Speaker 1: Hi, I'm doctor Shiloh and I'm doctor Scott.
Speaker 2: And this is La Not So Confidential, the forensic psychology
Speaker 2: and true crime podcast.
Speaker 3: Each episode we explore the intersection of psychology, the criminal
Speaker 3: justice system, and entertainment.
Speaker 2: Today our episode is on the forensic psychtopic of poisoning.
Speaker 3: Welcome back, everybody. It is our second to last episode
Speaker 3: here for La Not So Confidential. How is that for you,
Speaker 3: Doctor Shiloh?
Speaker 1: That sounds really weird.
Speaker 2: It does, like literally only one more to research and record,
Speaker 2: because of course our behind the Couch for the end
Speaker 2: of this month is already done as well.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know how I feel about it.
Speaker 1: Feels great and also sad.
Speaker 3: I know, yeah, we can feel ambivalent about it, right
Speaker 3: like we I think we were very proud of what
Speaker 3: we've accomplished over these eight years, and also where we're
Speaker 3: going to be going in the future, which is going
Speaker 3: to be fun, and neither of us know what that's
Speaker 3: going to be.
Speaker 2: I think that's the exciting part, kind of like daydreaming
Speaker 2: and fantasizing about what I will do with extra time
Speaker 2: and I don't know, just like scheduling wise and what
Speaker 2: we could put on our plate when we have had,
Speaker 2: you know, a very good break.
Speaker 3: So yeah, really I got a palette cleanse for our
Speaker 3: brain in a.
Speaker 2: Way, right, definitely, definitely, Well, today we're talking about poisonings,
Speaker 2: but in episode twenty twelve we talked about stabbings sort of.
Speaker 2: I mean our topic was peakerism, a very specific sexual
Speaker 2: paraphilia often associated with serial murder cases. We covered some
Speaker 2: interesting historical cases and case studies and discussed whether or
Speaker 2: not we think pikurism was a factor in the Idaho
Speaker 2: four case. So a good old fashioned, elle not so
Speaker 2: confidential episode for sure.
Speaker 1: Please go back and listen if you haven't yet.
Speaker 3: And then in episode two thirteen, we had a great
Speaker 3: interview with retired detective Mike Weber. He co wrote a
Speaker 3: book called The Mother next Door with Andrea Dunlop of
Speaker 3: the podcast Nobody Should Believe Me. We discuss his expertise
Speaker 3: and investigations of medical child abuse aka factitious disorder by proxy,
Speaker 3: and talk about one of the cases highlighted in their book.
Speaker 2: Such a great interview, Please go back and listen, so
Speaker 2: good if you haven't. It's just this whole other world
Speaker 2: of detective investigations, really specific.
Speaker 1: And he told us.
Speaker 2: He's retired now, but he's continuing to train, which is awesome, which.
Speaker 3: Is great his expertise. And I will also say it's
Speaker 3: not often that we carve out time here to talk
Speaker 3: about podcasts you should go listen to. I mean we
Speaker 3: suggest every once in a while, but I was not
Speaker 3: familiar with nobody should believe me. Somehow that had slipped
Speaker 3: under my radar. And now I've been marathoning all the
Speaker 3: seasons for the last two weeks as I do my
Speaker 3: field work, as I'm driving all over La County. It
Speaker 3: is a roller coaster ride. The entire series is just
Speaker 3: like a completely me yelling what the fuck over and
Speaker 3: over again in the.
Speaker 1: Car heavy staff. That's a lot to listen to on
Speaker 1: that topic.
Speaker 2: I mean, the book was phenomenal and our conversation with
Speaker 2: him was really good, So yeah, I can imagine that
Speaker 2: the podcast is a lot but done really really well,
Speaker 2: and it's been on the top of the charts for
Speaker 2: years now. So well, I mean, should we get on
Speaker 2: with our second to last Forensic Sach episode.
Speaker 3: Let's jump into it. So we've got a classic here,
Speaker 3: a lot of history, a lot of case examples for us,
Speaker 3: and full on personality disorders, So let's do it so.
Speaker 3: The Oxford Dictionary defines poison as a substance that is
Speaker 3: capable of causing the illness or death of a living
Speaker 3: organism when introduced or absorbed, And so for as long
Speaker 3: as people have had act to herbs, minerals, powders, and
Speaker 3: various bits and pieces of the animal kingdom, they've had
Speaker 3: the power to heal and to harm. Most data about
Speaker 3: murders via poisoning use a definition of poisoning that includes
Speaker 3: standard poison, but also murdering with a poisonous use of
Speaker 3: narcotics like sleeping pills. The FBI does not include poison
Speaker 3: gas because that falls under the category of asphyxiation. Very
Speaker 3: interesting there. So most cases of poisoning involve one perpetrator
Speaker 3: and one victim who know each other pretty well. Poisoning
Speaker 3: is an intimate crime, and Hollywood loves showing us up
Speaker 3: pernicious powder slipped into a drink from a heavily jeweled ring,
Speaker 3: a noxious nectar mixed with a salve, or a deadly
Speaker 3: draft mixed into a delicious dinner. Okay, that's enough alliteration
Speaker 3: right Across cultures, the line between cure and curse was
Speaker 3: razor thin. And in every age, societies have asked the
Speaker 3: same anxious question, who controls these powerful substances and what
Speaker 3: happens when they choose to harm instead of heal? And yes,
Speaker 3: I will take full responsibility for writing those terrible alliterations.
Speaker 3: I figured why not go out here at the end
Speaker 3: of our run with a purple prose?
Speaker 2: Bang right, Okay, I'm glad you said that, so we
Speaker 2: knew it wasn't.
Speaker 1: Chat gpt right.
Speaker 2: Okay, So trigger warning for this episode. We don't get
Speaker 2: into the nitty gritty of much, but of course we
Speaker 2: are talking about murder today, murder of family members, including
Speaker 2: children and the elderly. And then some descriptions and mentions
Speaker 2: of illness as a result of poisoning in what people
Speaker 2: have gone through.
Speaker 3: So let's look back through the history books. The use
Speaker 3: of poison as a way to end to life, both
Speaker 3: instantly as well as through a grueling illness, has a
Speaker 3: long and significant history, particularly in the way that it
Speaker 3: is a hidden and surreptitious method that allows the poisoner
Speaker 3: to hide their actions. Poisoning's long and often covert history
Speaker 3: is a method of crime has evolved alongside societal shifts
Speaker 3: and scientific advancement in substance and the methods of implementation
Speaker 3: and delivery.
Speaker 2: In Egyptian texts, there are records of the use of snake, venom, hemlock,
Speaker 2: and opium for healing, assassination, and self harm within the
Speaker 2: famous story of Cleopatra experimenting with various toxins on royal
Speaker 2: prisoners before choosing the ASP as the most likely successful
Speaker 2: route to enter.
Speaker 1: Her own life.
Speaker 2: And in ancient India, poison wasn't just a weapon, it
Speaker 2: was a specialized craft requiring a wide range of knowledge
Speaker 2: and skill. Historical texts described the practice of raising vishakanyas
Speaker 2: or poison maidens. Allegedly, these children from infancy were microdosed
Speaker 2: with poison until their very bodies became lethal. Their kisses
Speaker 2: or even their touch was thought to be deadly. Indian
Speaker 2: military texts also detail pragmatic tactics like contaminating enemy wells
Speaker 2: and smearing arrows with toxins from snakes or rotting animal matter,
Speaker 2: basically biochemical warfare. The Chinese practice of gu poisoning arose
Speaker 2: from a practice where venomous insects and snakes were sealed
Speaker 2: in a vessel until only one survived. Allegedly, the resulting
Speaker 2: tocsin was believed to cause wasting, illness, and enemies, and
Speaker 2: was considered a form of black magic, often linked to women,
Speaker 2: of course and marginalized groups in southern China, and.
Speaker 3: While their goals were different, Chinese emperors seeking immortality would
Speaker 3: unknowingly cut their lives short by ingesting alchemical mixtures that
Speaker 3: contained substances like mercury, arsenic, or lead, a practice that
Speaker 3: bafflingly went on four centuries. I guess no one wants
Speaker 3: to say no to an emperor, right, hm?
Speaker 1: Weird?
Speaker 3: Yeah, very strange and current.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: At the same time, Eastern traditional medicine sometimes successfully operated
Speaker 3: on the principles that a practitioner used poison to attack
Speaker 3: poison a verified version of this or classical vaccinations for
Speaker 3: smallpox and the flu, and at the other end of
Speaker 3: the medical spectrum are like homeopathy. At the same time,
Speaker 3: Greek physicians such as Diascorides and Galen catalog poisonous plants
Speaker 3: alongside remedies, underscoring the often incorrect belief that the line
Speaker 3: between medicine and poison was razor thin and it was
Speaker 3: determined only by dosage and intent.
