Professor Death January Letter

Dear Professor Death,

I’ve read that at one time arsenic was a popular way to rid oneself of unwanted persons. Has it gone out of favor? And exactly how would someone go about using it?

Curious in Cleveland

Dear Curious,

Arsenic is a metal that is light gray in color, white in powder form, and extremely poisonous to humans. It has no taste or odor. Because it does not dissolve well in cold liquids, it is most often added to the victim’s food where it is unlikely to be detected. Another method the Victorian’s used was to feed the arsenic to toads and cook them after death, adding the toxic liquid to a victim’s food or drink. Yum. (1)

I found the following information from The Encyclopedia of Crime, one of my favorite reference books. (2)

Arsenic has been around forever. It became readily available when Arab alchemist Gber distilled a white tasteless and odorless powder called arsenous oxide in the eight century. Wallpaper and wallpaper paste was made with arsenic to deter rats. Victorians soaked flypaper in water to obtain a fatal dose of the popular poison. It was used to color fabrics, paper products, soaps, and more.

In more misguided applications, arsenic was used in popular health tonics, complexion wafers that were swallowed to rid the face of blemishes and make the skin translucent, and the treatment of syphilis. Administered in small doses over a period of time, arsenic poisoning mimics natural diseases.

It wasn’t until 1830 that an English chemist developed a simple test for the presence of arsenic, a test reliable enough for juries to convict the poisoners. The test put an end to centuries of unprovable murder, and as the test was refined, poisoning by arsenic fell out of favor for the most part. The test has become so refined, that it is now known that even healthy adults carry trace amounts of arsenic in their bodies, primarily due to polluted groundwater.

I could only find one relatively recent use of arsenic to murder someone. In 1949, Englishman Frederick Radford hastened the death of his wife who was dying in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Allegedly, he had been feeding her the arsenic in fruit pies over a four-month period, using his father-in-law to deliver them to the sanatorium.

A few days before she died, Radford’s wife shared her suspicions about the pies with a friend and asked her friend to send an uneaten one to Scotland Yard. The pie was sent to the sanatorium’s superintendent with an explanatory letter instead.

The letter was placed in the superintendent’s secretary’s in-tray on a Saturday where it lay unread and the pie was placed on the super’s desk. The super worked weekends and brought the pie home with him, believing it to be a gift. He became violently ill after eating a slice and barely survived.

Marjorie Radford died a few days later, her body autopsied, and the presence of a lethal does of arsenic confirmed. Frederick claims he had no reason to kill his wife since she was dying anyway, and he knew nothing about the arsenic in the pies. He took his own life by swallowing cyanide, claiming he was tired of being badgered.

Did Frederick Radford poison his wife with arsenic? Or could it have been Marjorie’s own father? It remains a mystery. Where is the motive? According to a London paper, either Marjorie or Frederick was a bigamist, but I couldn’t find anything more on that. Could bigamy factor in? We’ll never know.

¹ Murder and Mayhem by D. P. Lyle, M.D.

² The Encyclopedia of Crime by Oliver Cyriax, Colin Wilson & Damon Wilson