Opiates? Not much of a weapon

I intend for this post to contain some stories that will be more entertaining and somewhat less data-driven than some of the other text I will be posting.

So let’s start with researching murderers who used opiates as their weapon. I was surprised to discover  only three court cases in the US and the UK. In the late 19th-early 20th century. American Nurse Jane Toppan is reputed to have killed dozens of people, and when her story is told, as in the episode of  the TV show “Deadly Women”  she is said to have used morphine as her main weapon. However,  she would use not just morphine, but morphine in conjunction with atropine, and even other drugs, such as in the murder for which she was caught, when she used strychnine. Jane was known to prolong the deaths of victims for her own entertainment.  Once her crimes were discovered, Jane spent the rest of her life in a mental hospital.

The second case, in the UK was Dorothea Waddingham, who was executed in the mid 1930s for the murder of two lodgers, one who was a chronically ill middle-aged woman, Ada Baguley, who was regularly prescribed morphine, and Ada’s 89 year old mother, Louisa Baguley,  who was not known to have used morphine. The ill woman, Ada, died first, and several months later, when her mother died, suspicious relatives arranged for exhumation of the mother, and morphine was discovered during autopsy.

The most famous case was UK Dr Harold Shipman, convicted of killing 12, but suspected of killing 200+ patients. The story is typically told as Dr Shipman injecting a single large does into an elderly patient with no history of opiate use. Although there was sporatic investigations by local professionals because of the numbers of deaths of his patients, it was the forged will of a newly-deceased patient’s that led to the discovery of Shipman’s murders.  Because his defense claimed that Shipman had been treating elderly secret heroin addicts, a number of his patients were exhumed and samples tested positive for morphine, in a pattern consistent with only a single dose, not previous regular use. Shipman pled not guilty, and hanged himself several years after his conviction.

I noticed two different people who had some experience dealing with death scenes and the deceased, funeral director Debbie Brambroffe and funeral director Alan Massey, reported that the death scenes of Shipman’s victims were unusual – so tidy one would not think a sick person lived there, and the departed discovered sitting in a chair, fully dressed. This suggests to me that Shipman didn’t just stick a needle with a large amount of morphine into a victim who would instantly die, and then walk away. Because his patients lived alone, he could easily have had time to stage the body and the scene. Perhaps he used the diamorphine to make the victim easier to subdue.

Just for fun, I looked at the IMDB summaries of every one of the 800+ episodes of Forensic Files. Although there were numerous poisoning cases featured, including several antifreeze murders, thallium,  and even ricin, not one murder featured on Forensic Files involved opiates.

Sources:

Jane Toppan, deadly nurse, aka “Jolly Jane”

biography from New England Historical Society

Deadly Women segment on You Tube:

Jane used atropine with morphine:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74sou5uczgI

Atropine: atropine:  https://www.rxlist.com/atropine-drug.htm

“Depression and circulatory collapse occur only with severe intoxication. In such cases, blood pressure declines and death due to respiratory failure may ensue following paralysis and coma.”

Dorothea Waddingham

http://www.capitalpunishmentuk.org/wadding.html

Dr Harold Shipman

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-335607/Killer-Shipman-murdered-250-patients

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2005/aug/25/health.shipman

http://www.murderuk.com/serial_dr_harold_shipman.html

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/justice-story/dr-death-britain-prolific-serial-killer-article-1.1423566

 http://www.razsmidnightmacabre.com/2014/05/real-life-horror-dr-harold-shipman.html?zx=c2f9d8629eb2b7b1

thigh muscle and 2 spots in liver test positive for morphine http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/morphine-killed-shipman-patients-744022.html

muscle tests that showed morphine in shipman deaths http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00450610902936005?src=recsys&journalCode=tajf20

skeletal muscles http://journals.lww.com/amjforensicmedicine/Abstract/2003/09000/The_Case_of_Dr__Shipman.1.aspx