3. Poisoners - The Teacup Poisoner, Pt. 1
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Hi everyone, welcome to Binge. Now, I'm sure you've all heard the expression, "As American as apple pie." Well, as American as apple pie is, there may be nothing more English than an afternoon cup of tea. And if you were to transpose this reasoning to the dark terrain of true crime, you could also say that a fatal poisoning is as English a thing as a mass shooting is American.

That's how stark the cultural differences are when it comes to violence. In his humorous essay, The Decline of the English Murder, George Orwell complained about the lack of patience and imagination in modern murders compared to the murders of the past. And this essay was first published in 1946. So one can only imagine how horrified Orwell would be in 2022 by how much more the quality of murders has deteriorated.

But in his essay, he described the hypothetical perfect English murder. And of course, the weapon of choice was poison. A year after Orwell's essay was published and surely unrelated to and uninfluenced by this essay, the most English of serial killers was born. One who would come to be known as the teacup poisoner. In fact, there was a movie made about the teacup poisoner back in 1995 called The Young Poisoner's Handbook.

So if your pantry is stocked with tea, now may be a good time to brew some as we begin our story about the teacup poisoner. Founded in the early 1960s, John Hadland Laboratories, known to locals as Hadlands, was a manufacturer of camera equipment based in the village of Bovingdon, some 30 miles north of London.

And by 1971, Hadlands occupied a spacious building that employed about 75 people with the company storeroom housed in a long barn-like extension from the main offices. It was on a weekday afternoon in late May of 1971 that 41-year-old storeroom employee Ron Hewitt's workday was interrupted by a sudden bout of diarrhea. Now,

This is something that, you know, happens to the best of us. But Ron's cramps persisted throughout the work week. It seemed like he'd come down with some kind of stomach bug, he thought.

And it was only once the weekend arrived that his symptoms started to ease. And by Monday, when Ron returned to work, his discomfort was pretty much gone. But then by late Monday afternoon, his stomach cramps returned. And he once again spent much of the rest of the week doubled over on the toilet.

And Ron wasn't alone. On the 1st of June, 59-year-old storeroom supervisor Bob Agla, a World War II vet just a couple of years away from retirement, suddenly became ill with a bout of diarrhea that was unlike anything he'd ever experienced. And these debilitating cramps were accompanied by other random symptoms like a strange burning sensation in his throat.

Now, all of this was unusual for Bob and worrisome because Bob was a man who up to this point had always been in robust health and almost never got sick.

He had braved the battlefields of Dunkirk during the Second World War, and unlike many of his army buddies, he made it out the other end unscathed. He had gone through much of his life seemingly invincible. But now there was a new, invisible enemy battering Bob's insides, and he was growing increasingly powerless against it.

His symptoms lingered and intensified throughout the first week of June, during which he also developed headaches so severe that he was popping coding tablets. So now, both Bob and his younger coworker, Ron, were experiencing waves of similar symptoms over the course of the next few weeks.

But then Ron's time at Hadlund's came to an end as he took a job with another company. And miraculously, this stubborn stomach flu disappeared as soon as he began his new job. So at this point,

it's sounding like it could be something similar to what we now call sick building syndrome, where employees at a specific work site become chronically ill as a result of exposure to something in the workplace. Sometimes it's mold, other times it's bacteria,

or a virus, or even just an excess of allergens. But in the case of hadlans, whatever it was that was making Bob and Ron sick, it was something relatively new to the environment because no one had experienced this before.

And these were people who had been working in the same building for quite some time. And then Bob's symptoms, much like Ron's, also disappeared when he was away from work, when he went on vacation. But when he returned to work at Hadlands, these symptoms returned and with a vengeance. In early July, Bob began experiencing numbness in his fingers and extremities, a pinning

a pins and needle feeling. And by the end of the workday, he was in so much pain that he was hardly able to move. Bob was rushed to the hospital and by the time he got there, most of his body was paralyzed and he was almost completely unable to speak.

Doctors were at a loss to figure out exactly what was causing these symptoms, so they diagnosed Bob with Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is an extremely rare autoimmune disorder where the body's immune system attacks the nerves. Now, GBS generally affects one or two out of every 100,000 people a year, and a little under 8% of those diagnosed will die.

