A cup of DEATH
For the victims of an obsessive poisoner, accepting some tea was to be sentenced to excruciating — and fatal — suffering
STAFF at a photography laboratory were impressed when Graham Young started work there — due to his willingness to make the tea.
But soon after the 23-year-old took up his post in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, in February 1971, some workers fell ill with stomach cramps, dizziness and vomiting.
A nasty virus, however, had been going around the local school, so most people presumed it was this.
Little did they know that the sallow- skinned man with swept- back hair was a poisoner, a man obsessed by the power of chemicals.
He’d already murdered one family member and would go on to kill at least three more people. Young’s boss, Bob Egle, was told he’d just been released from Broadmoor but not why he was there. Young’s probation officer did not check his place of work.
The man nicknamed ‘the teacup poisoner’ by some and ‘the guinea pig murderer’ by the Mail during his 1972 trial because he liked to see the effect of poison on victims, had a troubled childhood. His mother died of tuberculosis three months after his birth in 1947. He went to live with his adored aunt, Winnie, for three years. But when his father remarried he was forced to move in with him, which he resented. From an early age he was entranced by murderers, borrowing library books about infamous poisoner Dr Crippen. ‘I became obsessed with the macabre. Toxicology always fascinated me,’ he told police after his arrest.
He excelled at science at school and his father gave him a chemistry set. At age 14 he was tricking local pharmacists into thinking he was 17 so he could buy poisons including antimony and arsenic.
In 1961, his family started to fall ill. First his stepmother Molly suffered headaches and vomiting. Next his elder sister Winifred became extremely ill. She remembered her brother had given her a cup of tea that morning that tasted so foul she had spat it out. Belladonna, donna, the extract of deadly nightshade, e, was later found in her system.
Young’s father er confronted him but ut the boy claimed his is sister had used the e cup for mixing g shampoo and his s father probed d no further. A few weeks later r Molly, 37, died an n excruciating death, , after losing weight and her hair falling out. It was blamed on a bus us crash she’d been in n the previous year.
She was cremated, ted meaning it could never be proved she was Young’s first victim. He had just carried out experiments with a new poison: thallium.
But his teacher became suspicious after Young’s father became ill. Books about poisoners and jottings about lethal doses were found in his desk.
Young was arrested in May 1962 and confessed to the attempted murders of his sister, his father and a schoolfriend.
Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he was sent to Broadmoor for nine years. A fellow inmate died of cyanide poisoning but the authorities did not believe Young’s boasts that he had extracted the lethal substance from a laurel bush in the grounds.
Doctors insisted by 1970 that Young was ‘no ‘ longer obsessed with poisons’ and recommended his release. He soon joined the photography lab, which involved him handling highly toxic thallium, a colourless, odourless and tasteless chemical.
He would try to poison at least 70 workers in months. Within days of Egle returning from holiday, he fell ill and died in July 1971. Another worker began to suffer similar symptoms and died a few months later. Only O then was an investigation launched.
Young was arrested with thallium in his pocket. Diaries at his home detailed the doses he’d administered. In one entry, reported by the Mail, it said: ‘Di irritated me intensely yesterday, so I packed her off home with an attack of sickness. I only gave g her something to shake her up. I now regret I didn’t give her a larger dose.’
He pleaded not guilty, claiming the diary was a fantasy novel. He was sentenced to life in prison, where he befriended Moors Murderer Ian Brady, who described him as ‘excited only by power, clinic experimentation, observation and death’.
He died aged 42 in 1990, in his cell.