Has Poison Been Used to Kill Many People?

One imagines the Persian queen smiling warmly as she passes the food down the table to her daughter-in-law. Queen Parysatis, during the reign of her son, Artaxerxes II (405 to 359 B.C.), was trying to influence a power struggle within the kingdom and had felt the need to be rid of her daughter-in-law. She poisoned one side of a knife that then was used to bisect a roast bird at dinner. Taking the untainted half for herself, she passed the rest, knowing - hence the smile - that her problem was all but solved.

Recorded instances of poison as a remover of human obstacles go back 6,500 years and remain as current as the headlines about the attempted assassination by poisoning of a presidential candidate in Ukraine.

"Poisoning," said John H. Trestrail III, "goes back as far as politics goes back. Poison penetrates power."

Trestrail, trained as a pharmacist with 29 years of study in toxicology and a more recent specialization in forensic toxicology, is the world's nexus of murder by poison. About once a day, an e-mail arrives at his office at the Center for the Study of Criminal Poisoning in Battle Creek, Mich. It will be from a fellow toxicologist somewhere on the globe and will detail yet another intentional poisoning.

Trestrail's database has 1,036 such cases as this is written, and the huge database in his head allows him to summon up from memory - like Milton Berle could with jokes or Julia Child with recipes - astonishing bursts of information.

"Ever hear of Herman Webster Mudgett, also known as Henry H. Holmes?" he asked. "He was the first American serial killer, poisoned many of his victims, and he was a Chicagoan." (Mudgett lived in what would be known as the "murder castle" at 63rd and Wallace. He admitted to 27 murders and was possibly responsible for as many as 200. Holmes was the "Devil" in Erik Larson's book "The Devil in the White City.")

"Just to keep it local for you, there was Johann Hoch, caught in Chicago in the early 1900s." (Hoch married, fleeced and dispatched young women across the country. When he was captured, he had an arsenic-filled fountain pen in his pocket.)

"There was the Tylenol tamperer in September and October 1982," Trestrail went on. "Killed seven with cyanide, never caught. Mickey Finn, who gave his name to the knockout drink, was a Chicago bartender. He would mix the sedative, chloral hydrate, with alcohol. That would put his victims out so he could drown them. That still counts as a poisoning."

The "golden age" of poisoning was the late 1400s with such famed practitioners as Pope Alexander VI and his illegitimate son, Cesare Borgia. Borgia's much maligned sister, Lucrecia, often spoken of as a poisoner, likely wasn't.

The Borgias' poison, which became known as the "liquor of succession," cleared bothersome cardinals and others of power out of the way with a certainty that lingers in the phrase "tasting the cup of the Borgias'" - i.e. death. Their poison was called "cantarelle." Though its exact composition is lost, recorded symptoms suggest the presence of arsenic.

The Borgias first tested it on animals, then humans chosen from the lower class, dumping used test subjects into the Tiber. Their systematic, widespread and successful use of poison led to what was termed the "Italian School" of poisoning.

In 1533, in an arranged marriage, Catherine de Medici of Italy walked down the aisle with Henry, Duke of Orleans, who would become the French king Henry II. Both were 14. Despite her youth, Catherine brought the arsenic arts to her new home, laying the groundwork for what would become the "French School" of poisoners.

Today, tourists who visit the Royal Chateau Blois, where she died, can view her poison cabinets.

By the 1570s, there were something like 30,000 sorcerers in Paris with poisons prominent among their brews. Rumors of poisoning surrounded the death of almost anyone of influence and reached the ear of England's king Henry IV. When he visited the Louvre it was said he prudently ate nothing but eggs he himself had cooked and drank only water he drew from the Seine....