Speaker 1: So if you.
Speaker 2: Wanted someone dead. In ancient Rome, without drawing a sword,
Speaker 2: you reached for venium. That one little word could mean medicine,
Speaker 2: a love potion, or straight up poison, and the Romans
Speaker 2: were so spooked by it that Sola wrote it right
Speaker 2: into law through the lex Cornelia descarsis at Venefesis in
Speaker 2: eighty one BCE, making poisoning officially a crime. But it
Speaker 2: wasn't just legal theory. Rome had some very real poison scares.
Speaker 2: Take three point thirty one BCE. Live tells us about
Speaker 2: the so called Matrons poisoning panic, in which during a plague,
Speaker 2: dozens of elite women were accused of secretly mixing He's
Speaker 2: deadly poisons that were promoted as cures. Were they murderers
Speaker 2: or victims of mass hysteria hard to say, but the
Speaker 2: city responded with trials and executions, and mass hysteria turned
Speaker 2: the focus on women again. I mean, how many times
Speaker 2: have we talked about this.
Speaker 3: Over and over and over. At that time laws were
Speaker 3: written against the practice of poisoning because the blur between
Speaker 3: medicine and magic. There were trials, executions, and political scandals
Speaker 3: often turned on the suspicion that someone had turned from
Speaker 3: a pharmacist into an assassin. At a historical time when
Speaker 3: home remedies were often the first line of defense against illness,
Speaker 3: families were expected to have a wide range of ingredients
Speaker 3: right on hand. Fast forward a few centuries in a
Speaker 3: crime scene looks a lot more targeted and Imperial Emperor
Speaker 3: Claudius dead after eating mushrooms served by his wife Agrippina.
Speaker 3: Tacitus and Suanitas both describe it. One version even has
Speaker 3: a doctor finishing him off with a poisoned feather. I mean, hey,
Speaker 3: he's almost dead. You can use that feather over there
Speaker 3: to see beat up the process, I guess. And then
Speaker 3: there's Lacusta, the professional poisoner. Nero basically kept her on
Speaker 3: a retainer in fifty five CE he wanted his rival
Speaker 3: Britannicus out of the way, and Tacitus says that Lacusta
Speaker 3: whipped up a brew that got slipped into his drink
Speaker 3: and boom, Britannicus collapsed at the table. Lacusta became infamous,
Speaker 3: the ancient world's first celebrity poisoner. She could have had
Speaker 3: a whole episode on Dayline for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely, I would watch that.
Speaker 2: So with the combination of these panicked, accusations, imperial intrigue,
Speaker 2: and basically professional hit jobs. Poisoning haunted Rome's imagination for
Speaker 2: many years. So remember the lex Cornelia made sure to
Speaker 2: codify these crimes as punishable. Potion use could easily turn
Speaker 2: into prosecution, and the punishments fit the crime. And of
Speaker 2: course the use of poison wasn't regulated just to Eastern
Speaker 2: or Western so we.
Speaker 3: Started with an overview of criminal poison use in the
Speaker 3: ancient world. But here's where it gets even more interesting.
Speaker 3: The way religion and law turned poisoning, and that's where
Speaker 3: the term starts to get a little loose, turned it
Speaker 3: into a tool for controlling women. You know that famous
Speaker 3: line from the King James Bible, thou shalt not suffer
Speaker 3: a witch to live. But that word which isn't in
Speaker 3: the original Hebrew, the text says macasifa, basically a female
Speaker 3: ritual specialist. When it got translated into Greek, the word
Speaker 3: became pharmacose and that could mean healer, drug maker, potion mixer,
Speaker 3: or poisoner, and by the time it hit Latin, it
Speaker 3: morphed into malificos or just evildoers, and the English translators
Speaker 3: of the sixteen hundreds living in the middle of a
Speaker 3: witch panic settled on which so instead of broomsticks, we're
Speaker 3: really talking about people, often women, who knew how to
Speaker 3: make potions. And in a world where medicines and poisons
Speaker 3: sat right next to each other in the same cabinet,
Speaker 3: that knowledge was terrifying to people. That anxiety shows up everywhere.
Speaker 3: The existing Roman laws about thaneficium and the poison panic
Speaker 3: in the Middle Ages, and of course the witch trials. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean that says everything about how seriously they took it.
Speaker 3: Then in Renaissance Italy, poison became part of everyday political drama.
Speaker 3: City records in Florence listed poison prices and contracts. There's
Speaker 3: the well known shadowy reputation of the entire Borgia family,
Speaker 3: with multiple members accused fairly or not, of lacing wine
Speaker 3: with arsenic at banquets. Then there are later figures like
Speaker 3: Julia Tafauna, who created and delivered a clear, tasteless and
Speaker 3: odorless liquid into bottles labeled as holy water or cosmetics.
Speaker 3: It was named Aqua Tofauna. The poison was intended to
Speaker 3: give women a means to end permanently their abusive relationships
Speaker 3: by dosing their husbands slowly over weeks. The symptoms started
Speaker 3: out as low key enough that it looked like a
Speaker 3: natural illness, weakness, stomach pain, wasting away. It was a
Speaker 3: perfect cover. But at the heart of all of this
Speaker 3: is arsenic. Sometimes with the little lead or belladonna thrown in,
Speaker 3: but the heavy lifter arsenic. Its colorless, odorless, tasteless one dissolve,
Speaker 3: and once inside the body it systematically shuts down vital processes.
Speaker 3: Victims would start with violent stomach cramps, then nausea and vomiting.
Speaker 3: Diarrhea was so severe that it led to dehydration. The
Speaker 3: victim's skin would slowly lose color, becoming an ashen gray,
Speaker 3: sometimes even further marred by dark lesions, and in high
Speaker 3: doses it calls convulsions and collapse of the cardiovascular system.
Speaker 3: But in slow doses, like with aquatafauna, it looked like
Speaker 3: tuberculosis or simple decline, which was called consumption.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 2: That's like the start of all of the sort of
Speaker 2: black widow cases that we hear.
Speaker 1: About right exactly so, in the Middle.
Speaker 2: Ages, in Scandinavia, noble women like Blanche of Namor, Queen
Speaker 2: of Sweden and Norway were accused of resorting to poison
Speaker 2: against rivals. Current researchers proposed that these accusations might be
Speaker 2: political smears, But the important thing is that the idea
Speaker 2: of female poisoners was powerful enough to stick around for
Speaker 2: thousands of years. By the fifteen hundreds, England cranked things
Speaker 2: up with the Poisoning Act of fifteen thirty. It was
Speaker 2: so extreme that it made poisoning high treason. The punishment
Speaker 2: wasn't hanging or beheading, it was boiling alive. One of
Speaker 2: the first executed was Richard Ruce, a cook accused of
Speaker 2: poisoning a pot of porridge in Bishop John Fisher's household.
Speaker 2: He was literally boiled to death in Smithfield Market. So
Speaker 2: through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, poisoning wasn't just a crime.
Speaker 2: It was a cultural obsession, tangled up with witchcraft trials,
Speaker 2: royal scandals, and social control. And at the center of
Speaker 2: it all was the same anxiety we saw back in Rome.
Speaker 2: Who controls the potions and what happens when that power
Speaker 2: is used to kill instead of cure.
Speaker 3: But a key historical event that is recorded are the
Speaker 3: accusations against Ellenor Cobbham, Duchess of Gloucester in fourteen forty one,
Speaker 3: She was accused of witchcraft and sorcery, including trying to
Speaker 3: poison King Henry the sixth through the use of her potions,
Speaker 3: and Eleanor ended up in prison for life. Whether or
Speaker 3: not the poison was really involved, the charge itself carried
Speaker 3: that leathles association with witchcraft.
Speaker 1: So here's the paradox.
Speaker 2: While poisoners were feared, this era also gave us the
Speaker 2: birth of the science of toxicology. Doctors started experimenting, documenting symptoms,
Speaker 2: and basically building a science of detection. By the nineteenth century,
Speaker 2: it was front page news the so called poison panic.
Speaker 2: Easy access to arsenic and other poisons made the public
Speaker 2: very paranoid, and trials of accused poisoners became sort of
Speaker 2: the new media spectacle. The slow burn effect was part
Speaker 2: of its power. A husband or a rival could weaken
Speaker 2: over the weeks, losing weight, their hair, becoming brittle, skin pale,
Speaker 2: until they just essentially wasted away. No suspicious knife, woo,
Speaker 2: no obvious crime scene, just this lingering illness, and without
Speaker 2: chemical tests, no one could prove otherwise. This is where
Speaker 2: the science starts to change the story. Paracelsus, a Swiss
Speaker 2: physician in the early fifteen hundreds wrote quote, all things
Speaker 2: are poison, and nothing is without poison. Only the dose
Speaker 2: makes the poison end quote, which is true to medications
Speaker 2: and things that we talk about in today's day and age.
