Antifreeze was the perfect 20th Century Murder Weapon
For the 20th century murderer, antifreeze had a ton of plusses. Unfortunately for crime writers, in 2012, the US mandated a bittering agent be added to antifreeze to save pets from poisonings. Some countries still don't do that, however, so Google around.
Or you can use some antifreeze that's been hanging around in the garage for a decade or so.
1) There's nothing suspicious about having it around.
You can always keep the stuff in the garage with the intention of using it to protect the car for a ski trip or winterize that mountain cabin. (Some people like to put antifreeze in the toilets of summer cabins to avoid breakage from hard freezes. Unfortunately, pets drinking from the toilets the next summer may have to be rushed to the vet. Beware: Ethylene Glycol is toxic to pets, too.)
2) The victim doesn't suspect a thing.
Antifreeze has a sweet, not unpleasant taste (unless a bittering agent has been added, which is now mandatory in an increasing number of countries and states.) But if the unbittered kind is put into a sweet beverage like sweet tea or a whiskey sour, the victim won't have a clue that anything is amiss.
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| It's undetectable in sweet tea |
3) It works fast.
Unless an antidote is administered within an hour of ingestion of a lethal dose, a human victim's fate is sealed (dogs and cats have digestive systems that give them a little more leeway.) The usual anti-poison measures, such as charcoal, gastric lavage and bicarbonate of soda will not work and can make matters worse.
4) You can blame the victim.
The initial symptoms of antifreeze poisoning appear to be the result of overindulgence of alcohol.
5) Death usually doesn't appear suspicious.
Most antifreeze poisoners have been caught because of snitches or mistakes by the killers. The victims appear to have died of heart attacks or kidney failure, so there's no reason for an autopsy.
The Symptoms
Ethelyne
Glycol poisoning symptoms occur in three stages.
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| The victim will first appear drunk |
1)
Intoxication—the victim appears to be drunk, with slurred speech, uncoordinated
movements, confusion, and drooling.
2) Elevated
Heart Rate—plus hyperventilation, muscle spasms, and heart failure. Sometimes
the victim dies during stage 2 of what appears to be a heart attack.
3)
Kidney failure. Often indicated by severe lower back pain—and eventually, death.
Treatment
So how
is this kind of poisoning treated if it's caught it in time?
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| The treatment for antifreeze poisoning |
The
reason this works is that the body prefers pure alcohol to the antifreeze and
will absorb it instead. So the victim may live, but he'll have one bear of a
hangover.
A Few Well Known Cases of Antifreeze Poisoning
In 2013,
a mother-daughter team in Missouri, Diane and Rachel Staudte, were convicted of
killing two relatives and attempting to kill a third with antifreeze cocktails.
They might have got away with it if a nurse in the hospital of the third victim
hadn't told the police that the women seemed way too happy for members of a grieving
family.
NBC's
Dateline recently ran a 2-hour special on the Holly McFeeture case. Ms.
McFeeture was convicted of poisoning her fiancé Mathew Podolack in 2006 with
antifreeze-laced iced tea over a period of months. Because the poisoning was
slow, he didn't know anything was amiss until it was too late. Unfortunately, by the time he
went to a doctor for lower back pain, his kidneys were already failing.
One of
the most notorious antifreeze poisoners was Stacey Castor, "The Black
Widow" who poisoned two husbands with Jell-O made with antifreeze. She then poisoned her own
daughter and tried to pin the murders on the young woman with a fake suicide note. Thankfully, the daughter survived.
.jpg) |
| The "Black Widow" poisoned her husband with antifreeze in Jell-O |
In 2014,
Dr. Ana Gonzalez-Angulo was sentenced to 10 years in prison for the attempted
murder by antifreeze of her lover Dr. George Blumenschein in a Fatal Attraction
style love triangle. She'd laced his coffee with the stuff. He survived, but lost 60% of his
kidney function. Now if he'd taken his coffee with no sugar…
In 2008,
after a decade of legal wrangling, Mark Jensen was found guilty of the slow
poisoning of his wife with antifreeze. She had left a letter with a neighbor
saying that if anything happened to her, she feared her husband was trying to
kill her, but this was kept out of court as "hearsay evidence" until
the last minute. The defense argued that she was slowly committing suicide, but
that seems unlikely, since suicide tends to be a spur of the moment thing
rather than a long drawn out process. Also, Jensen admitted to the
murder to a jailhouse snitch.
What about you? Have you read any mysteries that featured antifreeze as a murder weapon? Are any antifreeze plots planting seeds in your heads?
What about you? Have you read any mysteries that featured antifreeze as a murder weapon? Are any antifreeze plots planting seeds in your heads?
Here's a list of all the posts in the poison series
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Humorous portraits of rebellious women at various stages of their lives. From aging Betty Jo, who feels so invisible she contemplates robbing a bank, to neglected 10-year-old Maude, who turns to a fantasy Elvis for the love she's denied by her patrician family, to a bloodthirsty, Valley-Girl version of Madame Defarge, these women—young and old—are all rebelling against the stereotypes and traditional roles that hold them back. Which is, of course, why Grandma bought that car…
