Cyanide causes a swift, gruesome death. But how exactly does it kill you?
Cyanide has made quite the name for itself.
Take the Jonestown murder-suicide, for example—where cult leader Jim Jones called for over 900 of his followers to drink cyanide-laced punch. Cyanide also sits centerstage with a popular spy movie trope: the cyanide tooth. In case of capture, pop out the fake tooth that’s actually made of cyanide. Swallow it. And boom, a quick death is on its way.
But how exactly does cyanide kill you?
Let’s light up our gumshoe detective pipes and crack this case wide open with Neil Bradbury, author of A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them.
A few curiosities you’ll uncover in this episode:
Did You Know?
From a murderer’s perspective, cyanide is typically given as either sodium or potassium cyanide crystals—which are often sprinkled in water.
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Curious State is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast hosted and produced by Doug Fraser.
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Neil
Everybody likes a good poison story. I'm Neil Bradbury. I'm a professor of physiology and biophysics. And I spend most of my time teaching medical students and graduate students. And in my spare time I write about poisons. I've grown up loving murder mysteries, Agatha Christie shows on TV and I've always been fascinated when they use poisons. But I also found very disappointingly they never go into details about exactly how the poisons work. They just say someone died from poisoning, which as a scientist is very dissatisfying. So I decided to look deeper into this to figure out exactly how poisons work, and got very fascinated with it and decided that this would be something that I think many people would enjoy reading about. Using real life crime stories as a background to explain how the body works and how it reacts to poisons.
Doug
If pop culture is to be believed, the poison cyanide causes an almost instantaneous death. But how exactly does it kill you? Let's light up our gumshoe detective pipes and crack this case wide open. I'm Doug Fraser and this is Curious State. When administered for a murder most foul cyanide is nearly undetectable, except as literature and movies tell us for a faint scent of almonds.
Neil
Turns out that only a small percentage of people can actually detect the almond smell of cyanide. Surprisingly, this was found out because research was done getting parents and their children to smell cotton wool soaked in cyanide. Now this was done many many years ago, and not something that would ever be done today.
Doug
Cyanide has made quite the name for itself. Take the Jonestown murder suicide for example, where cult leader Jim Jones called for over 900 of his followers to drink cyanide laced punch. Cyanide also sits center stage with a popular spy movie trope, the cyanide tooth. In case of capture pop out the fake tooth, it's actually made of cyanide, swallow it, and boom, a quick death is on its way. Why is it such a popular poison?
Neil
I think it's popular because of the symptoms that it gives. Everybody can immediately recognize the frothing of the mouth and the convulsing and the rapid death. Typically when you see it in literature and popular shows, it's a very fast acting poison. You see someone taking a sip of wine and immediately keeling over. Usually it takes a few minutes for a person to actually die but it's a very visually stunning way of someone dying.
Doug
From a murderer's perspective, cyanide is typically given as either sodium or potassium cyanide crystals, which are often sprinkled in water.
Neil
It's something that's very soluble in water, you only need a small amount, so it's really difficult to detect it by taste. And usually once you've taken a few mouthfuls of wine or tea or whatever the poison was put in, it's generally too late. Once in the stomach that cyanide reacts with the acid in the stomach to produce a very corrosive acid called prusik acid which turns into a gas very easily and so will leave the stomach, enter into the blood supply and be carried around the whole body. So it even though the initial cyanide may be ingested in a drink, it gets converted into something that can be transported all around the body very quickly.
Doug
But our body is able to naturally fend off small amounts of cyanide is that right?
Neil
That's the interesting thing is that in small amounts, we can actually cope quite nicely with cyanide, cyanides and a lot of food that we eat spinach, appleseeds, prunes. So we are actually able to digest a small amount and break down a small amount of cyanide every day. It's only when we massively overwhelm the body's normal process for detoxifying the cyanide, that it becomes a problem. And typically that's what we see in poisoning cases. It's a massive overwhelming of the body's ability to handle the small amounts.
Doug
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is a top tier medical Research Facility and a world renowned hospital. In 2013. Dr. Autumn Klein returned home exhausted, she just finished a grueling 15 hour shift as a research assistant at the hospital. Her husband Bob Franti was also a research scientist at the hospital, and he was at home when Autumn arrived. Shortly after autumn returned home, Bob found her lying on the kitchen floor. “911, what’s your emergency? Please, please, my wife is having a stroke.”
Neil
Curiously, he asked the paramedics to take her to a hospital further away than the hospital that they both worked out. They both worked at a very large university hospital that was known for its emergency room and trauma center. But Bob Ferrante really implored the paramedics to take her to another hospital twice as far away. The medics, paramedics decided that probably wasn't a good idea and ignored him and took her to UPMC hospital. They did scans of her brain and could find no evidence for a stroke.
Doug
She had a blank stare in her eyes and barely a pulse. When they drew blood samples, it came out bright red, almost neon.
Neil
Inside each of our cells, every cell in the body, there are little structures called mitochondria. What these do is convert all the food that we take into our bodies every time we eat, and process them to a chemical called ATP. And this is the actual chemical that fuels everything that goes on in our body. And the cyanide binds to a particular protein within these mitochondria, it sticks very tightly to it. And it essentially shuts off the whole energy production system. Typically, we don't keep a lot of energy stored around in our body, there's only a few minutes worth of energy stored. So every cell in the body relies on a continuous production of energy. So once that energy system shut down completely, it doesn't take very long for the whole body to run out of energy. And if those mitochondria have been completely shut down, then they're no longer able to use oxygen. And so the oxygen stays in the blood, the blood stays a bright red color, which would be very unusual in venous blood, which is typically a purplish color. So that was one indication that something was amiss.