Speaker 2: Certainly circling back to earlier Eastern perspectives, Paracelsus looked at
Speaker 2: substances like arsenic and mercury not just as tools for murder,
Speaker 2: but as potential medicines if measured carefully.
Speaker 1: He gave us the idea of dose.
Speaker 2: Response, the foundation of toxicology. He helped to turn the
Speaker 2: focus from poison as a dark, mysterious force, something tied
Speaker 2: to witches, sorcery, or secret criminal plots, to chemistry and
Speaker 2: the dose the same arsenic that can kill you in
Speaker 2: grams might cure certain ailments in milligrams. He dragged poison
Speaker 2: out of the realm of superstition and into science.
Speaker 1: Imagine that, and.
Speaker 3: By the nineteenth century, Matthew Orphela, sometimes called the father
Speaker 3: of modern toxicology, developed chemical tests to actually detect arsenic
Speaker 3: in tissues. Suddenly, poisoners couldn't hide behind mystery illnesses anymore, and.
Speaker 2: That's why arsenic earned the nickname the King of Poisons
Speaker 2: and the poison of kings.
Speaker 1: It was used to.
Speaker 2: Murder peasants, noblemen, and even emperors. But it also forced
Speaker 2: us to invent the science that finally exposed it. And
Speaker 2: this is when the government's cracked down. Britain's eighteen sixty
Speaker 2: eight Pharmacy Act restricted poisons to license pharmacists and even
Speaker 2: required sales to be logged. In the United States, dozens
Speaker 2: of states followed suit. They even made special textured poison
Speaker 2: bottles so people wouldn't mistake them in the dark. And
Speaker 2: in nineteen o six, the Pure Food and Drug Act
Speaker 2: banned dangerous ingredients and the nineteen twenty Dangerous Drugs Act
Speaker 2: targeted opiates. And in the modern world, while we see
Speaker 2: fewer poison murders, the pattern continues. When it does surface,
Speaker 2: it's often in healthcare settings, serial poisoners abusing access to medications.
Speaker 2: But now toxicology is incredibly advanced and we can detect
Speaker 2: trace levels of toxins that would have been invisible just
Speaker 2: a century ago.
Speaker 3: When we talk about poisoners, the truth is that our
Speaker 3: field psychology has not paid them as much attention to
Speaker 3: other forms of overt violence, or even the direct focus
Speaker 3: of studying serial killers of which poisoners can be a subset.
Speaker 3: The twenty fifteen systematic review by Terrant and Glorny examining
Speaker 3: poisoning cases from eighteen fifty to twenty fourteen, has laid
Speaker 3: a foundation for more of an understanding of the motivations
Speaker 3: and the profiles of these perpetrators. So what Terrant and
Speaker 3: Glorny found was surprisingly consistent across time and cultures. You
Speaker 3: can almost sketch a prototype poisoner. It is someone often
Speaker 3: tied to healthcare or science fields, where they both have
Speaker 3: access to an array of potentially poisonous substances and the
Speaker 3: knowledge of how to use them. Many of the profile
Speaker 3: studies show individuals with complex personality traits that are shaped
Speaker 3: by their life histories like attachment issues and those made
Speaker 3: them more vulnerable to committing these crimes. Their motives are
Speaker 3: rarely random. Poisoning was usually about secondary gain, and secondary
Speaker 3: gain is the indirect benefit that a person receives from
Speaker 3: their symptoms or behavior, such as attention, financial compensation, or
Speaker 3: avoiding responsibility, and that's beyond the primary effect of the
Speaker 3: condition itself. So in these cases, the drive is the money,
Speaker 3: control or reclaiming power over a victim right.
Speaker 2: So kind of pointing out the obvious here. But I'm
Speaker 2: sure at this point us and our listener are all
Speaker 2: kind of picturing this emerging ven diagram, of course, including
Speaker 2: a circle that is a factitious order by proxy, right,
Speaker 2: because what you're talking about really describes that, among some
Speaker 2: other things that we're going to get to. And from
Speaker 2: an article from our friend and colleague, doctor Joni Johnston,
Speaker 2: she posits that poisoners tend to be cunning, methodical, and
Speaker 2: risk adverse. So unlike offenders who use physical violence, poisoners
Speaker 2: actually avoid confrontation, so instead they tend to plan carefully,
Speaker 2: manipulate others, and strike in ways that con seal their hand.
Speaker 2: Some experts compare their methodical planning to writing a script
Speaker 2: for a play. Every step kind of mapped out, every
Speaker 2: risk considered.
Speaker 3: Another theme that emerged in tarant and Glormy's research was,
Speaker 3: of course, the substantial factor of mental health. A substantial
Speaker 3: number of poisoners had suspected or even diagnosed psychiatric conditions,
Speaker 3: and that influenced how they managed their emotions and their relationships.
Speaker 3: This is again reflected in doctor Johnson's research that shows
Speaker 3: poisoners often show signs of emotional immaturity and inadequacy, and
Speaker 3: they're thought to compensate for these perceived deficits through manipulation,
Speaker 3: a hunger for control, fantasies of power, and an exploitive
Speaker 3: interpersonal style. Many were spoiled or came from unhappy homes. Psychologically,
Speaker 3: it's as if they never grew up. They take what
Speaker 3: they want without regard for others, driven by greed, lust,
Speaker 3: or resentment rather than empathy or moral restraint. Definitely leaning
Speaker 3: heavily here on the influence of narcissistic elements within their personality.
Speaker 3: Put together literature and case files show that they have
Speaker 3: recognizable patterns. The studies authors suggest that these patterns could
Speaker 3: be the basis for an early warning system that would
Speaker 3: help professionals spot suspicious behavior before it escalates into a crime.
Speaker 2: That's a good foundation, I mean, I think we're starting
Speaker 2: to get a picture, just personality wise of what's going on,
Speaker 2: and now naring down to a perspective on the mental
Speaker 2: health factor. A really interesting point is that poisoners don't
Speaker 2: fit neatly into the usual criminal boxes. Poisoners show traits
Speaker 2: of both the so called organized and disorganized defenders. When
Speaker 2: you dig down a little deeper, I do want to
Speaker 2: say we don't use this caveat much, but it's worth
Speaker 2: noting that with these descriptors, they're not to be confused
Speaker 2: with the psych use of them in evaluations, where we
Speaker 2: might talk about someone being organized versus disorganized, which really
Speaker 2: kind of in that case refers to an individual's executive
Speaker 2: functioning processes. In this use, we mean that those are
Speaker 2: just planners, very careful planners, versus those that are more impulsive.
Speaker 2: So you know, we have some overlap and like our
Speaker 2: psych folks and our listeners and just you know, true
Speaker 2: crime criminal justice listeners, and I think sometimes we have
Speaker 2: to make that differentiation.
Speaker 1: And we don't.
Speaker 2: So having said that, on the organized side, they're meticulous
Speaker 2: choosing poisons that are colorless, tasteless, slow acting, and really
Speaker 2: tough to detect, all while leaving almost no physical evidence behind.
Speaker 2: But at the same time, they can still behave in
Speaker 2: disorganized ways, acting erratically or leaving small clues that they
Speaker 2: didn't mean to. Successful poisoners are often calculating and deliberate,
Speaker 2: yet they still might slip up, either emotionally or maybe
Speaker 2: logistically or practically. Take Mary Anne Cotton, a nurse go
Speaker 2: figure who is often called Britain's first female serial killer
Speaker 2: in the nineteenth century, she poisoned at least fifteen people,
Speaker 2: usually her own children and husbands, with arsenic, and for
Speaker 2: years she got away with it by making their deaths
Speaker 2: look like natural illnesses. But her slip up came when
Speaker 2: she started talking too freely about collecting life insurance before
Speaker 2: her last victim had even died. That inconsistency ray suspicion,
Speaker 2: and toxicologists finally tested the bodies, finding the arsenic she
Speaker 2: thought was invisible. It's a classic example careful planning on
Speaker 2: one hand and a careless human mistake on the other
Speaker 2: that brought everything crashing down. So when we turn to
Speaker 2: look at personality traits a little bit more closely and
Speaker 2: kind of start tying this in with what we know
Speaker 2: about criminal psychology, I think the discussions in our field,
Speaker 2: though often anecdotal, do commonly describe poisoners in certain ways.
