Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This is exactly right. Hello. Karen and George are here with breaking news. In addition to our regular weekly podcasts,
My Favorite Murder is now doing a new third episode and it's called Rewind with Karen and Georgia. We re-listen to our earliest episodes and share favorite moments, talk about the lessons we've learned along the way and give important case updates. So whether you're a day one listener or a brand new murderino, join us as we rewind to the very beginning. Rewind with Karen and Georgia is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Goodbye.
I want to talk to you about the King's heart and how it ended up where it did. So remember that after Boris died in 1943, the official cause of death was given as cardiac arrest. But a few of the doctors tending the King on his sickbed firmly believed he'd been poisoned. Now, for religious and emotional reasons, the Queen didn't want an autopsy performed.
But during the embalming process of the king's body, a mini-autopsy was performed on his heart. And somehow, when the king was buried at the Rila Monastery, his heart was not replaced inside his chest. You'll probably recall that the king was kicked out of his Rila resting place by the new Soviet regime in 1946.
They didn't much care for all the nationalist fervour his tomb inspired. And a new grave was dug for him at Vrana. But after the Queen and the royal children, Simeon and Maria Luisa, were sent into exile, the tomb was dug up once more and the king's body went missing, never to be found again. But in 1991, his heart suddenly turned up.
In a pickle jar. Allegedly in the empty grave. But more probably on a dusty shelf of a medical institute. OK, now in the last chapter, we'd just received a cryptic voicemail from someone inviting us to meet up with him to talk about the Butterfly King's mysterious death. He was addressing his message to EJ, my producer.
Dear Scobie, thank you for your acting. I'm very interested. So that voice belongs to a man called Dr Deutchnow. He's well into his 90s and has Parkinson's. He remembers King Boris's death. He was in his early teens when the king died. But that's not really what he wants to chat about. It's very fascinating for me to meet an English journalist.
He's telling me he'd be fascinated to meet an English journalist looking into the death of the king. Why are we so happy to receive this message? Because Dr. Deutchenhoff is actually the one witness we thought would never agree to speak out.
Because that pickle jar that showed up in the early 1990s, the one that turned out to contain King Boris's heart, well, the doctor who examined that royal heart was Dr. Deutchenhoff. From Blanchard House and Exactly Right Media, this is The Butterfly King. I'm Becky Milligan. MUSIC PLAYS
Chapter 7: The heart of the matter. We have a lot of trees that shouldn't be here. Oh really? Because the dying trees spread disease and kill more trees.
We're taking a guided tour around the grounds of Rana Palace with the king's suave and charming aide, Yavor. He's almost as knowledgeable about trees and plants as King Boris himself was. And now you see there is a fallen tree on the road. I will call now the gardens to cut it. It's dangerous. Secondly, it's ugly and it spreads diseases.
Sickness and disease seem to be the order of the day. We're really in Sofia to meet pathologist Dr. Deuchenov. But unfortunately that meeting isn't to be just yet because poor Dr. Deuchenov goes down with Covid. And as he's now in his 90s, we can't push for an interview until he's completely recovered. But we speak to the doctor's daughter-in-law on the phone.
She tells us Dr. Deutchenhoff is even more disappointed than we are. Apparently he has so much he wants to tell us, so much he needs to tell us.
But all we can do is be patient and wait. And of course, spending time with Javor is always a lovely distraction. It's full of mushrooms in the garden. There are animals also in the garden now. We have deers, foxes, rabbits. Elephants? Not anymore.
Foxy Ferdinand, Boris' father, used to keep a small zoo in the grounds of Rana. Buffaloes, exotic birds and elephants. But after the accident with the elephant, they moved it in the centre. What accident? We're not sure, but probably one of the people that take care of the elephant probably beat him or something.
The man beat the elephant? Yes. Right. My hunch is this doesn't end too well for the elephant keeper. And one morning, when this person go inside the cage of the elephant, the elephant just, without say anything, just push the man on the low. Trot on him? Yeah. Smash him like a stamp. Oh. So there we have the royal palace's first sort of murder.
But was it really the only murder? I mean, so many people hated King Boris and wanted him dead. A heart attack seems like a convenient excuse.