So that's about one person out of every million people who will die each year from this disease. It's like the inverse of winning a lottery. And sadly, the previously indestructible Bob became one of those rare unlucky people.

By July 7th of 1971, Bob's respiratory system had become completely paralyzed and he died with the official cause of death being of bronchopneumonia. Bob's death sent shockwaves through Hadlands. Again, this is where he worked.

And one coworker who seemed particularly captivated by Bob's death was the 23-year-old storekeeper, Graham Young, a relatively new hire who had just begun working for Hadlands two months earlier. Now, Graham saw a certain tragic irony in Bob's death. It's very sad that Bob should have come through the terrors of Dunkirk, said Graham, only to fall victim to some strange virus at work.

Graham wound up accompanying the Hanlon's managing director, Joffrey Foster, to Bob's cremation. And over the next few months, Graham seemingly couldn't get Bob's death out of his mind. He talked about it with his coworkers nearly every day, evidently quite disturbed by the mystery of it.

Which is understandable, right? I mean, a previously healthy coworker suddenly gets sick and their health rapidly deteriorates and they die. I think that would haunt me too, especially if others in the workplace were also getting sick. And that's indeed what was still happening. 39-year-old Jethro Batt, who also worked in the company's storeroom, began feeling queasy on Saturday, October 16th of that year.

At first, he woke up in the morning feeling like he had a hangover. But as the day wore on, Jethro's legs became weaker and weaker, and he had to spend the remainder of the day sitting down.

By the following day, his legs were outright numb. But despite this and a doctor's visit early Monday morning, he pressed on with work, returning to the Hadland's storeroom each day, feeling worse than the last. By Thursday of that week, Jethro was completely unable to even get out of bed. His legs had stopped working altogether. The pain was radiating to his stomach and chest, and his hair was falling out.

And perhaps most terrifying of all, he had begun experiencing hallucinations. Jethro Bat was feeling so desperately unwell that his mind was turning to thoughts of ending his own life. That's how much pain he was in. And

And on Friday morning, he was admitted to the emergency room for further testing. And only a week before Jethro had started feeling sick, young Hadland's ex-sport clerk, David Tilson, had a brush with similar symptoms. Pins and needles, sensations in his feet, followed a day or two later by severe pain in his chest and stomach, which left him only able to take shallow breaths.

David went to the doctor and was prescribed some tablets, but then over the next few days, he developed insomnia and his other symptoms grew even worse. He too was admitted to the hospital. Now, once there, David's hair, just like Jethro's, began to fall out. And even after he was feeling somewhat better and discharged from the hospital, David's hair just kept shredding. It got so bad that this young man who had previously had thick,

healthy hair, had to begin wearing a wig. And instead of returning to work, David decided to stay home. He took five weeks off to return to health. He would be in and out of the hospital during this period with symptoms that would wax and wane. But it was ultimately David's decision to prioritize self-care over work that probably saved his life. But 60-year-old storeroom supervisor Fred Biggs wouldn't be so fortunate.

On Tuesday, October 26th, four of Fred's colleagues were out sick, all with similar symptoms. That was Jethro, David, and Hadland's secretary, Diane Smart, and her husband, Norman.

And that afternoon, Fred, whose spouse Annie also worked for Hadlands, which was, you know, a friendly workplace that looked after its employees, suddenly raced to the toilet experiencing the same ominous diarrhea that had preceded the more serious illness of several of his coworkers. Within a week, Fred's symptoms slowly subsided and he was almost back to normal when suddenly,

almost overnight in the first week of November, Fred's condition took a nosedive. He suddenly had become so ill that he lost the will to even communicate and

and like two of his other colleagues, had to be admitted to the hospital. Now once there, doctors noted a variety of symptoms: loss of sensation and reflexes in his limbs, scaly skin across his upper body, a flushed complexion, a hairy tongue, and this was on top of his continuing gastrointestinal symptoms.

And then Fred's eyesight began slipping away. He had trouble breathing and swallowing. He was completely unable to speak and doctors eventually had to perform a tracheotomy and insert a tube into his throat.

