8. And let's not forget the non-poisoning of Yasser Arafat.
This week, Russian scientists hired to examine bone and tissue samples from the body of the late Palestinian leader reported officially that they had found no trace of poison and that they believed he had died of natural causes. This finding followed a similar no-poisoning-found conclusion from French scientists in early December.
Why are these negative results worth repeating? Well, a Swiss laboratory working with the Qatar-based news service Al Jazeera had earlier reported that they had found "moderate" support for a poisoning theory. And Al Jazeera had been hyping the murder idea -- and the provocative suggestion of assassination -- for well over a year.
So let's consider this a cautionary tale. And the caution? Just the rather prosaic suggestion that it's better to wait for the results before deciding on the conclusion to your story.
__9. Despite my fascination with the year's homicidal and non-homicidal stories, we're in far greater danger of accidentally poisoning ourselves than of a homicidal lunatic bearing cyanide. __
The poisonous gas, carbon monoxide, for instance, continues to kill far too many people especially during these winter months, including two dead in Minnesota yesterday thanks to a malfunctioning furnace; two killed by a leaky space heater in Missouri last Friday, a Michigan man poisoned by a malfunctioning generator last week, and more others than I can list here.
10. So get a damn carbon monoxide detector.
Or if you aren't willing to take that minimal protective step, consider becoming a caterpillar. As Ed Yong writes in this fascinating postof the week, some of these, at least, handle poisons remarkably well.
Image: Carbon monoxide warning signs/Gas Safe Register.