Sometimes, in an investigation like this one, you get the most extraordinary strokes of luck, like finding a document in some old dusty library, an overlooked paper that gives you a brand new lead, or a new witness suddenly springs up from nowhere and takes your case in a whole new direction. But sometimes difficult things happen, which completely throw you off course.
And today is one of those days. We've just received a text message from Dr. Deutchenhoff's daughter-in-law, Maya, and it contains some devastating news. I'm going to read it to you. Unfortunately, Dr. Deutchenhoff passed away peacefully this morning. He wanted to meet you so much. We're so sorry for Dr. Deutchenhoff's family. In the last few weeks, we've been in regular contact with them,
And they've quite often mentioned that the prospect of talking to us and getting the chance to tell his side of King Boris's story was what was keeping Dr. Deutchenov alive. But now, of course, we'll never know exactly what he was burning to tell us. He didn't share those details with his family. And understandably, they've declined to do an interview with us. They're not only grieving, they don't want to second-guess him. They don't want to put words into his mouth.
But what we do know is this: Cast yourself back in time to a medical lab in Sofia, October 1991, and a man in his early 60s is hunched over a microscope. He wears a white coat and he's studying something closely. Before him on the table is a glass jar, the sort of large jar you'd store jam in, maybe pickles.
There's no label on the jar, but you don't really need a medical degree to recognise what's inside it, because floating in the clear, preserving liquid is a heart. A human heart.
On the workbench sits a smaller glass file. There's a scrap of paper inside it. It reads: "The heart of His Majesty King Boris III." And it's signed by the Bulgarian doctors who tended the monarch in his final hours, who claimed the cause of death was a cardiac arrest. The pathologist in the lab coat has spent hours examining and measuring the heart,
There's no doubt it's the royal heart. Its description perfectly matches the autopsy report written in 1943. But it's almost 50 years since that document was typed. And in that time, science has moved on considerably. As the pathologist sits back and begins to write up his notes, you can read the name badge pinned to his lapel. Dr. Deutchen Deutchenhoff.
He's smiling because Dr. Deutchenhoff has carried out exhaustive tests on the King's heart and he's made a huge discovery. He now knows exactly what killed King Boris. He has scientific proof and he can sum up his findings in just two small words: heart attack. He can find no trace of poison and no signs of foul play.
Dr. Deutchnow concludes that King Boris III of Bulgaria died a natural death. After all the decades of theories, speculation and finger-pointing, is it possible that this isn't a case of murder after all? We'll never know if Dr. Deutchnow had more specific information he wanted to disclose to us. We just know he believed the king died of a heart attack.
So I've decided to talk over his findings with another forensic pathologist to try and understand what a pathologist really does, what someone like Dr. Deutchenhoff would have been looking for. So I want to introduce you to someone you met briefly in our very first chapter, Dr. Stuart Hamilton. He's fascinated by how the body works and how it goes wrong. He's not quite so bothered about his bedside manner, though.
I am not particularly good with poorly people, which is somewhat unfortunate. So my patients are very, very quiet. As quiet as the grave, in fact. Dr Hamilton has been working with the dead for the past 20 years...
Or should I say, on the dead? So our main role is to examine bodies in cases of suspicious deaths or homicides. We investigate as best we can what the cause of death might be. I mean, if I'm honest, it sounds a bit gruesome. It is gruesome. It is examining and cutting into dead human beings as a day job.
Gruesome for sure, but essential, so that the living get answers and the dead can rest in peace. So let's imagine King Boris had ended up on Dr Hamilton's marble slab. What proof would he need to confirm that the monarch had indeed died of a simple cardiac arrest? A heart attack to a doctor, to a pathologist, is also known as a myocardial infarct.
And that means that part of the muscle of your heart is not receiving enough blood for it to stay alive. And that means that the muscle will die. And if that is enough damage, it can kill the person. It essentially stops the heart working, stops the pump working. So that's fairly clear. No pump, no pulse.
But what makes that heart muscle die? You get fatty deposits building up in the arteries that supply the heart itself. They become narrowed and they don't let as much blood through as they should. That can produce symptoms such as angina, that chest pain on exertion. Hang on a second. Tell me a little more about angina. Angina is a warning sign for a heart attack.
