Know Your Weaponry: Poisons Presentation

This is the presentation I did on poisons for the Nebraska Writers Guild Spring 2021 virtual conference.

Welcome to Know Your Weaponry: Poisons edition. Poisons are a VAST topic, which I learned during my research so I can’t cover all of them but I tried to hit the really popular and interesting ones for a more in-depth look.

• Educational purposes only: please don’t start growing belladonna for the purpose of ridding your life of an annoying relative or coworker. Fictional victims only!
• Graphic: While I don’t have any graphic pictures, I am going to talk about what these poisons do to the body so if you are a little squeamish, you might want to fast-forward through those parts or move on to the next class.

What is this all about? Poisons, obviously. We’re going to talk about the sources and some of the history behind them, symptoms and how they kill, some of the famous people who used them, and if they leave behind any trace evidence. All things an author will need to know if you want to use them in your stories. Poison might be called the “women’s weapon” but majority of poison users throughout history were men, you just hear about the women poisoners because their stories tend to be more sensationalized. Late 18^th-Early 20^th centuries are considered the golden age of poisoners. The rise of forensic toxicology is what brought about its end

• So why is this important to authors?
• Adds authenticity and reputability to your writing
• Creative ways to kill (your characters) like I said before Fictional victims only!

• Source & History: naturally occurring element that isn’t super dangerous until it is chemically altered into white arsenic
• Paris Green: used as a dye for wallpaper, clothing, and foods
• Beauty aids:
• Causes hair loss so it was used as a depilatory
• Dilates small capillaries in face giving people a healthy glow, dilates the pupils, thought it whitened the skin but chronic use actually had the opposite effect
• Medical:
• causes skin surface to die and slough off, great for psoriasis, bad for ulcers and eczema
• Used in lots of other medicines that it had no business in being in like medicine for stomach pain
• Symptoms: similar to food poisoning
• Stomach cramps, diarrhea, vomiting, confusion, and thiamine deficiency resulting in racing hearts and tingling limbs
• Often misdiagnosed as influenza, cholera, heart disease, stomach cancer or other digestive ailments
• Tans/yellows the skin, white stripes show up in nails
• Can be inhaled, ingested, or injected
• Odorless, tasteless white power, looks like sugar or flour, easily added to foods
• How it kills: disrupts the production of ATP which is in charge of transporting energy throughout your cells, without the energy, your cells can’t do the processes that keep you alive. This can cause multi organ failure.
• Cure/antidote: there isn’t a specific cure or antidote for arsenic poisoning, you just have to stop the exposure and let your body flush it out.
• There has been some evidence that Vitamin E and selenium counteract the effects of arsenic poisoning but they’re still testing these
• Trace evidence? The short answer is YES
• Between 1752 and 1889- half of the arsenic deaths were murder, the rest were accidents and suicides. Because of its popularity as a murder weapon, scientists worked hard to develop many different tests to detect it in the body
• It breaks down slowly and can be found in the body decades later
• Slows natural decomp causing what scientists call “arsenic mummification”
• Acute poisoning: emaciated look of dehydration, and blue hands & feet because of lack of oxygen
• Chronic poisoning: yellow/browning of the skin, scaly patches
• Wrecked the stomach with bloody lesions, mucous membrane lining is swollen, yellowish with patches of scarlet, heart has loose bloodclots
• Plenty of signs that somebody was killed by arsenic poisoning
• Famous users (besides everybody?)
• The ‘de Medici family (15^th-18^th centuries) and the Borgia family (15^th-16^th centuries) Italy
• Borgias had a special arsenic mixture that was said to be far more potent than standard white arsenic called la cantarella. It was so dangerous that the recipe was destroyed so it couldn’t be used anymore.