Speaker 2: So generally throughout the literature, you're going to see them
Speaker 2: described as cunning, remorseless, and even greedy, especially when it
Speaker 2: does come to financial gain and the stories of collecting
Speaker 2: life insurance policy after life insurance policy. But we also
Speaker 2: see them described as calculating about their timing, like really
Speaker 2: doing the research and knowing how long the toksin will
Speaker 2: take to act, and then also preparing alibis accordingly. So
Speaker 2: to this extent, it's probably not surprising that they're also
Speaker 2: described as being highly intelligent and methodical in studying poisons
Speaker 2: and planning. So they're having to utilize dangerous substances that
Speaker 2: could harm them too, right, so there has to be
Speaker 2: really this careful planning and execution so they don't end
Speaker 2: up becoming a victim of their own deadly aspirations. Here,
Speaker 2: we also see in the research that they tend to
Speaker 2: exhibit those dark triad traits that we've talked so much
Speaker 2: about before, especially machavelianism, you know, that cold hearted detachment
Speaker 2: that really leads to manipulation being something easy for them
Speaker 2: and easy skill for them. And then the psychopathy of course,
Speaker 2: that callousness, really having that strategic deceit about them to
Speaker 2: go through with this. Additionally, the literature shows that they're
Speaker 2: highly deceptive, emotionally detached, and again very very strategic, especially
Speaker 2: when it comes to gaining some sort of personal advantage
Speaker 2: their life.
Speaker 3: So this is really interesting because we're talking about how
Speaker 3: there is some research but there's not a lot, and
Speaker 3: it's very clear this is one of those situations where
Speaker 3: for so many years, for a couple of thousand at least,
Speaker 3: people had been able to do this in the shadows.
Speaker 3: So we don't have the data. How many people that
Speaker 3: we thought over the years that died of tuberculosis which
Speaker 3: was rampant for years until antibiotics came along. How many
Speaker 3: people before or even when arsenic and lead testing became quantified,
Speaker 3: when they could actually do it. That means you would
Speaker 3: have to be in an area where you could test
Speaker 3: for that, right in a city. I mean, if you're
Speaker 3: in a rural area, the local country doctor, is he
Speaker 3: really going to be able to do that? So fascinating
Speaker 3: stuff here about something that's just been hopefully I mean,
Speaker 3: I think actually one of the things the points we
Speaker 3: get to is how difficult it is to get away
Speaker 3: with it now. But the history of it, I think
Speaker 3: is always going to have a little bit of mystery
Speaker 3: to it. But we do have a really great example.
Speaker 3: This one has been done several times in various forms
Speaker 3: of media, in true crime and podcasts and even some
Speaker 3: sort of investigation discovery type shows. Is the case of it,
Speaker 3: doctor Harold Shipman, and I really like using him, even
Speaker 3: though he's been talked about a lot, because he's a
Speaker 3: perfect nexus of personality disorders and poisoner profiles. And he
Speaker 3: was a British family medicine practitioner. Like I said, he's
Speaker 3: been profiled on many true crime shows, but we would
Speaker 3: be remiss in leaving him out of this. On the surface,
Speaker 3: Shipman was everything that you would want in a doctor.
Speaker 3: He was calm, methodical, always professional, and so old school
Speaker 3: at the time that these crimes were happening that he
Speaker 3: spent a significant portion of his practice doing house calls. Now,
Speaker 3: on one hand, you would think that's wonderful. Look how
Speaker 3: much he cares about his clients, and he actually goes
Speaker 3: out into the field and goes to people's homes, something
Speaker 3: that really just doesn't happen today unless you're rich enough
Speaker 3: to afford concierge's medicine. But it also was part of
Speaker 3: his profile. The more you're going into people's homes, the
Speaker 3: more you have control over the environment, right. But that
Speaker 3: was the kind and compassionate facade that covered up one
Speaker 3: of the most prolific serial killers in modern history. Shipman
Speaker 3: was alleged to have murdered hundreds of his patients, often
Speaker 3: elderly women, by quietly, calmly, and methodically administering lethal dosis
Speaker 3: of diamorphine, which in medical terms is medical heroine. Although
Speaker 3: he was only convicted of the murder of fifteen of
Speaker 3: his patients, the flip side of his compassionate persona was
Speaker 3: this calm, cold, measured killer whose crimes entailed no screaming,
Speaker 3: no blood, and no signs of violence, just a gradual
Speaker 3: decline with elderly patients that looked like natural death, and
Speaker 3: Shipman knew how to falsify all the paperwork to back
Speaker 3: it up. His behavior matches what researchers show about poison intelligent, meticulous,
Speaker 3: emotionally detached, and quite manipulative. He did not kill impulsively.
Speaker 3: He planned, He controlled every detail, and he relied on
Speaker 3: his medical authority to cover his tracks. This is the
Speaker 3: ultimate example of the organized poisoner. He chose a substance
Speaker 3: that he had easy access to, he knew exactly how
Speaker 3: it worked in the body, and he crafted an alibi
Speaker 3: before anyone could ask questions. Again, cold, calculated and chillingly effective,
Speaker 3: until the growing number of victims and patterns in the
Speaker 3: death records of those victims finally exposed him.
Speaker 1: And that seems to be what it is.
Speaker 3: Like.
Speaker 2: You can't just I get getting away with a few
Speaker 2: of these, but just over and over again.
Speaker 1: The jig's got to be up at some point.
Speaker 3: Right, well, right, it's like the sort of what we
Speaker 3: talked about it in the Our Killer Nurses episode the
Speaker 3: Angel of Death. Yeah, persona, like, is there some part
Speaker 3: of him that thought that he was doing these elderly
Speaker 3: people of favor? Not so much because he was also
Speaker 3: known to have taken trophies and some financial stuff from
Speaker 3: them as well. I mean, I also say, like, and
Speaker 3: this is anecdotal on my part as a clinician, but
Speaker 3: you know, you look at pictures of him, and there
Speaker 3: is something that's really creepy about him. Like I guess
Speaker 3: you could see him as like this bespectacled, bearded tweed
Speaker 3: wearing doctor with the big black bag, as this calm
Speaker 3: authority figure. But I find him to be, at least
Speaker 3: the pictures I've seen, to be quite a nerving.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's it's interesting because here we have kind of laid
Speaker 2: the foundation for the literature that we have, But I
Speaker 2: think there's some other things that kind of come up
Speaker 2: when we think about poisoners, like this question of is
Speaker 2: it lore is it not?
Speaker 1: It just ends up like spoiler alert. This is all
Speaker 1: over the place. Like we do have sort.
Speaker 2: Of a profile in a sense, right, but it is
Speaker 2: used in so many different ways and types of crimes,
Speaker 2: some that we can't even like cover today, right. But
Speaker 2: I think one of those that we need to address
Speaker 2: here is kind of that lore about women always using
Speaker 2: poison or being way more likely than men to use
Speaker 2: poison when they kill.
Speaker 1: And to set the scene, you need.
Speaker 2: To know that poison is really only used in less
Speaker 2: than one half of one percent of all murders. So
Speaker 2: what we're talking about is already incredibly rare that.
Speaker 3: We know of, like that's the only car route and
Speaker 3: caveat from that, But that your point is very well taken.
Speaker 3: And again just to be clear on the basics, men
Speaker 3: commit ninety percent of murders, and two thirds of the
Speaker 3: time they use guess what, firearms? Right? Women also use
Speaker 3: firearms half of the time when it comes to murder,
Speaker 3: but they also use knives, they beat their victims, or
Speaker 3: they use blunt objects. Poison is actually the sixth most
Speaker 3: common way that women kill, so in a sense because
Speaker 3: men use guns so much of the time. Yes, it
Speaker 3: is more popular for women to use poison than men,
Speaker 3: but in raw numbers, we can say that men kill
Speaker 3: more often with poison because they're killing way more often, right,
Speaker 3: I think that's the important science to get in there.
Speaker 1: It is.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is you know, you start looking into
Speaker 2: this or hearing us talk about this in too much
Speaker 2: depth and you're like, wait a minute, what. But a
Speaker 2: way to frame this and why we have been led
Speaker 2: to kind of believe this trope is to think of
Speaker 2: it as men kill more often with poison, but is
Speaker 2: definitely more so a weapon of choice for women, especially
Speaker 2: if you do some statistical analysis and remove the firearms
Speaker 2: from it altogether. Similarly, and I find very interesting, drowning
Speaker 2: is more common for women, as we have covered in
Speaker 2: previous episodes on women who kill, especially in cases involving
Speaker 2: their own and sometimes multiple children. But aside from gender,
Speaker 2: some other interesting breakdowns. White women are more likely to
Speaker 2: kill with poison, and perpetrators are generally not targeting victims
Speaker 2: of other races, largely of course, due to the odds
Speaker 2: that still in this day and age, the closest to
Speaker 2: you are generally going to be the same race.
