What non-fictional substance can I use to kill off a fictional character?
May 26, 2010 5:44 AM   Subscribe

I know how to dispose of the dead body, but how do I make it dead in the first place? I have a story idea and I need a substance to kill my victim.

I'm trying to figure out a poison of some variety. Something that might be presumed to just make people sick without actually killing them in small doses, but which would, if taken in not substantially larger doses potentially kill people. Ideally, it should be fairly commonly available in a typical rural household and not taste too strongly. It doesn't, however, need to be undetectable. In fact, it'd be better if it was readily detectable in the aftermath of the death.

It's the second last point that ends up being a stumbling block, because it seems our governments tend to force companies that make poisonous things to also make them yucky tasting. I first thought of methylated spirits, because methanol is toxic, but they're generally deliberately made to taste bitter and nasty precisely so people won't drink them.

Any ideas?

(And no, I have no plans to kill anyone other than fictionally, I promise!)
posted by jacquilynne to Science & Nature (28 answers total) 11 users marked this as a favorite
 
Lithium, Gold salts, lead, mercury, antifreeze, &c.
posted by The White Hat at 5:47 AM on May 26, 2010


Best answer: Eyedrops!
posted by padraigin at 5:49 AM on May 26, 2010


Response by poster: Oooh. Eyedrops might be close to perfect.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:06 AM on May 26, 2010


Insecticides are often poisonous, fairly common, sometimes undetectable by the person exposed to them. Regardless of method, if you want to kill someone with a relatively small amount of a substance, nerve agents are the way to go. That's why chemical weapons are so scary.
posted by fearnothing at 6:07 AM on May 26, 2010


Final Exit is all about offing yourself with commonly available products.
posted by electroboy at 6:09 AM on May 26, 2010


Arsenic poisoning is really easily detectable, and roxarsone is an arsenic-based anti-parasite food additive for livestock, commonly found in chicken and in pig farms (among others --- yet another reason to be careful of where your meat is coming from). Roxarsone can give pigs arsenic poisoning, and pigs and humans are pretty similar to each other, metabolically speaking. I wouldn't be surprised if you could poison someone with it given a high enough dose.

Antifreeze is another good one.

Botulinum toxin is relatively easy to obtain -- just be careless and dirty when canning foods or curing sausages, and you might grow some up -- and the toxin is completely tasteless. Trouble is, botulinum toxin is too poisonous for your purposes -- it would be hard to give someone a tiny enough amount of it to NOT kill them. But for any future rural-murder stories, intentional botulism might be a good murder.

How about lead poisoning? Ground-up paint chips or something... Really, most heavy metals will do the job for you. They're nasty in the body, make you really sick in low doses, kill you dead in a slow and painful fashion with high/chronic doses, and are easy to find in a corpse by testing for heavy metals.
posted by kataclysm at 6:11 AM on May 26, 2010


The Suicide FAQ describes a variety of deadly home chemicals.

It's the second last point that ends up being a stumbling block, because it seems our governments tend to force companies that make poisonous things to also make them yucky tasting.

You could mix it with something to mask the taste. Poison curry?
posted by Mike1024 at 6:15 AM on May 26, 2010


Water. Readily available, no taste, and easily identifiable as cause of death.
posted by randomination at 6:30 AM on May 26, 2010


To make sure that your substance does all the required things, at the distributor's and the receiver's ends as well as in terms of obfuscation/detection evasion, you'll probably need to read up on the history of forensic toxicology (stupid wikipedia link that didn't give me the books I remember I have read once very long ago. But okay then.)

(This kind of research is sort of important. The main flaw in Dorothy Sayers's The Documents in the Case is, that the amateur mushroom collector - who dies from an overdose of one or other wrong species in his stew - runs for his bottle of Whisky as soon as he starts to feel ill. wrong move. Sayer's could have avoided it by reading up on the nasty things alcohol can do to some kinds of mushroom stew. Even a hobby expert on toadstools would have known that, if perhaps not much else.)

(And thanks for promising that this is for fiction only. Well done)
posted by Namlit at 6:44 AM on May 26, 2010


Anti-freeze.
posted by misha at 6:49 AM on May 26, 2010


Sodium nitrite, aka curing salt
posted by neroli at 6:57 AM on May 26, 2010


Cyanide is incredibly toxic, so it might not fit your requirements, but it has the upshot of appearing in consumer chemicals: bug collectors use both potassium cyanide and sodium cyanide to kill their specimens in preparation for mounting.

This doesn't really need to be undetectable, as it's fatal in doses as low as 1.5mg/kg of body weight, so a little more than a gram of the stuff can kill an average-sized adult male, and it works really, really quickly, i.e. death usually results within minutes.

Perhaps the biggest downside here is that it isn't terribly original. Cyanide poisoning has figured prominently in crime fiction for about a century. Still, if you want to poison someone right quick, it's hard to beat.
posted by valkyryn at 7:30 AM on May 26, 2010


Heavy metals kill too slowly. It can literally take months, and the symptoms are severe enough to arouse extreme worry/suspicion.

