On October 21, 2005 an unnamed 16-year-old girl from Shizuoka
prefecture in central Japan, was arrested for slow-poisoning her 47-year-old mother
with thallium over a period of four months. She was obsessed with the British
serial killer Graham Young (“The Teacup Poisoner,” arrested November 21, 1971),
whose biography she owned in a Japanese translation. Young used thallium to
kill his victims. The girl was an excellent student and her teachers regarded
her as having a brilliant future in chemistry. Her mother began to feel ill in
July from thallium-laced food and drink and developed a rash on her face, arms
and legs. She was taken to hospital on October 2, but slipped into a coma. The
girl tried to poison her mother's tea while she was in hospital and taken
photographs of her in a coma.
Graham Young started testing toxins when he was 14 and later
recorded his poisonings in a notebook. The Shizuoka girl seems to have followed
his lead in keeping a blog diary on the effects of thallium over time on her mother.
On 3 July, she wrote on her blog: “Let me introduce a book:
Graham Young's diary on killing with poison - the autobiography of a man I
respect.” Police later noted that in her blog, in which used code names, the
girl referred to herself as 'boku', the Japanese word for 'I' used only by men,
which police believe denotes her close identification with Young.
She also posted quotes from the book repeatedly. On August
19, she wrote: “My mother has been sick since yesterday. She has a rash all
over her body.” On September 12: “My mother has been complaining her legs are
no good for two or three days. It is almost impossible for her to move.” Later
on: “Mother seems to have started hallucinating.” 'I got sympathy from my
teacher when I tearfully talked about mother. … I guess people are more
gullible than I had imagined.” When her mother had become gravely ill, she
wrote: ''I took a photo of her today, as I did yesterday. My brother said I had
a penetrating stare and that he was horrified.”
Following the lead of her role model Graham Young, the girl
poisoned herself in an attempt to put herself beyond suspicion and was hospitalized
on October 21, but was arrested as soon as she was discharged, after her
brother told police he feared his sister was behind their mother's illness. In
her room, investigators found several animal parts that she had dissected and
preserved in formalin, along with the severed head of a cat.
When Police investigated her blogging activity, they discovered
this chilling post from September 4: “To kill a living creature. The moment of
sticking a knife into something. The little sigh. I find it comforting.”
The girl, nevertheless denied attempting to kill her mother,
claiming the woman, who, at the time of the daughter’s arrest remained critically
ill in a coma.
[Robert St. Estephe, based on: Justin McCurry, “Confession
of teenage poisoner,” The Guardian, Nov. 6, 2005]
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More cases: Youthful Borgias: Girls Who Commit Murder
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[451-9/12/21; 2867-7/17/22]
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