That's what I feared. Remember how King Boris went climbing with his brother Kirill after that dreadful final meeting with Hitler? We know he was in very low spirits, that he felt sick and that he was suffering from bad chest pain. Well, here's Dr Hamilton's description of how someone would feel in the early stages of a heart attack.
You have crushing chest pain, as if there's a metal band around your chest crushing it. That pain will often go down your arm, it may go up into your jaw, sweatiness and nausea. Some people even describe a feeling of impending doom.
Apparently Boris had confided in his wife and in his brother and sister that he feared he was suffering from angina pectoris and that he feared he'd die from it. But how did the king guess this? I mean, it was 1943, way before the internet and Dr Google. He must have consulted a specialist for the diagnosis. And that unsettles me.
Because if he was suffering from angina, but then pushed himself to his physical limits climbing mountains, a heart attack seems less surprising, less suspicious. Plus the time frameworks. Some people may die straight away. Some people may survive a day or so. Some people may survive two or three weeks. But hang on a sec. Let's remember that Boris was a bit of a health freak.
I mean, OK, he wasn't pumping iron in the gym every two minutes, but he was extremely fit. And someone who takes regular exercise and who eats healthily is fairly well insured against heart failure, right? That's sort of my point. Remember Colonel Hamish, our chemical weapons expert who served for 23 years in the British Army? Well, to say he is a fitness fanatic is a bit of an understatement. As a younger man, he actually held the world push-ups record.
But... Well, I have sudden cardiac death syndrome, which is a genetic heart condition. It's one of those things that if you know about it, you can do things about it. And if you don't, then that's very sadly when things can go wrong. Thinking about Boris, he was very fit. He was a mountaineer, a
He loved walking. He loved getting out in the wild, shooting, hunting. He was that type of king. And in that way, it could have been a natural death if he'd had a condition that we just don't know about. Absolutely. And if he had a condition like mine, all the sort of things he did would potentially lead to his demise. And in those days, people didn't know very much about the condition, so couldn't do very much about it.
Could the king have had some kind of heart defect, a congenital problem from birth that was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode?
I can't help thinking about something our learned but rather indiscreet historian Tessa Dunlop said about the shallow genetic pool that European royal families shared at the time. Loads of them were inbred and that can give you weird, you know, dicky hearts and stuff like that, can't it? I mean, we know that Boris with a nose like that...
Probably had a few other malformations, for want of a better expression, including the left cavity of his heart, or is it a chamber? It is a chamber, but there's no way I was going to mention a subject like inbreeding with King Boris's son, Simeon. But actually, he brought it up.
Protocol means you really cannot ask a king, even a sort of king like Simeon, about the state of his health.
But here's what I'm thinking. If there was a heart problem in Boris' family, it probably would have been passed down the line to Maria Luisa or Simeon, who are 90 and 86 respectively, and still going strong. Did my father die from a massive heart attack? Fine. I mean, it happens and this is still an open question. I don't mention it because I have no rational proof.
But did the doctors who performed Boris' autopsy in 1943 have proof? How did they, or even Dr Deutchenhoff, nearly 50 years later, know they were making the right call? Dr Stuart Hamilton, our forensic pathologist. It's one of those things that the naked eye examination can identify straight away.
There will be changes that you can see down the microscope. So you will start with inflammation in the heart and then you will see the dead muscle starting to be eaten away and replaced with early scar tissue. So again, for a true heart attack, the findings are quite specific and quite clear. So was the official cause of death correct all along?
The science now seems to be stacking up in its favour. But Boris wasn't even 50.
You're presuming that it's not possible for a man to die of a weak heart in 1943, aged 49. I would like to point out to you that at the turn of the 20th century, the average American male lived to the age of 49. It's not such a devastatingly awful age to live to in the middle of a war. Tessa's not the only cynic. Dr Stuart Hamilton thinks Boris could have just been unlucky in the genetic lottery. As a pathologist...
You can become very cynical. You deal with people who live to 85 having drunk and smoked and lived on chips and crisps and die happily in their beds. And you deal with 50-year-olds who collapse on the treadmill at the gym. So we can't rule out that it's just plain unlucky.