Speaker 3: You know. Just to circle back to the little dip
Speaker 3: into biblical history or biblical translation history that we talked
Speaker 3: about earlier, one of the things that I forgot to
Speaker 3: mention there is that the big push in that final translation,
Speaker 3: in the King James version, now shalt not suffer a
Speaker 3: which to live was pointedly directed at women because women
Speaker 3: were becoming more powerful through the church. Women made up
Speaker 3: the bulk of you know, abbeys and nuns, and they
Speaker 3: were providing lay services. So this was a way to
Speaker 3: pull some power back. And also women were becoming land owners,
Speaker 3: so it's like, hey, we can't have women owning land.
Speaker 3: Let's accuse them of this and accuse them of that
Speaker 3: and get our power back. It's just another you know,
Speaker 3: subjugation of gender roles throughout history, and all.
Speaker 1: Of a sudden you have maleficent. Yes, exactly, variations of
Speaker 1: the terms right, exactly so.
Speaker 3: But based on where you were going with the gender breakdowns,
Speaker 3: killers over thirty are more than twice as likely to
Speaker 3: use poison. That is fascinating to me. But poison is
Speaker 3: used to kill the youngest and the oldest victims. Sons
Speaker 3: and daughters are the most common male and female victims
Speaker 3: to be murdered with poison, and another clear but disturbing
Speaker 3: and not that surprising gender data point. Poisoning accounts for
Speaker 3: more than two percent of husband killings, while poison is
Speaker 3: used in just over half of one percent of wife killings.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so wow, interesting stuff there, I mean, just with
Speaker 2: the demographics to look at.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it makes you think about all those episodes
Speaker 3: that have been used on different crime shows and different
Speaker 3: podcasts where a husband or a wife will use anti
Speaker 3: freeze to poison, like, oh, my husband's just getting sicker
Speaker 3: and sicker. Oh my wife is just getting sicker and sicker,
Speaker 3: and then they know CSI goes through the garage and
Speaker 3: they find like a big old case of open bottles
Speaker 3: of anti freeze.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, we had one just a couple of
Speaker 2: years ago here in southern California. I think it was
Speaker 2: Orange County. We don't cover it in this episode, but
Speaker 2: the woman was poisoning her husband's breakfast cereal I think
Speaker 2: every morning, and I don't know if I think he
Speaker 2: eventually set up a camera and it showed her pouring
Speaker 2: it right in his cereal every morning. Breakfast of Champions
Speaker 2: oh my god.
Speaker 3: Well thanks, thank goodness. See maybe he watched The Sixth
Speaker 3: Sense and New Too.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe put a camera in there.
Speaker 2: I don't know. All right, so let's look at some
Speaker 2: of these other cases that fall into these family dynamics,
Speaker 2: starting off with what we tend to think about. Thanks
Speaker 2: to Hollywood and the interpretation of the data that we
Speaker 2: just gave you, we have a black widow for you. Also,
Speaker 2: I want to say props to my dad who found
Speaker 2: this new story this week while he was visiting.
Speaker 1: He's like, hey, did you hear about this? I'm like,
Speaker 1: did you know? We're doing an episode on poisoning?
Speaker 2: Thank you?
Speaker 1: So thank you, Alex. So this is a.
Speaker 2: Pretty shocking case out of Iran. A fifty six year
Speaker 2: old woman named coulsum Akbari is facing execution after allegedly
Speaker 2: killing eleven of her husbands over more than two decades.
Speaker 2: Authorities say she would marry elderly men, then slowly poison
Speaker 2: them with medications like sedatives, blood pressure drugs, diabetes treatments,
Speaker 2: and even industrial alcohol. If that didn't work, investigators claim
Speaker 2: she has also turned to suffocating them. In some cases,
Speaker 2: her motives appear to have been financial. She inherited property
Speaker 2: and dowries from her victims.
Speaker 1: The deaths went.
Speaker 2: Unnoticed for years because they all look like natural causes
Speaker 2: and older men with health problems, and because she tended
Speaker 2: to move across different regions of Iran. The alleged murders
Speaker 2: began around two thousand and continued until twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: when the suspicious death of eighty two year old Golamraza
Speaker 2: bay By led his family to contact the police. The
Speaker 2: son of this victim actually recalled that his father's friend
Speaker 2: had been married to a woman by the same name
Speaker 2: and he had been poisoned, but he survived. So the
Speaker 2: subsequent instigation, after the family notified the police, then started
Speaker 2: to expose her pattern. Abakari has reportedly confessed, even saying
Speaker 2: that she has lost track of how many she has killed,
Speaker 2: stating that up to fifteen husbands she's had that she's killed.
Speaker 2: It's very interesting. We'll see what happens, if anything. Human
Speaker 2: rights groups have long raise concerns that confessions in Iran
Speaker 2: can be forced through torture or threats against loved ones,
Speaker 2: and some people are just really questioning how these quote
Speaker 2: unquote confessions have come out.
Speaker 3: For her good point to be made about that. I
Speaker 3: hope there's some more data or information that comes out
Speaker 3: about that particular case. This next one was actually put
Speaker 3: on our radar by our dear friend Chris, who runs
Speaker 3: our walking tours, and we love him he does.
Speaker 2: Because that's what you side chat about when you're on
Speaker 2: a true crime walking tour, people poisoning their family and
Speaker 2: friends with mushrooms.
Speaker 3: But of course we do so. This case is unfolding
Speaker 3: right now in Melbourne, Australia. Ian Wilkinson, a Baptist pastor,
Speaker 3: lost his wife, Heather, and two of his closest friends,
Speaker 3: Don and Gail Patterson, after they ate beef Wellington laced
Speaker 3: with toxic death cap mushrooms in twenty twenty three. Aaron Patterson,
Speaker 3: the former daughter in law of the Pattersons, was convicted
Speaker 3: in July of three murders and one attempted murder for
Speaker 3: the lunch, which also nearly killed Wilkinson. At her sentence hearing,
Speaker 3: Wilkinson said that he feels only half alive without his wife,
Speaker 3: describing her as a woman full of faith, kindness and love.
Speaker 3: He said that his life is greatly impoverished without her
Speaker 3: and the Pattersons, but offered the accused forgiveness, praying that
Speaker 3: she will use her time in prison to change Aaron
Speaker 3: Patterson faces life sentences for each murder and up to
Speaker 3: twenty five years for attempted murder. Prosecutors are pushing for
Speaker 3: life without parole, calling the crime so cruel and horrific
Speaker 3: that she deserves no mercy. The judge agreed the case
Speaker 3: was horrendous and sentencing for September eighteenth, twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I mean, we don't know much about motive here. I
Speaker 2: don't think she's done a lot of talking. But to
Speaker 2: serve lunch to your in laws and their friends, I
Speaker 2: don't know. I mean, it's just it kind of falls
Speaker 2: outside of like who are you targeting? How are you
Speaker 2: targeting them? Why are you targeting them?
Speaker 3: But I totally it would seem I mean, in a
Speaker 3: case that we're about to cover a little bit later,
Speaker 3: is let me make it general so that there's not
Speaker 3: just focus on one or two victims, so that it
Speaker 3: can look like an accident. I wonder that's a possible motive.
Speaker 3: We still have many criminal cases to highlight that create
Speaker 3: a further frightening than diagram of offenders. The typologies we
Speaker 3: just shared can range from parents who medically abuse their
Speaker 3: children for historyonic attention, to healthcare workers seeking the power
Speaker 3: of life and death, to assassination with complex drives. The
Speaker 3: goals are as different as the.
Speaker 2: Motivations, which, by the way, we have episodes on all
Speaker 2: of those specific phenomenon, including killer nurses. As we mentioned assassinations.
Speaker 2: There's so much overlap. We will link all of those
Speaker 2: in the show notes in case you haven't gone back
Speaker 2: and listened to those. But let's parse out and focus
Speaker 2: on more specific and individual targets. One of the most
Speaker 2: well known victims of politically motivated assassination by poisoning is
Speaker 2: former Russian spy Alexander Litvienko, who was fatally poisoned in
Speaker 2: London after drinking tea laced with polonium two ten, a
Speaker 2: very rare and very radioactive isotope. Litvienko was a former
Speaker 2: officer with the Russian security Services, the KGB and later
Speaker 2: the FSB, Russia's primary domestic security and counterintelligence agency. In
Speaker 2: the late nineteen nineties, Litvienko accused his supervisors of ordering
Speaker 2: assassinations of political enemies, and later published books alleging that
Speaker 2: the FSB staged terror attacks to consolidate Vladimir Putin's power.
