The Teacup Poisoner...
He killed his stepmother at 14, then murdered two workmates after being freed from Broadmoor
Back from a few quick pints at his local, Fred Young arrived home to find his 14-year-old son Graham staring out of the kitchen window, apparently enthralled.
Writhing in agony in the garden, his stepmother Molly was clutching her stomach as she begged for help. She would die a few hours later in hospital.
For months the 37-year-old’s health had deteriorated – she had lost weight, aged and her hair had begun to fall out.
While Fred was desperate to find out what was causing his wife to waste away, he never suspected the truth.
His son was slowly killing her in a sinister chemistry experiment, while noting his observations in a journal.
By then he had poisoned several people, including a classmate and other family members – by lacing their cups of tea with toxic chemicals.
He would go on to poison hundreds, killing at least two, and would become known as the Teacup Poisoner.
Young managed to poison patients and staff at Broadmoor hospital, where he was its youngest inmate, then after his release laced an entire factory’s drinks with deadly thallium after getting his dream job – as the tea boy.
It wasn’t until a decade later, in June 1972, that his poisoning spree was ended, thanks to toxicology expert John Cavanagh. He proved it was Young, and not a bug that had caused hundreds to fall ill in Bovingdon, Herts.
Cavanagh, a professor at the Institute of Neurology in London, died this week aged 98.
Young, meanwhile, achieved his dream of entering the annals of serial killer history – and Madame Tussauds’ Chamber of Horrors.
However, he hated the name the press gave him because it “belittled his skill and experience”, preferring to be known as the “World Poisoner”.
Young’s mother died of tuberculosis three months after his birth in 1947 in Neasden, North London.
His aunt Winnie cared for him for three years before he moved with his father, who had remarried, to St Albans. Early on he began to show signs of the monster he would become.
When he was old enough to read, he preferred non-fiction accounts of murderers, with infamous poisoner Dr Crippen a favourite.
By his teens he had developed a fascination with Hitler, wearing swastikas, and he began to take part in satanic rituals including sacrificing the family cat.
He excelled at science, so his father bought him a chemistry set. By the age of 13, he was able to trick local chemists into thinking he was 17, enabling him to buy the poisons antimony, digitalis and arsenic.
He wanted to find out their effects on a human and chose fellow pupil Christopher Williams, who suffered extended vomiting, cramps and headaches.
It was in early 1961 that the Young family started to become ill. Stepmother Molly was the first to suffer from vomiting, diarrhoea and stomach pains, but dismissed it as bilious attacks. Dad Fred began having similar symptoms. Next, his sister Winifred became extremely ill on her way to work and had to be taken to hospital.
She remembered her brother had given her tea that tasted so foul she spat it out. Belladonna, the extract of deadly nightshade, was found in her system.
Fred confronted his son, believing he might have accidentally contaminated Winifred’s cup with his experiments, but he convinced her she had been using the same cup for mixing shampoo.
Young was still slowly killing his stepmother by adding poison to her daily cuppa. It was later discovered she started developing a tolerance to antimony, so he switched to thallium the night before her death.
Molly was cremated – at Graham’s suggestion – and her excruciating death blamed on injuries she had received from a bus crash a year earlier. There were even reports of people having cramps and vomiting at her funeral. In the days that followed, his father Fred was diagnosed with alimony poisoning, with doctors saying he was one dose from death.
Young’s science teacher became suspicious and discovered poisons as well as books and jottings about poisoners in his school desk and called the police.
He was arrested on Mary 23, 1962, when he confessed to the attempted murders of his sister, dad and friend.
Diagnosed with personality disorders as well as schizophrenia, 14-yearold Young was detained in Broadmoor, where he stayed for nine years.
Within weeks, the death of inmate John Berridge, by cyanide poisoning, had authorities baffled. Young’s claim that he extracted cyanide from laurel bush leaves was not taken seriously and the death was recorded as suicide.
In June 1970 doctors recommended Young be released as he was “fully recovered” and “no longer obsessed with poisons, violence and mischief ”. He celebrated by telling a psychiatric
nurse he intended to kill one person for every year he had been in the mental hospital. The comment was recorded on his file but never influenced the decision to release him. Young, then 23, found work at John hadland Laboratories, a photographic supply firm in Bovingdon, where he offered to make tea for his co-workers. When his boss, 59-year-old Bob Egle, began to have cramps and dizziness, it was attributed to a virus, which became known as the Bovingdon Bug. He was admitted to hospital where he died in agony on July 1971. His death was recorded as pneumonia. Hadland workers complained of similar cramps, hair loss and sexual dysfunction, and authorities could not solve the mystery.
Young’s diaries would reveal he had poisoned around 70 people in the factory, including David Tilson, Jethro Batt and Ronald Hewitt, while taking notes on doses and effects. In September 1971, 60-year-old co-worker Fred Biggs began to suffer similar symptoms to Egle, and died two months later. Investigators realised the Bovingdon Bug took hold shortly after Young joined the firm. Thallium, antimonium and aconitine were found in his flat, along with his notebook. He was arrested on November 21, 1971 in Sheerness, Kent, when police found thallium on him. At St Albans crown court in June 1972, he denied two counts of murder, two of attempted murder and two of administering poison. But Prof Cavanagh’s analysis, and extracts of Young’s diary, led to a guilty conviction and he received four life sentences. When asked whether he felt remorse, he replied: “What I feel is the emptiness of my soul.”
Young was sent to Parkhurst prison on the Isle of Wight, where he made friends with Moors Murderer Ian Brady, who described him as “excited only by power, clinic experimentation, observation and death”.
He died in his cell on August 1, 1990, aged 42, from heart failure, although claims remain that he was poisoned by inmates – or even himself.
But he has continued to cause fear... In 2005 a Japanese girl of 16 was arrested for poisoning her mother with thallium. She wrote in an online blog: “Let me introduce a book: Graham Young’s diary on killing with poison. The autobiography of a man I respect.”
Her mother remains in a coma.