Comments on: Poisoners are dumb

By: karl_jones

karl_jones — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 13:05:00 +0000

Let's all take a moment to remember Sidney Gottlieb, chief poisoner for the CIA.

By: blueelm

blueelm — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:14:00 +0000

If you read the article it actually is more insidious. She was trying to give him enough to have him slip off of the ladders he had to climb at work. Had she actually used a better method of giving him the drug and not blabbed about it she might have actually caused him to have an injury at work, which it seems was her goal. She could have probably come up for an excuse as to why he had taken the drug, but beyond thinking “this makes me sleepy I bet it will make him sleepy too!” she didn’t get very far.

It’s actually *almost* smart except… for everything.

By: Tynam

Tynam — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 23:40:00 +0000

(reply to Bill; thread depth)

It’s not really the number of cells it kills directly that’s the problem; it’s the damage to your biochemistry. Cause of death is, essentially, mercury poisoning.

Mercury reacts strongly with selenium. Some really important enzymes depend on selenium, including ones which maintain antioxidant molecules. Which you really don’t want to stop working. Damaged selenoenzymes –> Not enough antioxidants (especially in the brain) –> cell damage from oxidation.

(Disclaimer: I am not a biochemist.)

By: Bill Sudbrink

Bill Sudbrink — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 22:16:00 +0000

Here is what I’m trying to understand: How many molecules of ((CH3)2Hg) does it take to kill a cell? Does the compound persist after it causes cell death/damage? The wiki page indicates that absorbing 0.1mL through the skin can be fatal. Based on the other constants on the page, I get about 7.7×10^20 molecules in 0.1mL. There are about 10^14 cells in an average body. Assuming an even distribution, that would be about 7.7×10^6 molecules per cell. But how could you possibly get an even distribution?

By: Milo

Milo — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:37:00 +0000

Death by trazodone? Dream on, would-be poisoners. There’s a reason why it’s prescribed for the suicidally-depressed.

By: Tynam

Tynam — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:25:00 +0000

True; mercury poisoning is not exactly low-key. But assuming you’re smart enough to disguise your motive (and your purchase of the materials), it’d be very hard to prove who did it.

By: Tynam

Tynam — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:23:00 +0000

The way that stuff goes through barriers is the scariest think about it. Gloves, synthetics, skin, the blood-brain barrier… it pretty much ignores all of them.

By: Tynam

Tynam — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 20:23:00 +0000

True; I was being a little facetious there. It’s possible, but not trivial. But if you’re not smart enough to figure out how to source the components, you’re definitely not smart enough to use it without killing yourself.

Phosgene’s harder to use to get away with murder, though.

By: Jerril

Jerril — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:45:00 +0000

Throw in a certain amount of “I’m so clever that they’ll never catch me” egotism and sprinkle with a little ignorance about forensics…

By: ldobe

ldobe — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:26:00 +0000

Also the dioxin poisoning of Victor Yushenko(sp?)

It wasn’t lethal, but the disfigurement is truly horrific, with the terrible facial scarring due to the massive eruption of chloracne.

I don’t know which is worse, the immense but brief pain of strychnine or the pernicious way your body seems to fall apart over time with dioxin

By: welcomeabored

welcomeabored — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:22:00 +0000

Capitalizing on self-destructive behavior, while hiding in plain sight, letting law enforcement work to prove intent?

By: fuzzyfuzzyfungus

fuzzyfuzzyfungus — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 17:37:00 +0000

A toxin needn’t be undetectable, merely non-suspicious(and, sometimes, a non-detectable toxin might actually be more suspicious than a detectable-but-reasonable one)…

If you are in the position of being a default suspect, by virtue of known association with the victim, you may well actually be better off with an agent that leaves clear traces; but isn’t out of place, rather than a totally-mysterious-death-of-mystery. Especially now that modern medicine has neatly categorized(and not infrequently cured) a lot of the formerly mysterious and poorly understood fluxes and fevers and bacterial infections and so on. There just aren’t as many ‘expected’ modes of death, particularly for the young and healthy, as there used to be.

By: Bill Sudbrink

Bill Sudbrink — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 17:13:00 +0000

In the Wetterhahn case, I have to wonder how many molecules of dimethylmercury actually entered her body. The “dosage” seems to have been “a few drops” on a latex glove. How many molecules were in a few drops? How many of those actually penetrated the glove? How many of those actually penetrated her skin? Does a single dimethylmercury molecule have the ability to kill multiple cells?

By: Daemonworks

Daemonworks — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 16:35:00 +0000

The really smart ones spend years building up an immunity to it first, just in case.

