Why are poisons rarely used in homicides

But that was assuming that the doctor had a sample of the stomach contents. Soon some diagnosticians acquired better material. At the beginning of the century, postmortems were rare.

It was considered irreligious to interfere with a dead body. For corpses to dissect, medical schools often depended on grave robbers. But they still lacked dependable methods for analyzing them.

Often, they just resorted to the garlic-smell test. The first person to come up with a reliable chemical test for arsenic poisoning was an obscure but determined chemist named James Marsh. His procedure, as Hempel explains it, involved feeding sulfuric acid and zinc through an apparatus that combined tubes, rods, stopcocks, nozzles, and a great deal more.

Marsh presented his invention in , and won a big prize for it. With modifications, it was used for a hundred and fifty years.

Arsenic was now traceable in the body. For that reason—and because the enactment of divorce laws made domestic homicide less tempting—arsenic poisoning fell into disuse. George Bodle was a rich man, worth two million pounds—more than three million dollars—today. Still, the coffee grounds had to be boiled three times. And, until the beans were ground, they were kept locked up. Just as the freshly poisoned Bodles are staggering around the house, she switches gears and begins a discussion of the history of toxicology.

Only about forty pages later do we find out that George died and the others survived. Why the digression? Because, I think, Hempel was worried that her book would be unexciting, or too short.

It must be said that some of her digressions are more interesting than her main story. This is true, for example, of the case of Marie Lafarge, which seems to have been the most popular arsenic-poisoning story in nineteenth-century Europe. The defendant was a twenty-four-year-old Frenchwoman, an aristocrat and an orphan, who had been forced by her relatives into marriage with a certain Charles Lafarge.

This seems to have been a case of gradual poisoning. In time, he died, whereupon his family cried foul. At the resulting trial, the raven-haired Marie at first excited great sympathy. She was found guilty and sentenced to hard labor for life. I think the reason is that, whatever her taste for fitful lightning, she was trying to write a serious book.

The Lafarges were just too camp. Hempel is careful to use respectable sources. That may be why the Bodles are boring. There were four major cholera outbreaks in England between and , causing many thousands of deaths. Furthermore, cholera is more interesting sociologically.

Almost every respected medical professional in England at that time was certain that cholera was due to miasma: air polluted by emanations from dung, rotting flesh, etc.

The person who exploded this theory was a doctor named John Snow. By tracing a specific outbreak, in Soho, Snow proved that the disease was due not to polluted air but to polluted drinking water—a matter much more solvable than the rather mystic miasma. Reforms were instituted, and by the end of the century cholera was more or less gone from England. Detecting arsenic poisoning, however useful, is a small matter compared with eliminating cholera.

He died of a stroke at forty-five, without ever guessing that he would later be known by many as the father of epidemiology. Many nations contributed to the genre of the murder mystery, but it is rightly considered an English specialty. Hempel may have had Agatha Christie, the author of sixty-six detective novels, in the back of her mind when she chose to describe the Bodle poisonings.

The Bodle case is recognizably pre-decline. Unlike the cool-tempered crimes that Orwell complained about, this story still delivers the old shock: that someone actually plotted and accomplished the death of another human being.

Even if we forget about the moral problem, what about the risk? When a murderous shrink moved to a trusting coastal town, both had a surprise in store.

By Carl Elliott. By St. Clair McKelway. By Joyce Carol Oates. By Jill Lepore. Joan Acocella has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since Enter your e-mail address. Letter from New Zealand. Annals of Crime. It was reputed to be a tonic and prescribed in small doses by doctors to aid convalescence. It was also widely used to poison rats and other animals and as such was easily obtained, and although cited in only a few domestic murders its ready availability suggests it would be used in many undiscovered murders.

Cyanide : can be distilled from the kernels of certain nuts such as almonds and also present in the leaves of some laurels bushes. The industrial chemical sodium cyanide is widely used, especially in mining, and has been involved in attempted mass murders. It was used to contaminate Tylenol capsules in the US in the s and killed several people in the Chicago area. Cyanide has also featured in domestic murders and it causes death within minutes. It is the fastest acting of all poisons and for this reason it is the poison of suicide pills of the type carried by secret agents.

Thallium : this element was only discovered in the s and while it has been used in some domestic murders — in some countries it has been available as rat poison — it has been more widely used as an agent of assassination. It is ideal in this respect. Thallium sulfate is water-soluble and tasteless and they take several days for the symptoms to appear and even then these are generally attributed to other illnesses.

Skip to main content Skip to footer site map. S10 Ep8. About the Episode In the case of Hawley Crippen, the unusual poison choice, Hyoscine, led investigators to question the validity of the remains.

Features Production Biographies.