Now, meanwhile, Fred's body temperature skyrocketed. His skin began sloughing off. Everything hurts. Even his clothes and weight of his bed sheet were unbearable for Fred. He developed pneumonia and nothing he was given. No treatment, no medication seemed to improve his condition at all.

Fred then fell unconscious, was put on a ventilator, and on November 18th, 1971, he went into cardiac arrest and died, surrounded by his family who had been at his bedside throughout much of his slow, agonizing death.

And another person who seemed to prioritize Fred's condition was the young man who worked closely with him as his trainee, Graham Young. The lad who had seemed unable to get over Bob's death, talking about it incessantly for weeks, even months afterward. Now, Graham was checking in on Fred frequently, very eager to know every specific symptom that Fred was experiencing and what kind of tests they were doing.

In fact, Graham was in constant communication with poor Fred's wife, asking her almost daily about Fred's symptoms, requesting that she describe them in precise detail.

And Graham also regularly followed up on his other colleagues who were battling with this mysterious illness. He seemed to possess an almost encyclopedic knowledge of all things medical, diseases, symptoms, toxicology. And he would more often than not use clinical and medical terminology rather than layman's terms others could easily understand.

In fact, when his coworker Diane Smart took a first aid training course, Graham actually lent her a series of medical textbooks that were of no use to her because they were so advanced she couldn't even understand them. It seemed that Graham Young was better suited to be working in a hospital or a laboratory than doing low-level grunt work in a factory storeroom.

Now, Graham was most certainly an odd young man. He was slightly built at 23 years old with hands barely larger than a teenager's. Graham was polite, seemingly endlessly curious, and armed with a dry sense of humor and otherwise cold, emotionally detached manner. He'd had what one might imagine to be a surgeon's personality. Now, Graham was the youngest employee in the Hadland's storeroom, where most of his coworkers were middle-aged or approaching it.

His duties were varied, and as a newish hire still learning the ropes, he largely functioned as a gopher, tending to chores as menial as conveying items from the storeroom to the lab, managing the tea trolley, and serving his coworkers tea in their personal mugs. Now, perhaps you can already guess where this is going. And Graham was one of the only members of the storeroom crew who had managed to avoid these debilitating symptoms.

And among his numerous off-center workplace behaviors, Graham liked to carry around small bottles of ammonia in his pockets, offering anyone he crossed paths with a sniff. Most of his colleagues would politely decline this kind offer and brush it off as just Graham being weird.

Now, Hadland's administrators were hard at work trying to determine the cause of the sickness that everyone was now calling the Bovingdon bug, this mystery element taking down Hadland's employees. They even brought in inspectors from the outside, carefully processing the workplace, looking for potential contaminants and foodborne pathogens in the canteen.

And while everyone else at work was either sick with or terrified of becoming sick with the so-called Bovington bug, Graham always seemed to be nosing around, asking questions, and offering to Hadland's higher-ups his theories and suggestions.

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Let's get back into the episode. His behavior was beginning to stand out and honestly get Graham noticed. And his employers were starting to consider probing into his background just a little harder. Because before Graham was hired, Hadlins learned that 23-year-old Graham had previously been institutionalized at Broadmoor Hospital, which is a high security facility known to house criminally dangerous individuals.

They were led to this discovery by initially questioning Graham directly when he was still an applicant about the lack of employment history on his resume. Now, Graham explained that he had suffered a mental breakdown when he was young due to the unexpected death of his mother, and he spent some time at the mental hospital but eventually made a full recovery.

Now, during the initial interview, when the manager queried around and learned that it was at Broadmoor that Graham had been hospitalized, a letter was sent to Broadmoor's chief psychiatrist, Dr. Edgar Udwin. In his response, Dr. Udwin declined to provide details of Graham's history, except to say that Graham had suffered from what he described as, quote, a deep going personality disorder. But he eventually made a full recovery.

Now, because Graham was so polite in the interview and outwardly respectable, no one thought to dig any deeper, and they hired him to start work at Hadlands on May 10th, 1971, before Bovington's disease started to spread.