By: Daemonworks

Daemonworks — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 16:31:00 +0000

I was going to say ricin myself. Castor beans for the win!

By: Romeo Vitelli

Romeo Vitelli — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 16:29:00 +0000

It also helps to pick your victims carefully. In some cases, you can get away with poisoning thousands of people with only a slap on the wrist afterward.

http://drvitelli.typepad.com/providentia/2011/03/ginger-jake.html

By: welcomeabored

welcomeabored — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 16:27:00 +0000

This one I like… find a victim who is already on a slippery slope and give’em a little nudge.

By: Eric J.

Eric J. — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 16:18:00 +0000

The smart poisoners all use iocaine powder.

By: oasisob1

oasisob1 — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 15:18:00 +0000

In America, lead poisoning seems to be pretty popular. Delivery of the poison is relatively easy, and can be done from a few feet to hundreds of yards away from the victim.

By: blueelm

blueelm — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:59:00 +0000

It’s for stupid poisoners to keep in their house!

By: Boris Bartlog

Boris Bartlog — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:27:00 +0000

Dimethylmercury actually is a pretty difficult synthesis for the home chemist. Not that you couldn’t do it, but you would first need to source elemental sodium, mercury, and then either source or synthesize something like methyl bromide. Phosgene would be much easier.

By: ClaudiaC

ClaudiaC — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:22:00 +0000

Oh shoot! I just bought a book on poisoning. Now I guess I’ll need to get another! ;)

What fascinates me about poisoning is how it has been done with such flair in recent years – Gu Kailai poisoned Neil Haywood with potasium cynanide and basically got away with it until his family made a huge fuss and Alexander Litvinenko was killed with polonium-210 (the “perfect” poison). Litvinenko’s killed got away with it as well. So Poisoners may be dumb, but some poisoners are truly brilliant.

By: Boris Bartlog

Boris Bartlog — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 14:22:00 +0000

Cyanide is easily detected by forensic means, especially if the route is ingestion.

By: Douglas Stuart

Douglas Stuart — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:51:00 +0000

Of course, now if someone DID show up with botox poising, it COULDNT be you because how could you be that silly as to post about it and then do it. Right?

By: Douglas Stuart

Douglas Stuart — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:49:00 +0000

There was a guy I worked with who wanted to use dimethyl mercury as a precursor. He’d been using dimethylzinc, and was so damn cavalier it, I told him it just wouldn’t work. Scary stuff.

By: Everson Bernardes

Everson Bernardes — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:20:00 +0000

Cyanide poisoning. You can get a hydrogen cyanide precursor from apple and peach seeds, apricot kernels, cassava roots. Not a nice way to die, but with a decent level of plausible deniability.

By: fuzzyfuzzyfungus

fuzzyfuzzyfungus — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:17:00 +0000

Being able to soak right through standard protective gloves is the really mean trick. That, and the 6-ish months of relentless neural decline ending in death, of course.

By: fuzzyfuzzyfungus

fuzzyfuzzyfungus — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:16:00 +0000

I suspect that the bigger problem is that people generally want to kill people with whom they have some sort of strong(but now frayed) social relationship. Since this isn’t a huge secret, any surprising deaths among people you would want dead cast a certain amount of suspicion on you.

On the one hand, this means that you don’t necessarily even need to conceal the lethal agent: a nontrivial number of angry-college roommate’s roommates would probably be written off as ‘tragic; but not really surprising’ if they showed up dead with so much ethanol in their system that the medical examiner could diagnose them by scent from a dozen yards. Similar circumstances probably govern people with a variety of serious illnesses that carry an increased risk of death or involve a medication dosage schedule that can be lethal if you overshoot or undershoot.

On the other hand, if somebody in apparently perfect health catches a serious case of idiopathic death-itis after a nasty argument with you? *Raises skepticism eyebrow*

By: fuzzyfuzzyfungus

fuzzyfuzzyfungus — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 13:05:00 +0000

It sounds like the moral of the story(for the stories presented above) is that ‘crimes of passion are ill-planned’… Since there has been a reasonably concerted effort to get most of the really good toxins out of the home(if more out of concern for inquisitive toddlers and worries about longer-term effects of exposure during use than as a specific anti-poisoning measure), ‘heat-of-the-moment’ poisonings also tend to be pretty unimpressive in terms of lethality, unlike spur-of-the-moment shootings or stabbings; but most dubiously premeditated violence against close social contacts is really pretty dumb.

By: Yacko

Yacko — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 12:52:00 +0000

Castor bean cassoulet.