Speaker 2: For that, he became a target, fleeing Russia in two thousand,
Speaker 2: receiving asylum in the UK, and then began working with
Speaker 2: British intelligence while continuing to publicly criticize the Kremlin.
Speaker 1: We know that's going to be all bad.
Speaker 2: So on November one, two thousand and six, after meeting
Speaker 2: with two former Russian agents at a London hotel, lit
Speaker 2: Vienko quickly became seriously ill, and over the next three
Speaker 2: weeks his condition deteriorated in a way doctors had never
Speaker 2: seen before. His symptoms included violent stomach pain, bloody diarrhea,
Speaker 2: hair loss, and a slow, complete collapse of his immune system.
Speaker 2: The toxin used in this instance, of course, took a
Speaker 2: turn from the regular range of poisons. Polonium two ten
Speaker 2: is an extremely rare radioactive isotope. It's a substance that
Speaker 2: can only be manufactured in state run nuclear facilities. This
Speaker 2: was the first confirmed case of lethal polonium poisoning. The
Speaker 2: investigators later suggested it was chosen because it's tasteless, odorless,
Speaker 2: and nearly impossible to detect with standard tests. For the assassins,
Speaker 2: it was supposed to be the perfect silent weapon, but
Speaker 2: what they didn't account for was the radioactive trail it
Speaker 2: left contamination in airplanes, hotels and restaurants all across London.
Speaker 2: Litfienko's deathbed statement accused Vladimir Putin of ordering the hit,
Speaker 2: and subsequent UK inquiries and the European Court of Human
Speaker 2: Rights concluded the same that his poisoning was a state
Speaker 2: sponsored assassination. Beyond silencing a critic, the message was clear,
Speaker 2: defection and dissent would not be forgiven, no matter where
Speaker 2: you fled. The means of poisoning seems to have been
Speaker 2: meant to have been discovered to highlight the message. Essentially,
Speaker 2: we know where you are and we know how to
Speaker 2: get to you. And in our earlier points about motivation,
Speaker 2: this case shows that it's not always about money, not
Speaker 2: always about jealousy, but political power and intimidation on a
Speaker 2: global stage can also be the case. Chillingly, the weapon
Speaker 2: wasn't a medieval herb or an arsenic powder, but a
Speaker 2: radioactive isotope wants to use in nuclear bombs. Definitely strong
Speaker 2: message designed to hear and.
Speaker 3: If Litvinenko's assassination shows how poisons can be wielded as
Speaker 3: a tool of state power. The next case shows something
Speaker 3: very different. How poison, or in this case, a biological weapon,
Speaker 3: can be turned loose by a fringe religious movement in
Speaker 3: the US. In Oregon nineteen eighty four, in the small
Speaker 3: city of the Dales, more than seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: people suddenly fell violently ill diarrhea, fever, stomach cramps, nausea.
Speaker 3: Dozens were hospitalized. The cause not food handlers, not bad hygiene,
Speaker 3: which is the polite way of saying that staff weren't
Speaker 3: washing their hands. No, this was deliberate. Members of the
Speaker 3: rajnis Shei cult, led by ma Anan Sheila, had cultured
Speaker 3: the bacteria salmonella in their commune's lab and spread it
Speaker 3: across salad bars at ten local restaurants. The motivation power
Speaker 3: at the ballot box. The Rajnichis had already taken over
Speaker 3: nearby town, renamed it Rajenish, and wanted to extend control
Speaker 3: by winning county elections. Their plan was simple, sick in
Speaker 3: the vote in population so that their candidates would win.
Speaker 3: It was the first large scale bioterrorist attack on US soil.
Speaker 3: This particular example shows a great deal of calculation, planning,
Speaker 3: and implementation. The cult members bought the bacteria from a
Speaker 3: medical supply company, grew it in their own labs, and
Speaker 3: tested it first by dosing county commissioners with contaminated water.
Speaker 3: When that worked, they went bigger, salad bars, salad dressings,
Speaker 3: even doorknobs at government offices. Their nickname for the mixture
Speaker 3: was salsa. Fortunately no one died, but hundreds of people
Speaker 3: were incapacitated. People stopped eating out, they stayed home and
Speaker 3: felt like prisoners in their own town, leading to many
Speaker 3: businesses being closed, and of course, fear and distrust ran
Speaker 3: through the community. Investigators later uncovered glass files of salmonella
Speaker 3: and the Rajnishi labs, confirming the deliberate plot. Sheila and
Speaker 3: her lieutenant, ma Anan Puja were eventually convicted and served
Speaker 3: prison time. Unlike Shipman's need for control or live in
Speaker 3: INCO's political silencing, here it was about manipulating democracy itself,
Speaker 3: weaponizing illness to sway an election.
Speaker 2: And see, when most people think of cults and poisonings,
Speaker 2: they think they're doing it to their people within. This
Speaker 2: is such an outlier most people when they think of
Speaker 2: poisonings in America immediately picture the nineteen eighty two Chicago
Speaker 2: tilnal murders, seven people dead from cyanide lace capsules pulled
Speaker 2: right off drugstore shelves. But because that case was never
Speaker 2: solved and the motive remains a mystery, and because it's
Speaker 2: been covered very widely, we're going to turn instead to
Speaker 2: the Stella Nickel case, which gave investigators both a culprit
Speaker 2: and a clear motivation in a similar case. So Stella
Speaker 2: Nichols case is the one that finally put real legal
Speaker 2: teeth behind tamper evident packaging. In June nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 2: her husband, Bruce Nicchol, died after taking extra strength etc.
Speaker 1: At home near Seattle.
Speaker 2: Six days later, bank manager Sue Snow died the same way.
Speaker 2: A federal jury later found that Nicol had laced gelatin
Speaker 2: capsules with potassium cyanide and staged a random public tampering
Speaker 2: scare to disguise her husband's murder as an accident. She
Speaker 2: became the first person convicted under the federal anti tampering
Speaker 2: statute and drew a ninety year sentence. I mean no doubt,
Speaker 2: probably gaining inspiration from the Tailanol murders, investigators initially struggled.
Speaker 2: Bruce's death was first chalked up to natural causes. The
Speaker 2: picture changed when officials tied Snow's death to cyanide and
Speaker 2: then found another tainted bottle that had come from the
Speaker 2: Nickel home. The FDA and FBI broad ins testing and
Speaker 2: amid a nationwide alert, identified a handful of contaminated bottles
Speaker 2: in the region. Two of them traced Nichol's possession, cementing
Speaker 2: the theory that someone had seated store shelves to create the
Speaker 2: illusion of a random poison.
Speaker 3: Forensics and paper trails closed the loop. At autopsy and
Speaker 3: at the lab, examiners detected cyanide spiked with green crystals,
Speaker 3: and the color of those crystals matched an aquarium algaecide
Speaker 3: that Nicol bought and used at home. This was an
Speaker 3: unusual choice for a poison that became her signature modus operandi,
Speaker 3: and of course, subpoena library records showed that she checked
Speaker 3: out books on toxic plants and poisons. FBI analysts later
Speaker 3: lifted her prints from cyanide related encyclopedia pages. And this
Speaker 3: is the kind of stuff, minute but substantial, circumstantial evidence
Speaker 3: that juries tend to find persuasive because each piece points
Speaker 3: in the same direction. And this was nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 3: way before forensics files, motive evidence was pretty clear cut.
Speaker 3: Nicol had multiple life insurance policies on Bruce, with a
Speaker 3: double indignity payout for accidental death. Her adult daughter told
Speaker 3: investigators that before the murders, Nichol had talked about wanting
Speaker 3: Bruce dead and had tried foxglove also known as digitalis
Speaker 3: in capsules, and she had openly discussed how insurance money
Speaker 3: would change their lives. That testimony, paired with the product
Speaker 3: tampering stagecraft, framed the killings as calculated bid for secondary
Speaker 3: gain money and freedom, rather than a spree. So what
Speaker 3: do you think this leakage was about.
Speaker 2: That's shocking to me that she told the adult daughter,
Speaker 2: because you know, we're talking about the one who's really
Speaker 2: falling into the category we're talking about earlier, right deliberate.
Speaker 2: She's doing the research, very very organized, but yet we
Speaker 2: said sometimes they slip up in the weirdest ways. I
Speaker 2: don't know what this is about, what you.