And this being 1971, no one would have gone to the library to dig through microfilm because, you know, it's just not the sort of thing one would ordinarily do. But if it were 2023 that Graham was being hired, any of his hiring managers or co-workers could have easily gone to a newspaper archive like newspapers.com and typed Graham Young into the search bar.

And in doing so, they would have found countless news headlines from nearly a decade earlier.

Headlines like, "The Boy Who Played With Poison," "Boy Who Gave His Family Poisons Sent to Broadmoor," "Brilliant Youth Obsessed by Poisons Felt Sense of Power." His coworkers would have then learned the real reason that Graham Young had spent nearly a decade at Broadmoor Hospital, perhaps soon enough to spare the lives of their coworkers.

because Graham Young had an obsession with poisons that began very early on when he was just a boy. Graham Frederick Young was born on September 7th, 1947 to Fred and Molly Young.

in the London suburb of Nesden. Now, Graham was their second child after daughter Winifred, who had been born eight years earlier. Molly's pregnancy with Graham was a difficult one. She had suffered with respiratory symptoms throughout the term, and these health issues progressed to a level of severity where Molly actually needed to be hospitalized for an extended period.

And shortly before Graham was born, Molly, his mother, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. So the birth itself was fraught with complications. Graham was born a blue baby. And when he first emerged into the world, he was silent and still. But he had a heartbeat. And after

After receiving antibiotics and being well tended to, baby Graham soon recovered and became a healthy baby boy. But tragically, his mother Molly never did recover. Her health continued its rapid decline until she developed an abscess at the base of her spine. And by Christmas 1947, Molly Young was dead at the young age of 33. Now this left her husband Fred a widower with an eight-year-old daughter,

and a three-month-old son, Graham. Now, Molly's death was devastating to Fred, who was now saddled with the overwhelming responsibility of raising two children by himself, all while balancing a full-time job. It was more than Fred was able to handle. So he sent eight-year-old Winifred to live with his mother, while baby Graham was given to Fred's sister, Wynne, and brother-in-law, Jack.

Now, his daughter goes with grandma and his son goes with aunt and uncle. And all of these family members lived within close proximity from one another, so it's not as though the children were being sent away. Fred still saw his kids regularly, every weekend, whenever he could.

He would take them both to the park, pushing Graham in his stroller, or his pram, as they say in England, around the pond near the house. And usually they would be joined by their cousin Sandra, who was Winifred's age and was the daughter of their Aunt Wynne and Uncle Jack, whom Graham was now living with at this time. At this point, baby Graham was growing very attached to his Aunt Wynne and Uncle Jack. I mean, rightfully so.

They were his primary parent figures, after all, from such an early age. And once Graham began learning how to speak, he would refer to his aunt as his mummy. So Graham was very attached to what he called his Auntie Panty and his Daddy Jack.

Those were his nicknames for them. And Graham was so attached to them to the degree that when Graham was sent to the hospital with an ear infection to undergo an eardrum draining procedure, he couldn't bear to be separated from his aunt and uncle. He was screaming and crying before they even left him at the hospital. Now, this would be an experience that left Graham terrified of having any sort of medical procedure done on him from that point forward, which...

In hindsight is ironic because as Graham got older, he developed such an obsession with chemistry and medical terminology that his family saw him as like a little doctor, a wannabe general practitioner, if you will. But Graham, even as a toddler, was already showing signs of being a highly unusual child.

Like, when his Uncle Jack tucked him into bed, Graham would sneakily swipe pencils from Uncle Jack's pockets, and then the little boy would spend half of the night awake scribbling gibberish on the walls around his crib. In fact, Graham didn't seem to sleep a lot, and he was known to spend much of the night rocking back and forth inside of his crib, generating so much noise that a neighbor eventually complained to his aunt and uncle about the incessant thumping.

Now, years later, Graham's sister, Winifred, who everyone called Winnie, so we'll call her Winnie from here on. And again, to err on the side of avoiding confusion, I should point out that their aunt was also named Winifred, but everyone called her Wynne. So Wynne is Aunt Wynne, who is raising Graham, and Winnie is Graham's sister, who is being raised by Grandma.