The are many household chemicals that can kill you. The problem is that most of them taste horrible (naturally, in most cases) and one has to ingest quite a bit and not throw up to reliably cause death. That's why your best bet is going to be insecticides (organophosphates in particular) or some kind of plant/fungus-based poison. There are plenty of deadly plants and mushrooms to be found in rural areas, depending of course on geography: hemlock, belladonna, wolfsbane, death cap, etc. Their potency means that relatively little needs to be ingested.
posted by dephlogisticated at 7:41 AM on May 26, 2010


Ricin comes from the Castor Bean, which grows from a common and attractive plant.
posted by Lou Stuells at 7:43 AM on May 26, 2010 [1 favorite]


Piggybacking on valkyryn's suggestion, how about apple seeds? The kernels of peach or apricot pits would do the trick too. Of course, you might have trouble coming up with a plausible mechanism for your fictional victim to ingest the appropriate (large) amount of any of these.
posted by Johnny Assay at 7:53 AM on May 26, 2010


Camphor is another household chemical that can kill you-- not just by ingestion but also by skin application. It's old-school stuff: mothballs and "camphorated oil".
posted by Pallas Athena at 8:06 AM on May 26, 2010


Chloroform is famous for having a very low cut-off between unconscious and death. According to wikipedia, it's still in cough syrup in the UK. Which makes for a good means of killing I suppose: Just add extra chloroform to the cough syrup.
Slightly related, there's also Chlorodyne, though I think you'd need to be a pharmacist to make that one up.
posted by kisch mokusch at 8:21 AM on May 26, 2010


Nicotine is incredibly toxic.
posted by Bonzai at 8:59 AM on May 26, 2010 [1 favorite]


Okay, coming again with a less scholarly angle. Not to eat, but to use, and easily available in your good old generic rural household. Bleach and ammonia, stirred together. Dead-sure knockout combination, and please don't try it out.
posted by Namlit at 9:12 AM on May 26, 2010


wow. I'm a writer and thought I'd have all kinds of great ideas for you- and I ended up learning so much! Thanks for asking this question.
posted by flowerofhighrank at 9:39 AM on May 26, 2010


I came in to say nicotine, but Bonzai beat me to it.
posted by DarlingBri at 10:15 AM on May 26, 2010


My mom had a book on this which listed some possible poisoning methods. Apple seeds were mentioned: The suggestion was to grind them and use them in baked goods. (I seem to remember a specific example of sprinkling them on the top of a frosted carrot cake.) In any case, if they're ground up finely enough, they could maybe just be mixed with the flour, etc., for muffins and bread? This site claims that the seeds from a bushel of apples are enough to be harmful. That's a lot of apples, but not really that many seeds. This lets you mask the flavor and smell, but the cyanide in them would be detectable as such.

If you start to consider this, maybe to check to see how cyanide reacts to heat -- you wouldn't want to bake away the poison.
posted by nicething at 10:55 AM on May 26, 2010


Wintergreen could work. It is an old herbal remedy that when misused can be fatal. (Wikipedia on wintergreen toxicity)
posted by cpdavy at 2:54 PM on May 26, 2010


Arsenic features heavily in classic murder mysteries for this reason. You can build up some tolerance to it, so you and the victim can share the lethal dinner. otherwise, mushrooms.
posted by theora55 at 3:43 PM on May 26, 2010 [2 favorites]


Okay, coming again with a less scholarly angle. Not to eat, but to use, and easily available in your good old generic rural household. Bleach and ammonia, stirred together. Dead-sure knockout combination, and please don't try it out.

Namlit, it actually works better in theory than practice.

That's all I'm going to say about that.
posted by IAmBroom at 8:35 PM on May 26, 2010 [1 favorite]


And, not to pick on you, Namlit, but...

The main flaw in Dorothy Sayers's The Documents in the Case is, that the amateur mushroom collector - who dies from an overdose of one or other wrong species in his stew - runs for his bottle of Whisky as soon as he starts to feel ill. wrong move. Sayer's could have avoided it by reading up on the nasty things alcohol can do to some kinds of mushroom stew. Even a hobby expert on toadstools would have known that, if perhaps not much else.

There's only one genus* of mushroom (Coprinus) that has the alcohol-induced nausea effect. I don't know the details of the book you referenced, but most poisonous mushrooms have no significant interaction with alcohol.

* OK, maybe the genus has been split into more than one lately. Like since I started typing. Seriously, they've got to pass a moratorium on splintering the genus!
posted by IAmBroom at 8:39 PM on May 26, 2010


Response by poster: Thanks, everyone, for all your suggestions. I now have lots of ways to kill people, should more ideas for stories about killing people pop into my head.

Eyedrops in this case, seems perfect, because the expected behaviour -- diarrhea -- matches up with the motivation of the characters, even though that's not what actually happens.
posted by jacquilynne at 6:31 AM on May 27, 2010


The Book of Poisons is specifically a reference guide for writers.
posted by Nattie at 10:27 AM on May 27, 2010


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