Speaker 3: Thoughts, I don't know's. I think it's fascinating because in
Speaker 3: threat assessment you always look at leakage in fact, you know,
Speaker 3: one of the biggest cases right now is the most
Speaker 3: recent school shooting, which is horrific and in the news
Speaker 3: right now as we speak. There was so much leakage
Speaker 3: this person was posting daily, but in moments like this,
Speaker 3: it's not so clear cut. It's wondering was she hoping
Speaker 3: that her daughter would talk her out of it, Was
Speaker 3: she hoping for a co collaborator. Was she hoping for
Speaker 3: an alibi or permission? I don't know. I think it's
Speaker 3: very interesting and not so uncommon. You know, we hear
Speaker 3: about this, especially when it's familicide or you know, partner
Speaker 3: murders like this.
Speaker 1: Sure, yeah, I'm not sure.
Speaker 2: I'm leaning towards just generally it seems to be a
Speaker 2: way to see if people will catch on and then
Speaker 2: start asking questions.
Speaker 3: What's wrong, or pull some attention back to them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, put some sort of obstacle in place so they
Speaker 2: actually won't do it, Yeah, which we see with homicidal
Speaker 2: and suicidal leakage, Being that it was an adult daughter,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I mean, I guess I'd have to
Speaker 2: know more about the dynamics and the relationship to really
Speaker 2: see there. But obviously the daughter wasn't keeping that secret.
Speaker 2: But as we said, so, Nicole presented as a highly organized,
Speaker 2: instrumental poison in. Her indicators include advanced research. She had
Speaker 2: gone to the library, like physically if they're pulling fingerprints
Speaker 2: off Encyclopedia's method selection, right, something that was odorless, tasteless,
Speaker 2: was able to put into capsules. She also had seen
Speaker 2: control and staging, so being able to place bottles to
Speaker 2: kind of simulate that random seating and tampering in the stores.
Speaker 2: And then financial trigger insurance, right, she also had that
Speaker 2: double indemnity insurance plan.
Speaker 1: So she was very, very organized.
Speaker 2: So maybe her lapses, I don't know, stem from a
Speaker 2: lack of general knowledge in that area that we kind
Speaker 2: of take for granted today after you know, we're immersed
Speaker 2: in true crime all the time. But she didn't totally
Speaker 2: cover her tracks. In court, the judge called the crimes
Speaker 2: to be with exceptional callousness and cruelty, which tracks with
Speaker 2: a sort of power in controlled narrative more than with
Speaker 2: passion or grievance. Even there's no public record of a
Speaker 2: formal psychiatric diagnosis, but what we can kind of safely
Speaker 2: say is that her behavior fits the organized, goal driven
Speaker 2: poisoning pattern that we've been outlining across all of these cases. Legally,
Speaker 2: the case mattered beyond Seattle. A nineteen eighty nine Ninth
Speaker 2: Circuit opinion upheld her conviction under the then new federal statute,
Speaker 2: clearly stating that product tempering causing the death could be
Speaker 2: prosecuted federally even when the motive was a targeted domestic
Speaker 2: murder disguised as this public hazard. So the Nickel case,
Speaker 2: along with the Tailanal murders, of course, their precedent really
Speaker 2: is why we have those triple seal packaging, chain of
Speaker 2: custody recalls the way that we have all of those
Speaker 2: precautions that we take to protect the public, and why
Speaker 2: our shelves look the way they do today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it can be really annoying for me, Like you know,
Speaker 3: you get the child proof bottle off, and then even
Speaker 3: the seal is like concrete. You have to get a
Speaker 3: knife or an implement to stab through it really to
Speaker 3: peel it off.
Speaker 2: But all that is there for a reason, risk cutting
Speaker 2: yourself just to get into the bottles.
Speaker 3: But you can understand why after those two particular incidents.
Speaker 3: So another case that we want to cover is William
Speaker 3: Robert Cable, and this was from twenty twenty, and it's
Speaker 3: quite a different one that I found really fascinating, and
Speaker 3: it's pretty unsettling because it mixes premeditation with an additional
Speaker 3: factor of one of the four aspects of the dark
Speaker 3: tetrad as opposed to the dark triad, and that is
Speaker 3: sadism in this instance exemplified as performative cruelty and charged
Speaker 3: in twenty twenty and later pleading guilty, William Robert Cable
Speaker 3: admitted to poisoning eight unhoused people in Huntington Beach, California,
Speaker 3: by lacing food with oleo resin capsicum, the ultra potent
Speaker 3: pepper abstract that is used in police spray, and it's
Speaker 3: a particular version of pepper spray that's reported to be
Speaker 3: up to four times as strong as standard brands. He
Speaker 3: was sentenced in April twenty twenty one to four years
Speaker 3: in state prison. His prosecutors asserted that Cable targeted a
Speaker 3: vulnerable population, filmed the aftermath for later viewing, and even
Speaker 3: then drew an elder abuse count among his multiple felonies
Speaker 3: and misdemeanors, so his methodology was calculated and coercive. According
Speaker 3: to the investigators. Cable and his associates presented the stunt
Speaker 3: as a spicy food challenge to these unhoused individuals, and
Speaker 3: he would often enhance his pitch with the promise of
Speaker 3: alcohol or beer along with extra food to secure the
Speaker 3: victim's cooperation. Now, these victims, who were completely unaware that
Speaker 3: the dishes they were going to be eating had been tainted,
Speaker 3: suffered intense and drum matic seizure like symptoms, including vomiting,
Speaker 3: intense mouth and stomach pain, and difficulty breeding, with many
Speaker 3: of the victims requiring immediate hospitalization. The challenge framing, which
Speaker 3: was the use of a caustic agent that was reported
Speaker 3: to be at least as four times as strong as
Speaker 3: police pepper spray, and the decision to videotape their reactions
Speaker 3: all point to a scheme designed not just a harm,
Speaker 3: but also, in the prosecutor's language, to produce spectacle. So
Speaker 3: Cable may have asserted that he was attempting a ripoff
Speaker 3: of prank or jackass, or even the spicy food challenge
Speaker 3: that has been so popular on YouTube, but the acute
Speaker 3: difference here is that the victims he chose were exceptionally
Speaker 3: vulnerable individuals. They were in an unhoused situation with any
Speaker 3: number of unknown medical or mental health issues that could
Speaker 3: have contributed to their current situation and could have contributed
Speaker 3: to death.
Speaker 2: Clinically, his conduct aligns with thrill seeking and dominance motives
Speaker 2: rather than instrumental gain, likely because there was little evidence
Speaker 2: to indicate that the filmer was seeking monetary gain. The
Speaker 2: Orange County District Attorney characterized the videos as a twisted
Speaker 2: form of entertainment meant to be replayed, suggesting reinforcement from others, pain,
Speaker 2: and a desire to control both the victim's bodies through
Speaker 2: the ingestion of the chemicals and their social image through
Speaker 2: the camera. This is not unlike a phenomenon that was
Speaker 2: out there several years back, bum fights, if you'll remember that,
Speaker 2: where they were pitting unhelps people against each other to fight,
Speaker 2: like giving them some sort of incentive because of their situation.
Speaker 2: But this blend that coercive control, pain induction, and the
Speaker 2: addition of an audience is really congruent with performative cruelty
Speaker 2: and really dehumanization. Cable chose targets with little social power
Speaker 2: or really any means for recourse in the situation.
Speaker 3: There's this organized thread running through this whole sequence. Again,
Speaker 3: as we've said before, there's obtaining the substance, there's the
Speaker 3: creation or scripting of a benign cover story, the spicy challenge,
Speaker 3: manipulating while also coercing consent with the promise of alcohol
Speaker 3: or food, staging the setup, managing equipment. All of that
Speaker 3: planning paired with the attention seeking filming, and this gives
Speaker 3: us its character outline of someone who lacks empathy, who
Speaker 3: is a sensation seeking offender, and an individual who prioritizes
Speaker 3: control and spectacle over other conventional motives that we've mentioned previously.
Speaker 3: So he faced up to nineteen years if he was
Speaker 3: convicted a trial, but he only received four years on
Speaker 3: a plea, which is pretty lax given the crimes, but
Speaker 3: it still sent a message about targeting unhoused communities with
Speaker 3: chemical harm for entertainment. This case also underscores how challenge
Speaker 3: culture can be weaponized, and we've seen it in the
Speaker 3: ice bucket challenge, where really cruel bullies would fundamentally challenged
Speaker 3: peer and fill the bucket full of refuse if not
Speaker 3: excrement or you'reine. I mean, it's just horrible situations like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, definitely in this case against Cable. It also included
Speaker 2: misdemeanor accounts for contributing to the delinquency of a minor,
Speaker 2: indicating that some younger participants were present or maybe involved.
Speaker 2: Interesting because that's like another queue to perhaps dominance, right,
Speaker 2: like how is he involving other people? Which also doubles
Speaker 2: as like audience building inside this offender's own peer network.
Speaker 2: When you then add in the elder abuse charges, was
Speaker 2: I think was really smart and good for the prosecutors.