So years later in the 1970s, Winnie, his sister, was reminded of Graham's early childhood rocking back and forth when she was watching news coverage of the war in Vietnam and a segment showed young Vietnamese children exhibiting the same behavior, the rocking back and forth in their beds and cribs.

And so in Winnie's mind, because these children had been separated from their parents, she felt that maybe for Graham, it may have had something to do with him having been deprived of bonding with his mother, who of course died when Graham was still an infant. And to that note, there were other developmental things with Graham that, and this is said mainly in hindsight,

or maybe should have been concerning. One of which was he was experiencing what's been described as unusual visual symptoms, which isn't clarified, but I'm going to guess it may have been hallucinations of some kind or visual distortions. Your guess is as good as mine. He also exhibited, quote, awkward limb movements, and he was found early on to have a low verbal IQ. But

you know, later on in his childhood, this obviously wasn't so because even as a teenager, Graham was very articulate. So maybe it just took him a while to catch up a developmental delay or frankly, maybe the test just sucked. Who knows? But another thing is as a child, Graham was found to have irregularities in a certain part of his brain.

specifically the right frontal parietal lobe, if you need to know, which according to the Queensland Brain Institute, the areas in the parietal lobe are responsible for integrating sensory information, including touch, temperature, pressure, and pain. So this is really not a place you want irregularities to exist.

But perhaps the most alarming thing, even though it wouldn't have been recognized as such at the time, was that Graham was a bedwetter, wetting his bed all the way up to the age of 10. Now, for those of you who are familiar with the McDonald triad, you probably recognize bedwetting here as a pretty serious red flag. And if you don't know what the McDonald triad is, then I'll tell you. So the McDonald triad is a set of three beds.

patterns of behavior, that if two or more of them are present in childhood, this can sometimes predict deviant or violent behavior later on in life, especially serial rape and serial murder. And bedwetting is one of these three patterns of behavior. And before you get too alarmed, this is prolonged bedwetting that we're talking about.

bedwetting that remains a persistent problem beyond the age of seven. Because look, we all know that bedwetting to some extent is normal in childhood, but when a kid is still frequently wetting his bed at age nine or 10, as Graham was, then that can potentially be something of concern, especially if any of the other behavioral patterns on the McDonald triad are present. The second of those patterns is pyromania, which is an obsession with setting fires and

And the third pattern of behavior is cruelty to animals, which if you ask me is the reddest of those red flags. And so in early childhood, Graham was wetting his bed and he had irregularities in an important lobe of his brain. So yeah, needless to say, things weren't starting out so well for Graham Young.

And then, also when Graham grew a little older, he started sleepwalking. In fact, there was one night where Graham was sleepwalking and began walking on the edge of some furniture, and he almost walked off the edge when his family members intervened and caught him just in time.

So there was also that. Even though sleepwalking isn't part of the McDonald triad, it still illustrates here that a lot of strange stuff was going on with Graham in the first decade of his life. Now, Graham's father, Fred, was a machine setter and he worked for a clockmaking firm called Smith's English Clocks.

And it was there at Smith's clocks that Fred met a new woman in 1950, a woman who also worked for Smith's, who began dating Fred and their relationship progressed very quickly. Though also times were different then. And much like Fred's first wife, this new love interest was also named Molly. So Fred certainly loved his Mollys. And before long, Fred and his new Molly were married in a wedding that took place on April Fool's Day, 1950.

And once Fred was married again, he was ready to bring the family back together all under one roof. He now would be able to care full time for Winnie and Graham. So Fred purchased his sister's house, the house where little Graham had been living all this time, and moved into it with his new wife while his sister and brother-in-law moved out.

But Graham stayed. And suddenly, the aunt and uncle who had been Graham's parental figures for the first part of his life were gone. And despite this pretty massive change, Graham appeared to adjust to this just fine. And he was following

Molly around the house now calling her mommy. It was actually his sister, Winnie, that took longer to warm up to this new life because she'd actually had a real relationship with her biological mother, unlike Graham, who never really knew his mother. As he grew older, Graham was never athletic or into sports.

