Graham Young, The 14-Year-Old Who Poisoned Eight People
Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo14-year-old Graham Frederick Young on his way to court in 1962.
Graham Young was deeply fascinated with chemistry. Often, an interest in science is a good thing, the start of a promising and frequently lucrative career. Not in this case, though.
Young wasn’t just interested in making baking soda volcanoes or one day creating something that would benefit humanity; he was interested in making poison and deadly cocktails, which he then put in his family’s tea.
In 1961, when Young was just 14 years old, he both taught himself how to extract deadly belladonna from weeds and talked several local chemists into selling him harmful agents like antimony, digitalis, and arsenic.
Around this time, he also started carrying around a copy of the biography of the notorious British poisoner Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, wearing swastikas, and lecturing anybody who would stand still about how misunderstood Hitler was. He also claimed to be an expert in the occult and recruited neighborhood children into a coven that may have sacrificed several cats.
PA Images/Alamy Stock PhotoGraham Young at age 24.
When Young was 15, his stepmother fell gravely ill and eventually died in the hospital from what were thought to be complications of an old injury. In truth, she was being gradually poisoned. However, she had built up a resistance to the antimony Young was slipping her — but the night before her death, he had switched to thallium.
Following the thallium poisoning, Young’s father found her twisted up in the garden, writhing in pain, while Young stood nearby staring at her.
Around the same time, everybody in the Young family, as well as several of Young’s friends and coven-mates also got sick with an unidentifiable stomach ailment. Young himself got sick too, probably because he accidentally consumed some of the poisons he was experimenting with by pouring them over everybody else’s food.
Young was finally caught after his school chemistry teacher went through his desk and found his stash of poison, several books about poisoning cases, and a toxicology book. He quickly confessed to everything and went to a psychiatric hospital, where he amused himself by distilling cyanide out of laurel bush leaves and killing a fellow inmate.
Had Young been found competent to stand trial, his maximum sentence would have been eight years, but he wasn’t and instead wound up serving nine in the hospital. When he got out, in 1970, he went back to poisoning people, one of whom killed himself to stop the pain.
After finally getting caught for murdering two supervisors at his job, Young was sentenced to life in prison, where he died of an apparent heart attack in 1990.