• Invented by Giulia (Julia) Tofana, an apothecary in Italy the early 17^th Century
• What: it is made of a mixture of arsenic, lead, and belladonna
• A colorless and tasteless liquid so it could be easily mixed into drinks such as water or wine
• Disguised as a cosmetic or perfume
• Slow killer to mimic a progressive disease or other natural causes, similar to arsenic poisoning. They did it that way so the victims had time to update wills, repent, etc. It was administered in 4 doses.
• Dose 1: cold-like symptoms such as fatigue and weakness
• Dose 2: symptoms intensify
• Dose 3: vomiting, diarrhea, dehydration, & burning sensation in digestive system (like heartburn but so much worse)
• Dose 4: death
• Antidote: vinegar and lemon juice. Did the antidote work? We have no idea. Going off what I know of arsenic, lead, and belladonna, probably not.
• Giulia Tofana was the most famous user in addition to the inventor. She sold it primarily to women to take care of abusive husbands, estimated 600 deaths. Arrested but many of her patrons were high ranking women who knew if she was questioned ie. tortured, their names would come out so they managed to get the charges against her dismissed and she kind of disappeared from the pages of history.
• Trace evidence? We don’t actually know because the recipe has been lost but since it is made with arsenic, lead, and belladonna – all of which leaves trace evidence – it’s safe to say modern forensic testing would be able to find it. At the time of use though, there was no way to detect it.

• Naturally occurring: yew tree leaves, cherry laurel flowers, peach and apricot pits, bitter almonds, millipedes, cyanobacteria, blue-green algae, and other plants
• History:
• Reference to “death by peach” in ancient Egypt has lead historians to believe that ancient Egyptians knew how to distill cyanide from peach pits and used it as a form of execution
• Heinrich Diesbach, artist invent pigment Berlin/Prussian Blue by mixing potash (potassium carbonate) and green vitriol (iron sulfate) together making a deep violet-blue color. 80 years later a Swedish chemist mixed Prussian Blue with an acid solution and made hydrogen cyanide which could be chemically treated to produce powdery, white, poisonous salts known as potassium cyanide or sodium cyanide.
• Comes in liquid, powder, and gas (ingested or inhaled)
• Other uses
• Hydrogen Cyanide: pesticides, explosives, engraving and tempering steel, as a disinfecting agent, creating colorful dyes, and making nylon
• Sodium Cyanide: used in mining to etch away useless rock and get to the gold inside
• Potassium Cyanide: used in mining, photography, electroplating, and metal polishing (cook didn’t completely rinse out a pot after polishing it and killed somebody)
• Symptoms: weakness, nausea, bloody froth in mouths, blue faces from lack of oxygen, bruising, discoloration, twisted by convulsions
• Effectiveness: usually avoided by murderers because the poison’s signature is very obvious in victims as is the smell of almonds that lingers
• A small percentage of population can’t smell cyanide because of a genetic mutation, similar to how some people think cilantro tastes soapy
• Popular with suicides because of how quickly it kills, not instant (takes a few minutes depending on dose) but it is brutal
• Kills faster after being inhaled because blood picks it up quickly in the lungs and carries it throughout the body
• How it kills: “chemical suffocation,” shuts down body’s ability to carry/absorb oxygen, attaches to the hemoglobin in blood and quickly circulates thought out the body
• Antidote/Cure: activated charcoal (ingested) or cyanide antidote kit (amyl nitrate, sodium nitrite, and sodium thiosulfate)
• Trace evidence
• Besides the obvious state of cyanide victims, trace amounts can be found in the body long after death and decay begins
• Famous cases: Fremont & Annie Jackson gassed in NYC @ the Hotel Margaret in 1922 (cyanide gas), Chicago Tylenol murders in 1982 (potassium cyanide)- 7 deaths and many more in following copycat crimes
• Early murder by mail: laced chocolates sent to step son, a fired clerk sent poisoned candies to the woman who replaced her, laced tonic to the Knickerbocker Athletic Club’s director
• “Poisoners were hard to catch and even harder to convict” –Poisoner’s Handbook
• If you want a really showy poison death, Cyanide is for you

• History and Source: Made from the seeds of the Strychnine tree, in fact, all parts of the tree are poisonous.
• Native to India and South East Asia
• Was used during Medieval times for pest control
• Original medical use was to “shock” paralyzed patients out of paralysis because of it causes convulsions, sometimes it helped, more often it didn’t
• Delivery:
• Dissolves in liquid, colorless, bitter taste
• Ingested, inhaled, absorbed through the eyes and mouth
• Symptoms
• In small doses it increases energy, used as a short-term stimulant (like caffeine)
• In larger or chronic doses: causes severe, painful muscle spasms
• How it kills: only takes 5 milligrams to kill
• Prevents effective operation of glycine which is a chemical that sends nerve signals to muscles
• Death by asphyxiation or sheer exhaustion from convulsions
• Antidote
• Early supportive medical treatment like activated charcoal if it was ingested
• Curare: another poison but they affect the same nerve receptors, just in opposite ways so they counteract each other
• If a person makes it through the first 6-12 hours, they usually survive
• Leaves trace evidence
• American Olympian marathoner Thomas Hicks
• 1904 St. Louis Olympics were a mess for distance runners, no support stations until mile 11. Hicks was struggling so his trainers gave him a little boost in the form of a 1904’s energy drink: 1 milligram strychnine and egg whites. Then later, when dehydration was causing him to flounder, instead of giving him water, they gave him a cocktail of brandy and strychnine. He did survive somehow
• If you want a really showy poison death, Strychnine is another good option

