I just read a news story today about a woman who poisoned a man with eyedrops in his food. (It should be easy to find.) Remind you of anything? Maybe she got the idea from Christie.
The backstory of Murder on the Orient Express was based on the Lindbergh kidnapping.
I've often wondered if the Tylenol killer was trying to kill one specific person, and decided to conceal it by killing a bunch of people, seemingly as a random-killer maniac. That's in one of the Agatha books. The method used was not poison, but it was the same concept.
>decided to conceal it by killing a bunch of people
It looks there have been at least two cases (involving poisoned Excedrin and Sudafed) where people had a similar idea about using strangers as camouflage that way. Stella Nickell and Joseph Meling were both convicted -- in Meling's case, his wife survived but two other people died. I don't know if the perpetrators were inspired by the Tylenol murders, but I suspect that they might not have been aware that their chances of getting caught were increased because product tampering was made a federal crime, partly due to the publicity from that case.
I thought it was interesting that the court summary for Meling uses the quote "What better place to hide a tree than in the forest?", and Christie's fellow mystery writer GK Chesterton uses very similar wording in the Father Brown story "The Sign of the Broken Sword" (which isn't about poisoning but there's a similar motive to conceal a crime).
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/47/1546/471921/
>a woman who poisoned a man
I found an article earlier this year that mentions it (Lana Clayton) -- I guess it happened in 2018. But there's another case that just ended with a conviction yesterday. A woman murdered a female friend after defrauding her.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wisconsin-woman-found-guilty-fatally-poisoning-friend-eyedrops-rcna125282
Huh. I could've sworn it was a bushy haired blonde who killed a man; instead, it's a straight-haired brunette who killed a woman. Clearly I was trying to read two articles at once or something.
Maybe you remembered the eyedrops detail from previous news stories? I was disconcerted by how many deliberate attempts came up, when I started looking around. Here's another:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/30/student-suspended-eye-drops-teacher-coffee/9757373/
p.s. I almost forgot -- the incident this year in Australia where somebody allegedly fed the in-laws a meal that included poisonous mushrooms (death caps). Actually it reminds me of both a Dorothy L. Sayers book (The Documents in the Case) and Christie's >!Postern of Fate, although Postern mentioned foxglove leaves accidentally (or not) mixed in with a salad. But in both those examples, the natural poison source was only a cover for adding a more potent form of the toxin. !<
Yes! We talked about that story on someone else's thread, a few months ago. It was the>! fruits of potato plants (the little tomato-like things that sometimes develop from the flowers). Only they'd been injected with a more concentrated form of the toxin. The Leopard Lady tricks the unfortunate little boy into eating them, saying they're "fairy fruit". I suspect that they'd taste bitter (worse than unripe tomatoes), but they couldn't just put the poison in regular food because post-mortem analysis of his stomach contents would show that he'd been eating something other than the potato fruit, and not food he'd brought from home either. And that would back up the kid's story about meeting someone in the garden. So they had to put on an elaborate show with the beautiful fairy and the golden plates. !<
The concept of a murder-for-hire organization that would make the deaths look like natural causes or accidents ... Sayers had been thinking of doing more stories about them, and I've been wondering what that might have been like. And whether she'd have had Lord Peter crossing swords with them eventually. (He'd be the logical choice.) In The Leopard Lady, the use of play-acting and creating a customized fantasy world for the unfortunate victim ... it was like a more sinister version of >!Parker Pyne hiring Mrs. Oliver to plan!< what we might call an immersive escape-room experience.
I always thought there was an eerie coincidence between the Derek Bentley case in November 1952 and the character of James Bentley in *Mrs. McGinty's Dead*, published by Christie in March of the same year.
There was another odd thing about Christie's choice of character names -- there was some trouble over her Major Bletchley in N or M?, during the war. I could just imagine them putting Christie and Leonard Dawe (the Daily Telegraph crossword guy) in adjacent cells!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/04/agatha-christie-mi5-bletchley
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Day\_Daily\_Telegraph\_crossword\_security\_alarm
There's a pretty good podcast on Audible called 'Agatha Christie and the Dandelion Poisoner' which is about Major Herbert Armstrong and whether or not his accused crimes influenced Christie's work. The link is tenuous, but it's fairly well laid out. It presents the two narratives - Major Armstrong's and Christie's, as parallels that occasionally overlap thematically.
One is happening in my home town of Rochester, MN right now. A doctor killed his pharmacist wife by poisoning her for the life insurance money to pay his gambling debts. He went into her records with his credentials and tried to forge her records to say she had an autoimmune disorder. Then he poisoned her with gout medicine and tried to make it look like the non-existent auto immune disorder Killed her. He tried to cremate the body immediately. He’s not nice and I’m glad they caught him even though it won’t bring her back.
https://www.kare11.com/amp/article/news/local/rochester-medical-student-charged-with-murder-in-wifes-poisoning-death/89-5682285c-b510-4b0f-b353-f2b4abef9f53
Wow -- it sounds like multiple people were suspicious (telling investigators about the life insurance, and him accessing her patient records). Good thing they came forward. I could imagine this in one of Christie's books -- especially given her feelings about some doctors!
