Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Poisons for our characters


I have been looking for a poison to use in my novel—one that looks like a heart attack. A friend of mine 
said antifreeze. Now who would be stupid enough to drink antifreeze?

My friend said to Google it. It seems there’s a woman in Georgia who had two husbands in their thirties die.
Their deaths were very much alike. The bodies have been exhumed and they have discovered one of the men  
was a victim of poisoning from ethylene glycol, a sweet odorless chemical often found in antifreeze.

Six years ago, the first husband’s death had been determined to be of natural causes, but now points to 
possible evidence of the same deadly chemical in his body. Both men suffered similar flu-like symptoms 
shortly before their deaths. 

Both deaths were initially ruled natural and attributed to cardiac dysrhythmia, or an irregular heartbeat. 
But after the discovery of ethylene glycol poisoning in the latest husband’s death it is believed may be due to 
byproducts of ethylene glycol. 

Earlier reports said the woman poisoned the men by putting the antifreeze into Jell-o.

Dogs and cats like the sweet taste of antifreeze and often die after tasting it, or walking through it and then 
licking their paws.

Now another shocker I found is toothpaste. Colgate doesn't tell you that fluoride is highly toxic -
so toxic that if a small child ate an entire tube of fluoridated toothpaste, it could kill the child. You know 
those candy and bubble gum flavors in the fluoridated toothpastes? Kids tend to like the taste and will eat it
instead of spitting it out.

One man in his 50s actually committed suicide by eating a tube of this toothpaste. But I would never be able
to figure out how to murder someone by having them eat toothpaste.

Antifreeze isn’t something they look for when doing an autopsy. It takes a special test to detect it in the 
system, and unless they suspect it, it often is overlooked. Since antifreeze causes flu-like symtoms--or a heart
attack, that may be one thing we can use when killing off someone. I remember years ago when people were
doing Jell-o shots. So you have a person who likes them, stick a bit of antifreeze in them and kill them off. 
They’ll die happy—drunk!

Do you have any unusual poisons you’d give to kill off someone in a book?

Really, sometimes I worry people will wonder about us when we write mystery novels and have to research
ways to knock them off!










6 comments:

  1. I've used Jimson weed tea. In a book of course. Its use in fiction gores back to the Scarlet Letter. I've used Calabar beans in a traditional ordeal. Many decorative garden plants are poison in part or whole.

    I believe a University professor was convicted of killing his wife in part because of research he reported he had done planing to write a CSI-type mystery.

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  2. The problem with poisons is the taste. As you point out, who eats a tube of toothpaste? If you know someone well, you can make sure the poison goes in a favorite drink but you still have to cover up the taste with something sweet.

    After the twinkie defense comes to writing defense.

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  3. The thing is to pick something that isn't usually included in a tox screen. Most unusual things would have to be specifically requested as a test. I had a particularly clever murder in one of my books, I thought, and went to a pathologist to ask about it. He said there's no way to test for everything, especially if it looks like the cause of death is something else.

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  4. Wow! Anti-freeze in Jell-O shots! That's a very interesting way to kill someone.

    Nice post!

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  5. Frightening how it goes. Anything can be turned into a fatal object, or a murder weapon. Which makes forensic toxicology more important now than ever before, as technology rises in sophistication alongside human malice.

    EnvironmentalDiseases.com

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  6. Update: In December 2012 antifreeze manufacturers agreed to add the bitter tasting dentatonium benzoate to antifreeze.

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