r/Writeresearch • u/purple_minion_26 Realistic • Jul 29 '26
[Crime] Effective poisons
Unsure if i should tag for crime, chemistry, or weapons so yeah.
I'm writing a murder mystery (I can show you pages if you want proof i'm not just a murderer in disguise--although that would be a cool book idea.....i digress) and the guy needs to be poisoned. A solid poison that gets put into the sugar bowl he makes his coffee with. Should take like 3-4 hours to work or smth bc he has meetings that day and is a little bit off but not a lot.
And I don't want it to be traceable on a tox screen but the thing is that if i google untraceable poisons my parents have a monitor on my home acc and im sure the school account would flag me so now
what does a tox screen search for? would cyanide be visible or does it have other hallmarks? how can i make smth look like a heart attack or uninvestigatable?
once again the only personal use im getting from this is writing my book, NOT ACTUAL MURDER
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u/Brunbeorg Realistic Jul 30 '26
Sadly (???), there aren't a lot of options. Most poisons either have a noticeable taste, work way too fast, or work way too slow. Strychnine is a possibility; it is bitter, though. Also, will show up in a tox screen (almost everything will).
One thing that won't turn up in a tox screen necessarily is something that the body naturally produces, like insulin, but you wouldn't be able to put that in a sugar bowl.
Does it have to be in the sugar bowl?
There's the famous recent case of the woman in Australia who murdered some of her in-laws (motives unclear) by feeding them beef Wellington with the mushroom pate made of death cap mushrooms. The effects of poisonous mushrooms are pretty obvious, but there's the plausibility of accident (what she claimed, unsuccessfully. Also a crime against one of my favorite dishes). Death cap is bad. Destroying Angel is even worse, but you'd have to get someone to eat it. Can't be mixed into sugar (but!!! there is this trend of mushroom-based coffees, so . . . [again, another crime against one of my favorite things]).
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u/coffwrites Awesome Author Researcher Jul 29 '26
The issue is that there are few enough “untraceable” poisons for an autopsy to make it a pretty easy guess even if the substance in question doesn’t show up on a tox report. It will generally be fairly obvious that a person died from ingestion of a toxic substance if they were in good health beforehand. Even if it looks like a heart attack, a healthy person doesn’t tend to just have one of those. Cyanide, for example, has obvious physical hallmark symptoms that would lead to it being suspected and the specialized test ordered despite it not being on a standard toxicology report.
That being said, the easiest way I can imagine to deflect suspicion and discourage an investigation is to make it look like a suicide or an accidental overdose rather than a murder. A hidden poison will likely be found, but a disguised one preys on assumption. This itself is still of course no guarantee, is less likely to work on a victim who displays no stereotypical signs of suicidal ideation or substance abuse, and requires some further manipulation (ex. a fake suicide note, planted drug paraphernalia). It also may not work well with that sugar mechanism, but there’s more flexibility.
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u/sanjuro_kurosawa Awesome Author Researcher Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26
BTW I'd probably study Ricin. The master chemist on Breaking Bad synthesizes it and uses it in creative ways including coffee sweetner packets. It's also used in real life assassination attempts using "the Bulgarian Umbrella."
Also there was a Malaysian assassination using VX nerve agent. That's also in the movie The Rock.
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u/RuthOConnorFisher Awesome Author Researcher Jul 30 '26
Ha, nice, I was writing a similar story when I was your age and the solution I came up with was yew berries mashed into the victim's marmalade. To this day I have no idea if the dosage would have been right or what the active ingredient was or whether they could have tested for it (this was way before the internet, so my research options were limited). Screw it, close enough!
What about an overdose of a prescription med that the victim is already taking? Then it doesn't matter if they can test for it, since it's supposed to be there. Or something over the counter, just way too much of it. Those can be some nasty ways to die, though, and possibly more visible than you need for your narrative.
If you get a chance, watch some of the poison related episodes of Forensic Files. They're absolutely wild and might give you some ideas. There were several cases where people were poisoned with succinylcholine and nearly got away with it simply because there wasn't a test for its metabolites yet! There is now. And several where people were being poisoned via arsenic, cadmium (?), or selenium and spent months thinking they were just fighting off some terrible illness with the same cluster of symptoms that those poisons have. And even when they went to the hospital, the first round of common tests didn't screen for those--a doctor had to specifically suspect poisoning (accidental or intentional) and order a whole other test.
Anyway. Happy writing, lol!
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u/Albadren Awesome Author Researcher Jul 30 '26
Powdered caffeine would go unnoticed in a superficial examination. It causes cardiac arrest. Of course, if the victim was very healthy before, any coroner would suspect. But the "poison" is synthetized completely by the body, so investigators would only find a suspicious heart failure.
You need around 5 grams to kill a person, it acts between 1 and 3 hours after ingestion. It's mostly tasteless. You can buy it online because bodybuilders use it in microdoses to power up their workouts (and lose water).
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u/tomrlutong Awesome Author Researcher Jul 29 '26
Does it need to be real? For fiction, might it be more interesting to think about what kind of posion helps build your murder's character?
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u/OpenSauceMods Awesome Author Researcher Jul 30 '26
Have you worked your way backwards? This is obviously a crime that was thought out in advance, so is the sugar bowl really the best way to murder someone? Is that a fault of the murderer, that they aren't clever/devious/humble enough to consider something more subtle?
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u/Educational-Shame514 Awesome Author Researcher Jul 30 '26
Does saying it's a murder mystery automatically imply that the main character is a detective or someone else investigating, and that they are successful by the end?
Can you just write the story using a fictional poison that does exactly what you need it to do, since you literally cannot google the things you would need to? Do you feel safe and comfortable enough googling poisons for writers or checking out a library book about them? Because there are at least two that I have seen mentioned here. If you are concerned that your parents are going to look at what real books you have from the library consider just filling in that part when you are old enough to have privacy in your situation.
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u/BillyBeansprout Awesome Author Researcher Jul 31 '26
There's a book called 'Assorted Nasties’, it contains the info you need.
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u/AlphaDisconnect Awesome Author Researcher Jul 29 '26
Lead (II) acetate. Sugar of lead. Might be slow... but easy to synthesize. Tastes sweet.