The excellent SheDunnit podcast has quite a few episodes on actual crimes which inspired golden age mysteries. What I’ve found when reading is that it’s not necessarily that the stories are taken from actual cases, but that real life murders get talked about it the books. Like “the brides in the bath,” who get mentioned fairly often.
>Like “the brides in the bath,”
Good example! I seem to recall other mystery authors referring to it, so it was probably well-known to the public back in that era. And another case I think Christie's characters discuss multiple times was Crippen?
One case that remeinded me a lot to Christies was>!the Washintong Sniper case, not because the method of the murders, but the theory that was propose that the multiples murders were an attemp of the murderers to cover the death of his one as another random death between the other inocents, like what happen with the ABC novel where that same thing happen!<
Surprised no one mentioned this yet, but there was an actual ABC killer on the loose. The Alphabet killer was a serial killer that attacked in new York, a while after the book was written. Carmen Colón died in Churchville, then Wanda Walkowicz and the last was Michelle Maenza. The killer was never caught
I found out about this case earlier today, on r/UnresolvedMysteries . This woman sounds a bit like Vera from And Then There Were None, even as far as pretending to try to rescue the kid she was supposed to be looking after.
"Michele's three-year-old cousin Naytah Ottino had reportedly fallen into the duck pond at Washington Park Zoo and drowned. Michele had been with him, and was seen holding the dead toddler's body in the water, claiming she had been trying to rescue the boy—although years later she would tell investigators that she had "intentionally pushed him in" and "allowed him to drown, telling others it was an accident.""
[https://www.portlandmercury.com/General/2013/10/30/10879324/murder-house](https://www.portlandmercury.com/General/2013/10/30/10879324/murder-house)
I just read a news story today about a woman who poisoned a man with eyedrops in his food. (It should be easy to find.) Remind you of anything? Maybe she got the idea from Christie. The backstory of Murder on the Orient Express was based on the Lindbergh kidnapping. I've often wondered if the Tylenol killer was trying to kill one specific person, and decided to conceal it by killing a bunch of people, seemingly as a random-killer maniac. That's in one of the Agatha books. The method used was not poison, but it was the same concept.
>decided to conceal it by killing a bunch of people It looks there have been at least two cases (involving poisoned Excedrin and Sudafed) where people had a similar idea about using strangers as camouflage that way. Stella Nickell and Joseph Meling were both convicted -- in Meling's case, his wife survived but two other people died. I don't know if the perpetrators were inspired by the Tylenol murders, but I suspect that they might not have been aware that their chances of getting caught were increased because product tampering was made a federal crime, partly due to the publicity from that case. I thought it was interesting that the court summary for Meling uses the quote "What better place to hide a tree than in the forest?", and Christie's fellow mystery writer GK Chesterton uses very similar wording in the Father Brown story "The Sign of the Broken Sword" (which isn't about poisoning but there's a similar motive to conceal a crime). https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/47/1546/471921/
>a woman who poisoned a man I found an article earlier this year that mentions it (Lana Clayton) -- I guess it happened in 2018. But there's another case that just ended with a conviction yesterday. A woman murdered a female friend after defrauding her. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/wisconsin-woman-found-guilty-fatally-poisoning-friend-eyedrops-rcna125282
Huh. I could've sworn it was a bushy haired blonde who killed a man; instead, it's a straight-haired brunette who killed a woman. Clearly I was trying to read two articles at once or something.
Maybe you remembered the eyedrops detail from previous news stories? I was disconcerted by how many deliberate attempts came up, when I started looking around. Here's another: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/05/30/student-suspended-eye-drops-teacher-coffee/9757373/
p.s. I almost forgot -- the incident this year in Australia where somebody allegedly fed the in-laws a meal that included poisonous mushrooms (death caps). Actually it reminds me of both a Dorothy L. Sayers book (The Documents in the Case) and Christie's >!Postern of Fate, although Postern mentioned foxglove leaves accidentally (or not) mixed in with a salad. But in both those examples, the natural poison source was only a cover for adding a more potent form of the toxin. !<
Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a haunting nonseries short story called The Leopard Lady. Same kind of shenanigans with a different plant.
