Graham Young was only 14 when he began secretly slipping poison into his family’s food and tea, treating their sickness like a private scientific experiment and recording the effects in his diary. His stepmother, Molly, died after he poisoned her with thallium; his father, sister, and a school friend were also poisoned, and Young was sent to Broadmoor rather than prison.academic.
But after just eight years, he was released and given a job at a Hertfordshire factory, where colleagues began collapsing with agonising stomach pain, paralysis, and mysterious “flu-like” symptoms. Young had returned to the teacups, poisoning workers with antimony and thallium; two men, Bob Egle and Fred Biggs, died before forensic evidence and his own obsessive notes exposed him.
Known forever as the Teacup Poisoner, Young was convicted in 1972 and sentenced to life imprisonment, a chilling case not only because of what he did, but because the system once believed he was safe enough to be set free.