He didn't participate in a lot of group activities or appear to have many hobbies. He was quiet and shy, and he preferred his own company. He's what we might nowadays refer to as a loner, though he never seemed lonely. He was a loner by choice.

And if he did hang out with other people, he preferred the company of adults to children his own age. He was a kid you'd be more likely to find sitting on a park bench and chatting up an old man than mixing with the other children. And although he was a below average student and hated school, Graham was advanced beyond his years in many ways. And he was also an avid, prolific reader. But his choice of reading material was seen as questionable by his stepmother, Molly.

So questionable, in fact, that Molly once marched straight to the head librarian at the local library to insist that they monitor and restrict Graham's reading material. Eventually, Graham got wise to Molly's interference, and he started swapping out the book covers to disguise what he was reading.

And if you're now wondering what kind of stuff Graham was reading, well, at the mere age of nine, Graham Young was reading biographies of Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, as well as Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. And it was around this age, nine, that Graham began developing an obsession with Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Now, little Graham spoke of Hitler as a great man, which...

is never a good sign. They really need to add this to the McDonald triad, though I guess it would then cease to be a triad, but I digress. Young Graham so admired Hitler and the Nazis that he began sticking a Nazi badge onto his lapel, and he'd wear an armband with a hand-drawn swastika on it, just like the Nazis wore armbands, and he'd go around proudly sporting other makeshift Nazi gear. Now at school, Graham actually tried to organize an

anti-Jewish movement, and this rightfully got him into trouble. To atone for this, he was made to go around the school and formally apologize.

As Graham approached his teens, things grew more worrisome as he began exhibiting socially bizarre behaviors. And this is as if what I've described so far wasn't already bizarre. His sister Winnie would later tell of incidents like Graham lighting a cigarette on a crowded city bus or engaging in strange comical monologues with himself or staring at people until they became uncomfortable.

She also described about an episode where Graham kicked someone's suitcase away from them while they were waiting for a train and walked away laughing. And another one where he deliberately knocked a cup of coffee out of a cafe server's hands. So antisocial behaviors, which are one of the hallmarks of a psychopath.

Now, Graham also began making his own explosives with powder he extracted from fireworks. So there's the pyromania part of the McDonald triad. He also began reading books about black magic and the occult. That became a new obsession for him, and he told his family about wanting to join a witch's coven.

In fact, one day his family found in his possession what appeared to be a voodoo doll. And when his stepmother Molly refused to let him keep a dead mouse that he'd brought home to perform an autopsy on, he then drew a doodle of a grave and a headstone etched with the words, "In hateful memory of Molly Young."

Now again, Molly Young is both his biological mother and his stepmother's name. I should note here that this mouse autopsy idea really flirts with the cruelty to animals pattern of behavior. So that pretty much completes the McDonald triad for Graham. And as Graham matured, he became more and more obsessed with medicine and medical stuff.

If someone had a cold, Graham would diagnose them, but always using clinical terminology as though he were a little doctor. Okay, you guys, let me guess. Your medicine cabinet is crammed with stuff that doesn't work. You still aren't sleeping. You still hurt and you're still stressed out.

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By age 12, Graham seemed to have amassed a vast knowledge of medical terminology, and he would flaunt this all of the time. He read countless books about things that were morbid and horrific, death, voodoo, pathology books, medical books, and in particular, books about poisons.

lots and lots of books about poisons. In fact, in her book, Obsessive Poisoner, that his sister would write, she said, quote, if Graham had a greater hero than Hitler, it was Dr. William Palmer, the notorious Victorian poisoner,

So, Dr. William Palmer, who was known as the Prince of Poisoners, was hanged in the year 1855 for poisoning a friend to death with strychnine, which is the kind of poison one would choose if one really wanted to make their victim suffer. Strychnine, more so than many other poisons, causes an especially agonizing death.

And Dr. Palmer was suspected of having poisoned many other people, including his brother and his mother-in-law and four of his children, all of whom died from symptoms consistent with strychnine poisoning, as well as his wife, who died from antimony poisoning. And so this poisoner, alongside Adolf Hitler, was young Graham's hero. But to his family...