• Source: beans from the Castor plant
• Beans look like fat ticks (hence the "ticking" timebomb title)
• Originated in SE Mediterranean basin, North Africa, and India, but now can be found all over the world. Popular plant to use in landscaping, cousin to poinsettia
• Castor oil
• Medicinal uses: skin ailments and as a purgative, can cause internal burns and painful diarrhea if too much is ingested
• WWI, needed something to stabilize engine lubricants from extreme temps and Castor oil did the job. Started growing the plant all over the Midwest, caused huge upswing in hay fever and allergies.
• Ricin as a poison was used thousands of years before medicinal uses. Found on spearheads
• Delivery & Symptoms
• Ingestion (eating the beans,)
• Within a few hours of ingestion: Nausea, bloody vomiting and diarrhea, liver and kidney failure, shock
•  Injected
• Muscle pain, tissue death at injection site, necrosis of lymph nodes, organ failure, vomiting
• Inhaled
• Doesn’t cause multi-system problems, just causes lung necrosis
• Cough and flu-like symptoms, hypotension, and death
• MUCH harder to kill somebody because it depends on particle size, smaller the particle the deeper inside they can get
• US is really worried about bio-terrorism using aerosol ricin
• How it kills: Attacks the ribosome, blocks protein synthesis which causes irreversible cell death
• 500 micrograms can kill a human, that is 1/10^th of an 1/8^th of a teaspoon (injection)
• 2-3 castor beans can kill, chewing and swallowing, swallowing them whole theoretically won’t hurt you (don’t recommend trying it)
• US experimented with using Ricin during WWI, coated bullets and shrapnel with it, claimed it would only be used in retaliation if the enemy did something similar. Banned it in the 1970s
• USSR kept developing ricin as a poison into the 1980s
• No cure, strictly supportive care
• US military is working on a vaccine just in case it is developed as a bio-weapon
• Trace- Yes and No
• Testing can be done for urinary ricinin in suspected ricin exposure
• There aren’t any common tests right now but there are a few different things that can be done to find it like DNA amplification and antibodies essays (I have no idea what these are, I found them on the CDC's website, please don't ask me)
• Assassination by umbrella- Georgi Markov, 1978
• A hollow pellet filled with ricin was shot from a modified umbrella into Markov’s leg, within a few hours he got sick with flu-like symptoms and died four days later, the pellet was discovered either on an X-Ray or during the autopsy. It was believed to be the work of the Bulgarian secret service with the assistance of the KGB
• The pellet was covered with a special wax that would slowly melt at body temperature, exposing the ricin to be carried out of the pellet into the body

• Source: element but doesn’t occur naturally (byproduct of lead and zinc smelting), burns a brilliant green (named from Greek word thallos for newly leafed plant, green in the spring sunlight)
• Symptoms- imitator, often mistaken for regular diseases like pneumonia or other conditions
• Nausea and vomiting, trembling, weakness, exhaustion, paralysis of legs, and difficulty breathing
• Gradual poisonings also have symptoms: depression or excitation, delirium, dementia, convulsions, coma
• Tasteless, odorless, colorless, dissolves in liquid
• Ingested or absorbed through the skin
• Causes hair loss and was used in many depilatory creams
• Was also a popular pesticide (rat poison)
• Kills: paralysis of central nervous system and/or respiratory failure
• Follows potassium pathways, disrupts cell metabolism and splinters chemical bonds
• Antidote: Prussian Blue (which was also a key ingredient in the development of cyanide)
• Trace evidence
• Doesn’t have signature internal damage, what damage it does cause can also be caused by any number of other poisons or illnesses
• Stays in the body for weeks or months after death so trace evidence is easily found
• Chemist’s poison because it imitates so many other things and it’s easy for a chemist to get a hold of, but the trace evidence sticks around a lot longer than many other poisons
• Australia’s Thallium Craze, early 1950s, due to mass urbanization and an explosion in the rat population, Thallium-based rat poison was available over the counter. It also brought about a rash of Thallium murders or attempted murders
• Agatha Christie- there are at least three cases where people who read the description of Thallium poisoning in Christie’s The Pale Horse that they were able to identify it in real life