But Simeon can't rule it in. All this is, again, it's just conjectures. I like facts. Well, here are two undeniable facts. In the middle of the Second World War, with Bulgaria's precarious future in his hands, King Boris must have been stressed out of his brain. And heart attacks and stress? Well, everyone knows they go hand in hand.
Stress is a very well-recognised factor to precipitate a heart attack. And that awful meeting with Hitler could have been the straw that broke the camel's back. We know he couldn't get it off his mind. Remembering a stressful situation that stresses you again, that can do it. Right. So it looks like the mystery's over. There is no mystery.
Dr Deuteneff nailed it. King Boris simply died of a cardiac arrest. It would be an easy conclusion to draw. A middle-aged man who dies suddenly, look, he's had a heart attack, end of story. But its context, we're talking about powerful people in a very difficult point in history.
When you're talking about geopolitics, which is essentially what we are here, there is a why. It leaves the whole situation unresolved for me. So it's a case of don't let sleeping kings lie, really? No.
Let's just go over the brief of a forensic pathologist. It's not just to examine dead bodies to find out what caused them to fail mechanically. It's also about putting those dead bodies into context, into historical context, and asking, was there anyone else around who wanted that body to fail?
who maybe caused it to fail. One should look at the evidence, and the evidence in this case, as I see it, is that we have got somebody who would be a candidate for being bumped off with good reason. So there is a mystery there. I agree. I honestly don't think we can separate this case from the background of war. There was just too much of an agenda.
I would never stand up in a court and say, beyond all reasonable doubt, this is a homicide. But there is too much to it for me to comfortably say, write it off, never need to look at that again, job's done. In my profession, we don't like loose ends sort of hanging there going, you haven't got to the bottom of me yet. And Dr Hamilton's not the only one who thinks there's more to this than meets the eye.
King Boris's daughter, Maria Luisa, is convinced her father was murdered, despite being aware of Dr Deutchenow's findings that it was just a heart attack. You can induce a heart attack. That's not an answer. There are many ways of bringing somebody to a heart attack, you know. So you still questioned it after that? It wasn't the end of the story at that point? No.
What better way of taking stock of things than over tea and biscuits in our hotel room? I want to mull over what I'm now feeling about Boris's death. At least that was the plan until EJ floors me with a confession about our visit to Vrana Palace. Can I ask you a question about the royal toilet? Oh yeah. We both went to the royal toilet. Did you use the comb?
No, what did you comb your hair with? His comb? Yes. What was it made out of? Gold? Plastic. Plastic. What colour was it? Grey. You literally picked up his comb from the back and brushed your hair with it? I didn't really think that it was his so I just did. It was there with some powder puffs and I thought it was like, you know. Did you use the powder puffs as well? I didn't use the powder puffs, no. I just can't believe you used his comb. Mm.
I just, I actually can't believe that. Talk about making yourself at home in a royal palace. I went in there, I didn't, I just went in and out for me because it was a bit of a rush. I hope you washed your hands. Of course I did. Thank you. Of course I did. With Covid and everything. I wouldn't have bothered otherwise.
Actually, since we're getting all confessional here, I'm going to let you in on another little secret. Well, it's really Yavor's little secret. You'll remember that Maria Luisa is celebrating her 90th birthday today.
Well, Jarvo has been working on a little surprise for her and I'm sure she's going to love it. I hate surprises because, you know, you don't know what's going to happen. Oh, well, let's not mention that to Jarvo. The surprise is a cake with penguins with a T-shirt of Bulgarian football team Levskiy.
because princes very much like penguins and this football team, Levski, which is from the period of King Boris' time. She'll be so excited, won't she? I hope so, I hope so. If I were a princess, I honestly couldn't imagine a nicer aide than Jarvo. But how do royal families trust their staff? I mean, how do they know that Jarvo hasn't slipped a little poison in that penguin cake?
Simeon's rather horrified when I ask him. Can you trust him? Who? Javel. Javel. My secretary. I hope, you see, I can't possibly even visualise anything like it because if you don't trust somebody you see every day, finally you become insane. I'm only teasing, of course. Javel's a total star.