Graham's oddness seemed harmless. At least that's what they told themselves. Similar to how his friends laughed off Graham's promise to one day become a famous poisoner, like his hero, Dr. Palmer, or like Dr. Edward William Pritchard, who poisoned his wife and mother-in-law also with antimony. Graham read about Pritchard in a book called Poisoner in the Dock, 12 Studies in Poisoning by John Rowland, which had been published in 1960 and quickly became

quickly became Graham's favorite book. He would check this book out from the library again and again. Now in the chapter on Pritchard, Rowland touted antimony as a surprisingly underused poison, describing it as slow working with persistent small doses causing vomiting, cramps, and diarrhea, symptoms that were often mistaken for other ailments.

And Roland wrote about how regularly administrating antimony over a sustained period of time leads to muscle weakness, inability to urinate, collapse, convulsions, and ultimately death. "There is certainly something much crueler," Roland wrote, "in a slow process of this kind than when a single large dose of poison is given.

This resonated for Graham, who by this time had moved on to secondary school, where he was quite open about his interest in poisons, earning him nicknames like Acid and the Mad Professor. He also started amassing a collection of...

little bottles of things, some of which he kept hidden and others that he carried around with him. Smelly things like fingernail varnish, empty perfume bottles, stuff that he'd find on his grandmother's dressing tables. He liked to pull out these bottles, describe the contents, and challenge family members to name all of the ingredients in whatever it was.

It reached a point where Graham was carrying small bottles of things on his person at all times. And among them were bottles of ether and acetone, whose vapors he'd inhaled to get high. So he's huffing, basically.

Meanwhile, as a reward for passing his standard exams, Graham's father bought him a chemistry set, not realizing what he was cultivating in doing so. Around this time, Graham became like a self-styled general practitioner among his family members, taking a keener and keener interest in whenever one of them wasn't feeling well, which began happening more and more frequently in 1961 when Graham was 13 years old.

Beginning in April 1961, Graham had begun visiting the local pharmacy and requesting large quantities of antimony potassium tartrate, which he told the pharmacist he needed for lab experiments.

Now, when Molly found out that Graham was hiding poisons in his room, she told Graham's father and a heated argument with Graham followed. Molly yanked Graham along with her to the pharmacy where he'd gotten these substances and chewed out the pharmacist for selling them to a boy of just 13 years old.

And that's when Graham began storing his substances outside of the home. At school one day, Graham got into a playground scuffle with one of his few school friends, a boy named Chris Williams, who everybody called John.

Now, John was much larger than Graham and instantly knocked Graham onto the ground from where Graham looked up at his friend and promised him, I'll kill you for that. Now, later, when they made up, Graham revisited the subject, reminding John, I really could kill you. Sometime later that month, John and Graham were at school eating lunch together, sandwiches that they both packed from home, when Graham insisted on swapping sandwiches with John.

As the day progressed, John was blindsided by sharp stomach pains and vomiting, which persisted until early evening. John had had plans to take Jean, an older girl who worked at the library, to a live taping of the Dickie Henderson show that night.

But Graham had also been friendly with Jean. Indeed, the only person that Graham was ever known to have gone on a date with. And he himself had wanted to be her guest that evening. And given John's sudden illness, he ended up being just that. He was John's replacement. He took Jean to the taping. Now,

Now, for the next five weeks, John's symptoms would return every Monday after returning to school from the weekend. And no one was more attentive to John during this period than his friend Graham, who really looked after him, showing an intense interest in his condition.

Graham would hammer John with questions about how he was feeling, where he was experiencing pains, and what those pains felt like and what time of day the symptoms would begin. It was almost as though Graham was a general practitioner gathering information for diagnosis.

Graham seemed to really care about his friend's well-being. One afternoon, he took John to the zoo to lift his spirits. And while they walked to the zoo and looked at the animals, Graham pulled a bottle of lemonade from his knapsack and gave it to his friend, who immediately became sick after drinking it. When he finally got home later on, John was shivering, nearly to the point of convulsions, and had difficulty standing up straight.