Speaker 2: This is a clear example of opportunistic victimization focused on
Speaker 2: multiple kind of quote unquote perceived low resistant groups. So
Speaker 2: I think, if anything, that case is awful. Thank you
Speaker 2: for finding it, though, just to kind of put an
Speaker 2: extra little spin on well, essentially what we started with,
Speaker 2: what the definition of poison is and how it can
Speaker 2: be harmful in several different ways. But I think, if anything,
Speaker 2: you know, we use more case examples in this episode
Speaker 2: than we tend to do in our normal ones. But
Speaker 2: they're just all over the place. I mean, bioterrorism, swaying elections,
Speaker 2: spies either specific targeted victims, random victims being targeted. I
Speaker 2: mean this, I thank goodness, it is so so rare
Speaker 2: and we threw out that statistic, but this could truly
Speaker 2: be one of the most terrifying means of murder that
Speaker 2: we've covered.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean there's lots of media examples, you know.
Speaker 3: I won't go down with a long list of names,
Speaker 3: but I'm a huge fan of Hammer Horror Films, which
Speaker 3: is a British production company from the fifties sixty seventies
Speaker 3: and it's still around doing some really great classic sort
Speaker 3: of monster movies. And there's always like some you know,
Speaker 3: buxom vixen who has a you know, a jeweled ring
Speaker 3: that she clicks the ruby open and there's like a
Speaker 3: poison that she puts in a goblet of wine or something.
Speaker 3: So it's there's something that I think it connotes seduction
Speaker 3: in the way it's portrayed. But a modern media example
Speaker 3: that I really liked because it's also an excellent movie
Speaker 3: is Gross point Blank from nineteen ninety seven. So I'm
Speaker 3: going this is almost a vintage This is almost a
Speaker 3: vintage movies from what your daughter, remember I gave you
Speaker 3: gave your daughter one of my mom's necklaces from like
Speaker 3: the eighties, and she's like, is this vintage? It was like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I guess it is vintage right. So Gross point Blank
Speaker 3: from nineteen ninety seven is a dark comedy with John Cusack,
Speaker 3: his sister Joan Cusack in an absolutely hilarious role, and
Speaker 3: then Minie Driver. He stars as a character named Martin Blank.
Speaker 3: He's a professional hitman who reluctantly returns to his hometown
Speaker 3: of gross Pointe, Michigan for a job that his handler
Speaker 3: has set him up on. He has to go home
Speaker 3: in order to carry out an assassination. It also happens
Speaker 3: to coincide with his ten year high school reunion after
Speaker 3: he just completely ghosted everyone, his family, all of his friends,
Speaker 3: and his girlfriend who's played by Minnie Driver, who he
Speaker 3: reconnects with. So it's a great movie for the comedy.
Speaker 3: Dan Ackroyd is in it, but one of the scenes
Speaker 3: that shows his skill as an assassin is this scene
Speaker 3: where he attempts to poison an individual that's in a
Speaker 3: room will blow him in a hotel, and while the
Speaker 3: guy is asleep snoring, he drills a hole through his
Speaker 3: floor into the ceiling of the road below and then
Speaker 3: just drops a single viscous thread of poison into the
Speaker 3: snoring guy's mouth. It was like he's really chilling to
Speaker 3: think that, like that's legit, that could happen.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2: Yeah, great, great film for sure. So I went back
Speaker 2: and watched a truly vintage one yesterday. It's called A
Speaker 2: Blueprint for Murder in nineteen fifty three. Great quick it's
Speaker 2: like an hour and fifteen minutes crime noir film. I
Speaker 2: think our audience.
Speaker 1: Would love it.
Speaker 2: Within the first five seconds, you guys are going to
Speaker 2: be like, oh my god, munchow'sen by proxy. But it's
Speaker 2: really cool to kind of look at how they were
Speaker 2: actually looking at that phenomenon through you know, this great
Speaker 2: noir film in the fifties, and really until the end,
Speaker 2: you don't know if she did it or didn't. And
Speaker 2: we're talking about poisoning of family members, children, life insurance policies.
Speaker 2: And my favorite is this side character. Her name is Maggie,
Speaker 2: and she is the wife of the friend who's trying
Speaker 2: to figure out these murders, and she writes for pulp magazines.
Speaker 2: So she starts going, well, these deaths could be accidental,
Speaker 2: but they could also be murder, and then she starts
Speaker 2: pulling out the encyclopedia to look at the symptoms, and
Speaker 2: her husband is like, oh, there she goes again. You know,
Speaker 2: every time you hear something you gotta get all dark,
Speaker 2: and I'm like, I love this character.
Speaker 1: I'm stunky.
Speaker 3: Thank you for going and watching that. Where'd you stream it?
Speaker 3: Where did you watch it?
Speaker 1: Amazon Prime?
Speaker 3: I had to friend to go look for it. I've
Speaker 3: got that.
Speaker 2: It starts off super fast. It's not like a slow
Speaker 2: build up.
Speaker 3: Well, a lot of the movies at that time. You know,
Speaker 3: we've talked about so many vintage movies over the years
Speaker 3: that we've don't my got over the years that we've
Speaker 3: done this show. Isn't that wild to say that, But
Speaker 3: you forget that movies were many times a solid ninety
Speaker 3: minutes like that? Was it like? Because they were meant
Speaker 3: like we want to be able to and there was
Speaker 3: a reason for that. They wanted to get as many
Speaker 3: audiences in as they could to turn the audiences over
Speaker 3: back in the day. We'll have to get John to
Speaker 3: comment on that though, but I'm going to go look
Speaker 3: for it. Hopefully our listeners will go look at those
Speaker 3: two movies as well.
Speaker 2: I actually reached out to John and was like, hey,
Speaker 2: you got anything for me on this? And he wrote
Speaker 2: a really nice, lengthy email back with he hadn't seen it,
Speaker 2: but he kind of wrote some tidbits here and there, Poe.
Speaker 3: Well, let's post it. We'll post it in the show
Speaker 3: notes for sure, for sure. So also there are really
Speaker 3: great documentaries The Tail and All Murders on Netflix, really
Speaker 3: really well done, creepy as hell and well done with
Speaker 3: an interesting combination of using live action.
Speaker 1: Actors like true Yeah.
Speaker 3: Really really well done with that actor as well as
Speaker 3: historical footage. And then there's also a completely great and
Speaker 3: jaw dropping documentary Wild Wild Country, which won a lot
Speaker 3: of awards when it came out about the Rajniche cult.
Speaker 3: And then, of course I have to also mention that
Speaker 3: our dear friend deb Height, who stars in the documentary
Speaker 3: now take off on Wild Wild Country, which is very
Speaker 3: much worth seeing. You can see it on the Independent
Speaker 3: Film Channel.
Speaker 1: So good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, those are I mean, Wild Wold Country is like
Speaker 2: a classic now as far as like Netflix.
Speaker 1: True crime documentaries go.
Speaker 2: Again, like there's a million films I mean others I
Speaker 2: didn't watch. But apparently poison is the weapon of choice
Speaker 2: for women in Game of Thrones.
Speaker 3: Oh, it's fantastic, and there's a scene that's just worth
Speaker 3: I mean, I stopped watching the show, but I would
Speaker 3: dip in because I knew there were great performances And
Speaker 3: Diana Rigg Dom Diana rig who just passed away recently.
Speaker 3: She played Olenna Tyrrell and she was the one that
Speaker 3: finally kills that odious Jeoffrey character by poison. And she's
Speaker 3: really like, as she's about to be killed for all
Speaker 3: of her things that she's done and planning and trying
Speaker 3: to overthrow the bad guys, she's just like sitting there. Well, yeah, oh,
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was going to be
Speaker 3: quite so painful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, sounds well deserved. But yes, like any medieval film
Speaker 2: or TV show, I'm sure you're gonna find a poisoning
Speaker 2: in there. So let us know which ones are your
Speaker 2: guys favorite. Okay, that's the end of our show today.
Speaker 1: One more to go.
Speaker 3: Here we are. We are heading down to the finish line,
Speaker 3: Doctor Shiloh, we.
Speaker 2: Sure are, Doctor Scott. All right, everyone, well, we will
Speaker 2: absolutely see you next time on La Not So Fidential.
Speaker 1: Bye guys, Bye.
Speaker 2: Folks, We sincerely thank you for spending some time with
Speaker 2: us today. La Not So Confidential is part of Alienist
Speaker 2: Entertainment and the crawl Space Media Network. Each episode is hosted, produced,
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Speaker 2: Jason Usrie of ear Cult Productions.
Speaker 3: Our theme music, entitled Cool Vibes Film Noir, is composed
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