But I asked the royal siblings about him because I wanted to make a serious point. When King Boris was here in Vrana Palace, in the gritty heart of the Second World War, trust was not something one could take for granted. And even at the tender age of six, Simeon was made well aware that walls have ears. What I remember is that
My mother would tell us that, well, we just should know how to keep our mouth shut. But that was as far as we would go into anything sort of weird or secret or what have you. I think it was more for, is anybody eavesdropping or, I don't know. But interesting that the royal children were taught to be careful about what they said in earshot of palace staff.
Did the Queen suspect someone was listening out for information? Information she feared they might use to kill the King? It wasn't any spy phobia or agent phobia. It's much later that you realise that somebody might betray you or not. Things happen like in any war, like in any royal court or something. So it wasn't really specifically sinister or something.
Now, let's be clear about something. I'm not in any way ignoring Dr. Deutchenhoff's scientific conclusions or overriding them. I absolutely acknowledge that as the pathologist who actually performed an autopsy on the King's heart in 1991, Dr. Deutchenhoff's testimony is unique.
But I do still have to push forward with other lines of investigation, especially as Dr Stuart Hamilton, our own forensic pathologist, has cast doubt on whether everything adds up quite so neatly, whether we really can just accept that the King's death was unfortunate, but completely natural.
King Boris was pretty cautious about his health. He wasn't a hypochondriac like his father, Foxy Ferdinand, but he did go in for cures and remedies.
According to Stefan Grueth in his book Crown of Thorns, King Boris went everywhere with a substantial amount of pills and potions. He owned a sort of travelling pharmacy. Certainly there are substances which can mimic a heart attack. The one that immediately leaps to mind in normal everyday life to some extent would be cocaine.
cocaine can cause the arteries to your heart to spasm, to close down. Are you saying King Boris may have been on cocaine? I'm not suggesting he was on cocaine, but I'm thinking of things that can cause a similar outcome. Anything that causes your arteries to spasm will stop the blood flowing through them, and that means the heart muscle can be damaged.
And it wouldn't have been difficult for someone, someone who had close access to Boris, to substitute his vitamin kills and headache remedies for something more sinister. But who? A close aide? The Yavor of times past? The only problem is, it seems that Boris used his portable medicine cabinet as a kind of comfort blanket. He liked to know it was nearby, but he rarely actually used its contents.
A close aide would have known that. They'd have known there were no guarantees that Boris would have swallowed any poisonous pills. And here's the old sticking point, of course. Dr. Deuteneff was adamant that he found no traces of poison in the king's heart when he re-examined it in the 1990s. He only found the proof that Boris had had a cardiac arrest.
But Dr Stuart Hamilton still thinks it's perfectly possible that Deutchenhoff may have missed something. Not because he thinks Deutchenhoff wasn't doing his job properly, but because he simply didn't test for the right poison. Dr Hamilton's made the same mistake himself. I dealt with one person who ATU scenes. Oh, okay.
to end their life, which was an interesting one. Unsurprisingly, testing for plant seed poisoning is not standard procedure in the crime scene handbook. But luckily, one of the crime scene investigators was a horticultural fanatic. And he alerted Dr Hamilton to the fact that the body was found among yew trees, whose seeds he knew are deathly poisonous.
If one of the crime scene investigators hadn't been a keen gardener, I'm not sure I would have picked that up. So for all the certainty and expertise, there is an element of luck. There is an element of luck.
I would have missed because we don't routinely test for the poison that is in seeds from a yew tree. That story reminds me of something. Something Colonel Hamish, our chemical weapons expert, once said when we were wondering if the Nazis poisoned Boris. That the lack of scientific know-how at the time was definitely advantageous to a wannabe assassin.
At that time, they hadn't developed the sort of detectors that we have now that would signal that sort of stuff. So technology was there, or lack of it, was their friend in those days. Absolutely. And we know that the Soviets had established two poison laboratories with the sole aim of poisoning people and getting away with it. Remember, they were using a poison that could fool pathologists into thinking the victims had died of a heart attack.
one that couldn't be detected back then. But that was 1943. The last examination of the heart was in 1991,
But doesn't it stand to reason that in the last 30 years, technology and toxicology has moved on leaps and bounds again? When I was dealing with Al-Qaeda biological weapons attack in Iraq 15 years ago, it was taking us 36 hours to do DNA sequencing. It's moved so far forward now. What you could do in 36 hours 15 years ago, you could do it
15 minutes now. And not only has the speed increased, but also the breadth of what you can do. As I suspected. But as you know, the king's body has gone missing. The Soviets dug it up from Rila Monastery, where it was laid to rest in 1943. Boris was reburied at Vrana. Then at some point during Simeon and Maria Luisa's exile, the communists exhumed the body again.
and disposed of it goodness knows where. So when the heart turned up in a pickle jar in 1991, it was reburied again at the Rila Monastery.
