Word: poisoner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...book was The Pale Horse, a vintage Christie whodunit (1961) in which the villain plots to kill some factory workers with thallium, a tasteless, soluble and highly toxic substance that had never before been used on humans as a poison in Britain. The "fellow" was Graham Frederick Young, 24, who did precisely what Dame Agatha predicted could be done. Last month he was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering two of his fellow workers at a small photographic-equipment factory in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, by dosing their tea and coffee with thallium...
...suspicious owner of the plant alerted local police and, in due course, Young's shabby digs in Hertfordshire were searched. There police found "enough thallium to keep a pharmacy in business for an entire month." Phials and bottles of the stuff, along with containers of other poisons, stood in neat rows on his windowsill. As it turned out, Young was such a master of poisons that he knew exactly what dosage to administer to each of his victims in order to slow their dying and disguise the cause. He even kept a diary detailing his "experiments" on workmates...
While the plot might have been cribbed from Agatha Christie, the main character seems to have sprung straight out of a Charles Addams cartoon. At the age of 14 Young was sentenced to 15 years in the maximum-security Broadmoor mental hospital for having attempted to poison a classmate, his father and his sister. His stepmother died shortly after his confinement. Young admitted during the trial last month that she was the first person he had poisoned with thallium...
Today, affection and poison still figure strongly in Shanker's life. One critic calls him an "evil genius," while his supporters want him to run for mayor. As he toured New York State last week, enthusiastically explaining the June merger that will create a statewide, 200,000-member teachers' union, it was clear that Shanker has become one of the most complicated, controversial and powerful men in education...
...teachers. He called a citywide teachers strike that closed the schools to their 1,000,000 pupils for 35 days. Since Ocean Hill-Brownsville is heavily black and many of Shanker's teachers are Jewish, hotheads on both sides made ugly charges of racism. Those charges still poison both the schools and the imminent negotiations for a new contract, in which Shanker is emphasizing demands for more guards to protect classes in turbulent neighborhoods...