Now, following severe headaches accompanied by vomiting and body aches, John's family took him to a series of doctors who diagnosed him with migraines and wrote him a prescription. But John's illness would persist for months, and his family was growing to suspect he was either faking or exaggerating to get out of school. Now, meanwhile, a similar mystery illness had begun making the rounds in the Young household around the same time.

In the winter of 1961, Graham's stepmother, Molly, began experiencing regular bouts of severe stomach upset, followed by Fred and then Winnie and then Eve.

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And this would occur again and again throughout the year. Fred Young was experiencing it too. His episodes would usually begin after finishing a meal, when he would frequently find himself doubled over in stomach pain, sometimes spending entire afternoons on the toilet.

But it was Molly Young who would become the sickest of them all. Losing weight continuously throughout the year, Molly's condition grew so bad that she ended up spending 10 days in the hospital where she was diagnosed with a peptic ulcer. By the end of her hospital stay, Molly had fully recovered. But once she returned home, that recovery would be short-lived.

Meanwhile, one morning in November, Molly brought Winnie a cup of tea as Winnie was getting ready for work. Now, Winnie took a sip or two and could hardly believe her tongue, and she spat the next sip right back into the mug. It was one of the foulest things she had ever tasted. She told her stepmother about it, and Molly then broke the mug and tossed it into the trash, assuming that someone in the household may have mixed some personal care product in it and tainted it.

But later that day, when Winnie was on the train, she began to feel strange. She lost control of her eyes and became disoriented, bumping into things and people on her way out. Objects seemed to close in on her and then grow really distant. With the help of a good Samaritan, Winnie made it back to her workplace, where she then began experiencing something similar to hallucinations. Her employer sent her to the hospital and she underwent a series of tests.

And that's when she learned that she'd been poisoned with Belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade. And so this was the first time Winnie suspected her brother Graham of being behind any of the symptoms that she and others in the household were experiencing. Because she knew no one other than Graham could have been responsible for her Belladonna poisoning, she thought.

But even with her suspicion now turning to Graham, her first thought was this must have been accidental. The idea of Graham intentionally poisoning anyone was unthinkable. He's 13 years old. Winnie phoned her father after her hospital visit and told him, it wouldn't surprise me if it was Graham messing about with his experiments. But Fred...

The father was skeptical because he'd already forbidden Graham from continuing any kind of experiments inside the house, so he just assumed that his son would do as he'd been told. Now meanwhile, Graham presented his own theory to his aunt and his cousin. He suggested that belladonna may have come from one of Winnie's shampoos, as belladonna was sometimes an ingredient in beauty products.

But later on, when they analyzed the shampoo's ingredients, none of the products contained Belladonna. As fall rolled in, something like a revolving door of symptoms plagued the Young household, with everyone getting sick at various points, even Graham himself once or twice. But as the year was drawing to a close, it was Molly who was becoming chronically ill once again.

And no one was more attentive to her than her sweet stepson, Graham. He would sit by the couch where she was lying down, offer to adjust her pillows to make her more comfortable, offer to fetch her glasses of water. But despite all the care she was receiving, Molly's health began to significantly deteriorate by spring of 1962. To everyone who knew her, she appeared to be aging rapidly, becoming gaunt.

She seemed to be wasting away before our eyes, one family friend reported. And on the morning of April 21st, 1962, Molly woke up feeling a strange new set of symptoms. She complained of stiffness in her neck and pins and needles in her arms. And the doctors discovered that she'd lost reflexes in her legs.

She was sent to the hospital where no one could figure out what was wrong with her. As the sun began to set, Molly was ready to leave the hospital, explaining to the medical staff that she needed to return home to prepare her husband's dinner. The 1960s. But Molly would never leave the hospital. A short time later, on the evening of April 21st, 1962, Molly Young died at the young age of 40.

Fred had become a widow once again, but competing with the crushing grief were his own worsening symptoms, as Fred, too, was getting sicker and sicker by the day.

And that's where we'll stick the bookmark for this episode, as we're still only halfway through the story of the teacup poisoner and how he gets caught. So continue listening by tuning in to part two of the story. It's already available right now on Binged.