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 of Middlesex, England, 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 crafting baking soda volcanoes or one day creating something that would benefit humanity. He liked to make poison and deadly cocktails — which he then added to his family’s tea.
In 1961, when Young was just 13 years old, he taught himself how to extract the deadly toxins from belladonna plants 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 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 14, his stepmother fell gravely ill and eventually died in the hospital from what was thought to be complications from an old injury. In truth, she was being gradually poisoned. 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 his wife 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, also fell ill with an unidentifiable stomach ailment. Young himself got sick, too, probably because he accidentally consumed some of the poisons he was experimenting with while 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 texts about poisoning cases, and a toxicology book. He quickly confessed to everything and was sent to Broadmoor, England’s notorious psychiatric hospital, where he amused himself by distilling cyanide out of laurel bush leaves and purportedly killing a fellow inmate.
The teenage serial killer was never officially connected to the poisoning death at Broadmoor, however, so he spent just eight years there. He was released in 1971 — and almost immediately went back to poisoning people. That June, he started adding thallium to his boss’s tea, and the man died a month later. Young also poisoned a coworker with thallium in October 1971, leading to the man’s death that November.
Several more of Young’s coworkers had fallen ill around the same time, sparking an investigation that put Young behind bars once again. This time, he was sentenced to life in prison, and he died behind bars in 1990 at age 42.
