Graham Young

The one multiple murderer whose name will for ever be linked to thallium is that of Graham Young. As we saw in the previous chapter, victims of thallium poisoning were generally thought to be suffering from some other condition and treated accordingly, so there was little in the way of evidence that we can use to follow the effect this metal had on them. In Young’s case there were several victims whose illnesses were carefully recorded and we can reconstruct the way that Young administered the poison, although it is difficult to deduce why he chose one person to die and not another. Young used two metal poisons: antimony and thallium, the former to punish, the latter to kill. With thallium acetate he murdered his stepmother, Molly Young, when he was a boy of 14, and later he murdered workmates Bob Egle and Fred Briggs. He fed antimony sodium tartrate or antimony potassium tartrate to all and sundry and thallium acetate in sub-lethal doses to some people. Altogether 13 people, and maybe more, felt the repressed wrath of Graham Young. Graham Young was born in the less-than-fashionable London suburb of Neasden on 7 September 1947 and his mother, Margaret, died of tuberculosis 15 weeks later on 23 December. His father, Fred Young, was obviously not capable of managing a single parent family and Graham was passed to Fred’s sister and her husband who lived nearby at 768 North Circular Road. Graham’s 8-year-old sister Winifred went to live with her grandmother. Despite the care of his aunt, baby Graham was already displaying a common outward sign of the emotionally disturbed child: excessive rocking to-and-fro in his cot. Whether his aunt could ever have supplied all the love of a mother is unlikely, especially as Graham taxed her patience by being a poor sleeper. Whatever chance of emotional stability he had was upset by his having to go to hospital for an operation on his ears. When his father found a new wife both Winifred and 3-year-old Graham went to live back home. By now Graham was a very withdrawn little boy and his childhood years were made even more miserable by his stepmother, whom he openly resented, and who returned his animosity.