Doug
The doctors rolled in the ventilator Autumn could barely breathe on her own. One of their own team members was dying in front of them. And they had no idea why. Not many paintings before the 1700s have much blue in them. That's because the pigment was derived from lapis lazuli, a mineral worth at the time, more than five times its weight in gold, then came along a solution to what was known as the Blue problem. And that solution was discovered, as seems to be so frequent throughout history, by accident. The result was Prussian blue, and infinitely cheaper blue dye, the world of art and fashion and Home Products instantly became more colorful. In the center of each blue molecule was cyanide, it was non lethal in this form, since cyanide incorporated into larger molecules loses its deadly properties. But away from those larger molecules, cyanide’s savage properties run wild.
Neil
The way in which the cyanide kills someone is by depleting their whole body of energy. So you end up with a person whose heart stopped so they're not pumping blood around the body anymore. And a person whose brain has been starved of energy and the whole system will eventually shut down.
Doug
That is, unless you have an antidote.
Neil
A lot of industries actually use cyanide all the time, particularly metal extraction from ores dug out of the ground. Gold for example, it very heavily relies on cyanide to purify it, because cyanide is one of the few things that will actually react with gold. And so all the workers that work in these industries typically have an antidote kit around and there are several things that can be used. The key is getting the antidote quickly. If there's no antidote within about five minutes of exposure, it really is too late. So it has to be within a few minutes to get any effect. So, cyanide really does live up to its reputation of being a really nasty poison. Anyone that has been poisoned with cyanide, it really isn't a poison that you're likely to recover from, because it's gonna take so long for anybody to recognize that you have been treated with cyanide. And by then it's too late. One of the things that is a very good antidote, if given in time, it is something that most people probably take every day in vitamin supplements. And this is vitamin B 12, which cyanide likes to bind to very tightly, people who are exposed to cyanide are given a massive injection of vitamin B 12, to try and soak up and mop up all the cyanide that's in their body.
Doug
Over the span of three days, Autumn’s colleagues, the hospital did their best to save her. But ultimately, they couldn't figure out what was wrong. She died on April 20 2013. The autopsy revealed no signs of stroke, no sign of any cause of death. Actually, as the medical examiner stated, by all intents and purposes, Autumn should still be alive. Under her cause of death, he wrote, pending. A few days after filling out the death certificate. The medical examiner received autumns blood samples from the lab.
Neil
And when they looked for cyanide in the blood, they found that indeed, there were lethal levels of cyanide present in the blood. That was sufficient for proceedings to be taken, the police were called in.
Doug
Beyond the blood tests, two rather foolish mistakes gave Bob away. The first was his university Purchase Card, which is their version of a credit card they use to buy chemicals. He'd never used the card except one time, just a few days before his wife died, his purchase: cyanide. Is it readily available to the public.
Neil
It's not readily available to the public. But for someone working in research. It's very readily available, not just cyanide. There are lots of poisons that I could go in and order through the university to a chemical company. It's not that hard. Some things like opioids certainly do require federal regulations that allow you specifically to order those things, but things like cyanide for a scientific researcher is very readily available. I could go in and order a large tub today, and I would have it delivered in the next few days.
Doug
The second giveaway was Bob's internet search history.
Neil
This is supposedly someone that's highly educated and would think these things through. His internet search history listed cyanide for many searches, including cancer and IBD detected on autopsy. Although I will say that when my wife found my searches on the computer at home as I was researching for the book, she did bring it to my attention and asked if I was planning on anything.
Doug
In his book, Neil paints a picture of the case against Bob. He writes, in closing arguments, the prosecutor told the jury that Ferrante was a master manipulator and that if they put the pieces of the puzzle together, they would realize that he had killed his wife because he thought she was going to leave him. On that fateful night. Ferrante gave Autumn a poisoned drink called 911 and stood over her to watch her suffer.
Neil
And eventually he was found guilty of first degree murder, and is currently serving a life sentence in Pennsylvania for that murder. Don't think you're gonna get away with poisoning just because someone can't detect cyanide when they eat it or drink it. The police will be able to detect it, they can detect cyanide really easily. So don't be fooled into thinking that this is a classic way of getting rid of anybody that you don't like anymore. You will be caught so don't do it.
Doug
Over 120 years before Autumn returned home exhausted from her shift. Vincent van Gogh was putting his final touches on the Starry Night. contained inside each blue stroke was a chemical so powerful, it could kill a human minutes, but in its paint form, the cyanide was harmless. It was just a sky, a rolling hill, a tree colored in the soft blue of night, a cyanide laced expression that will outlive us all. You can purchase Neil's book, A Taste for Poison: 11 Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Use Them in both written and audio form wherever books are sold. If you have any questions, comments or ideas for future episodes, email me at curious@quickanddirtytips.com. If you prefer talking over typing, leave me a voicemail at 757-541-8471. For more information about the show and where you can find us across the internet, check out our show notes or visit quickanddirty tips.com. Special thanks to the quick and dirty tips team: Adam Cecil, our audience development and podcast manager, Morgan Christiansen, podcast and advertising operations specialist, Holly Hutchings, our digital operations specialist, Davina Tomlin, marketing and publicity assistant, and our trusty intern Brendon Picha. Curious State is hosted and produced by me, Doug Fraser for the quick and dirty tips network, which is a division of Macmillan publishers in partnership with Mignon Fogarty, Inc. Until next time, stay curious.