On February 4, 1971, Graham Young walked out of Broadmoor Hospital. He was twenty-three. He had been sent there at fourteen after his chemistry teacher opened his desk and found poisons, essays on famous poisoners and drawings of dying men, and after Young admitted administering antimony to his father, his sister and a school friend. The order was for fifteen years. He served eight. The staff who assessed him recorded that he no longer presented a danger.
Two months later he was working in the stores at John Hadland Laboratories in Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, a firm that made photographic instruments and kept thallium on the premises. His employers were not told what he had been convicted of. He was helpful, and in particular he was willing to make the tea.
The head of stores, Bob Egle, was fifty-nine. He began to suffer cramps and numbness in the spring of 1971. Other men at the works complained of the same thing, and it was put down to a local stomach illness the area had nicknamed the Bovingdon Bug. Egle recovered when he was off sick and worsened when he came back to work. He died in hospital on July 7, 1971, and the cause was recorded as pneumonia. In September a second colleague, Fred Biggs, aged sixty, fell ill in the same way. His skin peeled. He died on November 19.
What ended it was not medicine. It was Young talking. The works doctor had been brought in to reassure a frightened workforce, and Young asked him, in front of others, why thallium had not been considered. Nobody in that room had any reason to know the word. The doctor went to the police. Young was arrested two days later at Sheerness, in Kent, where he had gone to visit his father, with thallium in his pocket.
The search of his room produced the diary. He had recorded what he gave each man, how much, and what it did to him over the following days. He had described Biggs as seriously ill and noted that he did not expect him to live. At his trial at St Albans Crown Court in June 1972 he pleaded not guilty, apparently confident that the 1962 conviction could not be put before the jury and that nothing else could place the poison in his hands. Forensic examination of Egle's cremated remains found thallium. He was convicted on June 29 of two murders, two attempted murders and two counts of administering poison, and sentenced to life.
The government announced two inquiries within hours of the verdict, and both produced something. The Butler Committee reported on the handling of mentally abnormal offenders. The Poisons Act 1972 restricted the counter sale of the substances a schoolboy had been able to buy by claiming they were for a school experiment. Young stayed in prison for the rest of his life and was found dead in his cell at Parkhurst on August 1, 1990, aged forty-two. The recorded cause was heart failure.
The case is cited, still, whenever a release decision goes wrong, and the reason is the sequence rather than the poison. Nothing about Young had been hidden. There was a conviction on file, a documented method, and a recorded fascination with exactly the substances his new employer stored. The information existed in one institution and never reached the other, and five months after the gate opened a man was dead.