Young’s evident fascination with toxicology, and nothing but toxicology, was the key to discovering the truth of his poisoning habits and he was sent to Broadmoor psychiatric hospital. Williams’s deteriorating health sounded alarm bells at the school and a psychiatrist was brought in to question Young under the pretext of being a careers advisor. Eventually his father was taken to hospital, where he recovered, but he remained suspicious of his son.Įncouraged by his initial successes Young also poisoned a school friend, Chris Williams.
Young continued to dose his father with antimony, often sneaked into his pint of beer when he wasn’t looking. She died the same day but her death was attributed to natural causes. He was found by the kitchen window watching her writhe in agony in the back garden. Disappointed with the slow progress the poison was making on his stepmother, Young added a large dose of thallium to her tea one day. Most of the poison would have been removed by the vomit but the small amount that remained slowly built up in the body with repeated doses. The antimony in the jam also had an effect on the family: lots of vomiting and painful cramps in the legs. Her condition was serious enough that she was taken to hospital, where the doctors recognised the symptoms and were able to treat her successfully. She got to her office but by then she was having trouble focusing her eyes. During her bus journey she started to feel dizzy. It made the tea taste bitter, so his sister only drank a mouthful before leaving for work. The atropine experiment was not a success from Young’s point of view. He stirred atropine into his sister’s tea and added antimony to the jars of jam in the cupboards and watched the results. Young began adding different compounds to different foods in the family home. The pharmacist thought he was being encouraging and supportive, but Young was using the pharmacist for his own devious ends: poisoning his family. His extensive knowledge convinced a local pharmacist Young was much older than he appeared and enabled the schoolboy to get hold of some unusual and dangerous compounds. He excelled at chemistry but nothing else, despite being a bright student. Young’s fascination with the macabre and toxicology started when he was a schoolboy. So to avoid giving away whodunnit but to offer you lots of clues, this article is all about Young, one of Britain’s most prolific poisoners, and some of the uncomfortably similar circumstances of his real-life murderous career and Christie’s fiction. I don’t want to give away too much about The Pale Horse and spoil your enjoyment of the drama but I do want to discuss just how brilliantly Christie used her scientific knowledge to construct the plot. It is doubtful that Christie, scientifically accurate though she was, could have taught him anything anyway, as Young had made his own extensive and detailed studies of all things toxic.
The novel was published in 1961, the year before Young began his poisoning activities, but at his trial in 1971 he denied having read it. There are certainly some uncomfortable parallels between The Pale Horse and the crimes committed by Graham Young. But the same novel has also been accused of inspiring a murderer.Ĭhristie often used real life cases of murder as sources for her plots but on this occasion it was allegedly the other way round. It seems reading Christie could save your life. It is sufficiently detailed that on two occasions readers recognised symptoms in people who were being poisoned and were able to intervene. The novel, as would be expected of Christie, is packed with poisonous information and killer clues. Christie’s tale of contract killers, witches and black magic is a fantastic example of her brilliant plotting and superb ability to keep you guessing whodunnit right until the very end.
Mark Easterbrook becomes suspicious when a young woman dies just weeks after he saw her in a cafe, apparently in the prime of life, and he decides to investigate.
The novel centres around a series of apparently unrelated deaths that have all been attributed to a wide variety of natural causes. The novel is credited with saving two lives and has also been cited in a murder trial. This year’s big Agatha Christie adaptation, The Pale Horse, is one of her less well-known murder mysteries – but in some ways it has had a much greater impact than the others.