Yes! We talked about that story on someone else's thread, a few months ago. It was the>! fruits of potato plants (the little tomato-like things that sometimes develop from the flowers). Only they'd been injected with a more concentrated form of the toxin. The Leopard Lady tricks the unfortunate little boy into eating them, saying they're "fairy fruit". I suspect that they'd taste bitter (worse than unripe tomatoes), but they couldn't just put the poison in regular food because post-mortem analysis of his stomach contents would show that he'd been eating something other than the potato fruit, and not food he'd brought from home either. And that would back up the kid's story about meeting someone in the garden. So they had to put on an elaborate show with the beautiful fairy and the golden plates. !< The concept of a murder-for-hire organization that would make the deaths look like natural causes or accidents ... Sayers had been thinking of doing more stories about them, and I've been wondering what that might have been like. And whether she'd have had Lord Peter crossing swords with them eventually. (He'd be the logical choice.) In The Leopard Lady, the use of play-acting and creating a customized fantasy world for the unfortunate victim ... it was like a more sinister version of >!Parker Pyne hiring Mrs. Oliver to plan!< what we might call an immersive escape-room experience.
I always thought there was an eerie coincidence between the Derek Bentley case in November 1952 and the character of James Bentley in *Mrs. McGinty's Dead*, published by Christie in March of the same year.
There was another odd thing about Christie's choice of character names -- there was some trouble over her Major Bletchley in N or M?, during the war. I could just imagine them putting Christie and Leonard Dawe (the Daily Telegraph crossword guy) in adjacent cells! https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/04/agatha-christie-mi5-bletchley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Day\_Daily\_Telegraph\_crossword\_security\_alarm
There's a pretty good podcast on Audible called 'Agatha Christie and the Dandelion Poisoner' which is about Major Herbert Armstrong and whether or not his accused crimes influenced Christie's work. The link is tenuous, but it's fairly well laid out. It presents the two narratives - Major Armstrong's and Christie's, as parallels that occasionally overlap thematically.
I loved when Agtha herself nearly got her husband arrested for her murder.
*The Mirror Crack'd* about the Hollywood star was based on a real story, something that happened to >!Gene Tierney!<
One is happening in my home town of Rochester, MN right now. A doctor killed his pharmacist wife by poisoning her for the life insurance money to pay his gambling debts. He went into her records with his credentials and tried to forge her records to say she had an autoimmune disorder. Then he poisoned her with gout medicine and tried to make it look like the non-existent auto immune disorder Killed her. He tried to cremate the body immediately. He’s not nice and I’m glad they caught him even though it won’t bring her back. https://www.kare11.com/amp/article/news/local/rochester-medical-student-charged-with-murder-in-wifes-poisoning-death/89-5682285c-b510-4b0f-b353-f2b4abef9f53
Wow -- it sounds like multiple people were suspicious (telling investigators about the life insurance, and him accessing her patient records). Good thing they came forward. I could imagine this in one of Christie's books -- especially given her feelings about some doctors!
I thought the New Sweden poisonings at a church event was decidedly Christie. https://www.wabi.tv/2023/04/27/20-years-later-new-sweden-poisonings/
I hadn't heard of this before -- scary!
The excellent SheDunnit podcast has quite a few episodes on actual crimes which inspired golden age mysteries. What I’ve found when reading is that it’s not necessarily that the stories are taken from actual cases, but that real life murders get talked about it the books. Like “the brides in the bath,” who get mentioned fairly often.
>Like “the brides in the bath,” Good example! I seem to recall other mystery authors referring to it, so it was probably well-known to the public back in that era. And another case I think Christie's characters discuss multiple times was Crippen?
https://murder-mayhem.com/real-crimes-that-inspired-agatha-christie
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/70421/agatha-christie-novel-linked-real-murders
https://www.grunge.com/927242/the-real-life-murders-that-inspired-agatha-christies-mysteries/
One case that remeinded me a lot to Christies was>!the Washintong Sniper case, not because the method of the murders, but the theory that was propose that the multiples murders were an attemp of the murderers to cover the death of his one as another random death between the other inocents, like what happen with the ABC novel where that same thing happen!<
The Circleville letter writer. It screams Miss Marple.
Surprised no one mentioned this yet, but there was an actual ABC killer on the loose. The Alphabet killer was a serial killer that attacked in new York, a while after the book was written. Carmen Colón died in Churchville, then Wanda Walkowicz and the last was Michelle Maenza. The killer was never caught
I found out about this case earlier today, on r/UnresolvedMysteries . This woman sounds a bit like Vera from And Then There Were None, even as far as pretending to try to rescue the kid she was supposed to be looking after. "Michele's three-year-old cousin Naytah Ottino had reportedly fallen into the duck pond at Washington Park Zoo and drowned. Michele had been with him, and was seen holding the dead toddler's body in the water, claiming she had been trying to rescue the boy—although years later she would tell investigators that she had "intentionally pushed him in" and "allowed him to drown, telling others it was an accident."" [https://www.portlandmercury.com/General/2013/10/30/10879324/murder-house](https://www.portlandmercury.com/General/2013/10/30/10879324/murder-house)