Could the heart still hold clues? Clues that today's forensic medicine might be able to detect that the forensic pathologists of the 1990s simply couldn't. Pickling is a good way to preserve tissue. Dr Stuart Hamilton, our forensic pathologist. You can't get perfect toxicology from it because obviously the tissue will be affected by the thing it's preserved in.
But as I say to people many times when it comes to investigations, if you don't look, you won't find. If you look, you may or may not. And you don't know till you've done it. Gosh, that's a tough call. Should the remains of King Boris really be exhumed for a fourth time, on the off chance that some new trace of poison could be found? Simeon has already told me he still worries about his father's body.
that it's not resting peacefully at Vrana. I'm not a person who goes into any emotional moods or things. I simply regret, and now that you bring it up, I think of it again. It's disturbing. It does seem almost sacrilegious to disturb the remains of the king again, the remains of Simeon and Maria Luisa's beloved papa.
You know, one has to make one's peace with these things. That won't bring him back. And that's Dr Hamilton's feeling too. There's no point in a further autopsy. Digging up the heart would not give us a definitive answer. Because, of course, you just can't prove a negative. Even if we were to do tests, even if it came back and said, no substance is present...
then the counter-argument would be, A, it could be something you can't pick up. B, if it was something he was given several days before that set this in motion, it could have got out of his system by the time he died. So you'll never prove one way or the other. So I need to find new evidence elsewhere, because my gut feeling is still that King Boris was murdered.
Poisoned. And although I agree that many of his symptoms, the chest pain, the sweating, etc., do match the signs of a heart attack, there are still two unexplained signs. Those brown spots that covered his skin. And the fact that his red blood cells, as Simeon put it, exploded.
It was those brown spots on the King's skin, remember, that first alerted the German doctors to a possible poisoning. They just couldn't explain them away. Can Dr Hamilton? A rash or spots and breakdown of red blood cells does not sound like a typical consequence of a cardiac event. That would set you off investigating, wouldn't it? That would set my concern levels tingling.
I think there may be something underhand gone on. I really do. And remember our snake expert, Marco Shay? He rubbished my theory that snake venom killed the king. But he's been back in touch about those spots. The blotches do sound like a hypersensitive reaction to me to something.
They do. Maybe a poison. And Mark's been doing a bit of thinking. Maybe you'd have a hypersensitive reaction if you'd eaten something toxic like poisonous mushrooms. Maybe. Mushrooms? And there are plenty of highly toxic mushrooms or toadstools that could have been put into his food. As it happens, King Boris had one favourite dish. A dish that he asked for again and again.
Have you guessed yet? Next time on The Butterfly King. A chat with a Russian mycologist leaves us with a bad
a bad taste in our mouths. Some poisonous fungi, they are known to have some bitter taste, but these ones that are really poisonous, they are tasteless. And a fairy tale ending for Princess Maria Luisa and King Simeon when they're finally allowed home from exile. It was an unbelievable dream that came true because for almost 50 years, you know, the idea of Bulgaria was like, you know, for the
for the Jewish Jerusalem or something like that, a dream that would never come true. The Butterfly King is a production of Blanchard House and Exactly Right Media, hosted by me, Becky Milligan. It's written and produced by Emma Jane Kirby. Original music is by Daniel Lloyd-Evans, Louis Nankmanel and Toby Matamon.
Sound design and engineering by Toby Matamong and Daniel Lloyd-Evans. Artwork by Vanessa Lilac. The managing producer is Amika Shortino-Nolan. The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pye. The executive producer and head of content at Blanchard House is Lawrence Grizzell.
For Exactly Right Media, the executive producers are Karen Kilgariff, Georgia Hardstark and Daniel Kramer, with consulting producer Kyle Ryan. The Butterfly King is inspired by the book Hitler and the King by John Hall Spencer.
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