• Sources
• Naturally occurring: produced by many kinds of seaweed and fungi
• Can be man-made by combining chlorinated lime with ethanol, mixing chlorine bleach with ethanol or acetone
• Symptoms: Giddiness, heaviness in limbs, numbness, buzzing in ears, and most well-known: unconsciousness
• Takes about 5-15 minutes to knock somebody out so those movies where somebody’s nose and mouth are covered for a few seconds before they fall unconscious are wrong
• Was used by burglars who would incapacitate their victims before robbing them
• Colorless liquid that has a sickly, sweet smell that can be ingested or inhaled
• Caustic: Can burn the skin
• If swallowed, it will burn the mouth, it also inflames mucus membranes in mouth, stomach, and intestines
• Sudden Sniffer’s Death: Unpredictable- small amounts can kill some while it takes large amounts to kill others  
• Used as an anesthetic during surgeries but the number of deaths it caused lead to its disuse
• Causes liver and kidney toxicity, heart arrhythmias, respiratory and heart failure, and is a possible carcinogen
• Darkens blood and causes it to gather in brain, lungs, liver, and kidneys
• Victims look jaundiced because of liver damage, alcoholics were usually among those who quickly died when chloroform was used as an anesthetic
• Famous cases
• Used quite often in mysteries like Sherlock Holmes and Nancy Drew
• Real life: Frederick Mors worked at the German Odd Fellows home in Yonkers, NY for foundlings and the elderly, killed at least 8 people in 1915
• William Rice, Texas millionaire who Rice University is named for was allegedly killed with chloroform by his valet and lawyer in 1900

There are hundreds (if not thousands) of poisons out there. These are the the additional ones that I considered for this presentation but eventually decided to not do for a variety of reasons. They're all interesting and worth more research if you're looking for ways to kill your characters. 

(FICTIONAL VICTIMS ONLY!!!)

• Unicorn Horn
• Drinking something from a vessel made from the horn will neutralize poisons and cure wounds
• Usually a narwhal horn since unicorns aren’t real, could also be horns of rhinos and oryx
• Mithridate
• Invented by King Mithridates VI in 1^st century BCE but no recipe exists
• Kitchen sink mixture of things including ginger, iris, cardamom, anise, frankincense, myrrh, and saffron all bound together by honey
• Bezoars
• Solid mass of undigested food, plant fibers, or hair found in the digestive tracts of animals
• Chip off part of the bezoar, put in whatever you think is poisoned, and it will absorb the poison
• Some tests have shown that they will absorb arsenic but there’s no real evidence indicating that it will save a person from being poisoned.
• Pearls
• Used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat various diseases
• Antidote in the middle ages
• Activated Charcoal “Super absorber”
• Single most widely-used cure for people (and animals) who have been poisoned
• Traps toxins and prevents them from being absorbed into your intestinal tract
• Absorbs medicine also
• Activated charcoal is getting popular to use in facemasks, cocktails, foods, ect. It does absorb medicines that you are taking for good so be careful if you are consuming it.
• Prussian Blue
• Antidote for Thallium poisoning
• Curare
• Counteracts Strychnine symptoms

• The Poisoner's Handbook is a fascinating book about poisons but it is also about the birth of forensic toxicology, Prohibition, and political corruption in NYC.
• Criminalia Season 1 is all about female poisoners and was my primary source for Aqua Tofana and helped point me in the right direction for many of the other poisons.
• This Podcast Will Kill You with In Defense of Plants was my primary source for Ricin.
• Healthline.com, Truecrimedaily.com, and the CDC website were great sources for antidotes and famous cases where poisons were used.
• Quackery is a fantastic book about all the terrible things humans used to do to each other in the name of science. It covered a few of the different poisons I talked about and was where I found the story about Thomas Hicks. Its author, Dr. Kang, is a local, she lives in Omaha, NE and also writes novels.

Please message or email me if you have any questions about poisons. It's a vast and interesting topic that leads to fun conversations while ruining your internet search history.