The most famous unusual murder weapon in this archive is a pit of alligators behind a bar at Elmendorf in Texas. Joe Ball kept them, charged customers at the bar to watch them fed, and shot himself when the police arrived in 1938. Two killings are established against him. The alligators eating the bodies is folklore.
That is the pattern, and it holds across almost every case filed under this heading. What gets called an unusual weapon is very rarely the thing that killed anybody.
Take the three best known. John George Haigh murdered six people in England in the 1940s and dissolved their bodies in sulphuric acid, which is the only detail anyone remembers about him. The acid did not kill them. He killed them and then used it, in the belief that without a body there could be no conviction for murder, which is wrong and which he had time to reflect on before he was hanged at Wandsworth in 1949.
Haigh is worth one more line, because he supplies the second half of this article's argument as well as the first. Alongside the acid, his file records his claim to have drunk a cup of his victims' blood. Nobody has ever corroborated that and it did not form part of the case against him. It is a thing he said about himself, and it has travelled about as far as the acid has.
Leonarda Cianciulli killed three middle-aged women in Correggio in 1939 and 1940 and rendered their bodies into soap and tea cakes. The soap is why the case is remembered and why it appears on lists like this one. It is also the second half of the sequence. She killed them first, by ordinary means, and the extraordinary part happened to bodies that were already dead. Her reason, as her entry records it, was that she believed she was performing human sacrifices to keep her eldest son from dying in the war. That is the actual content of the case, and it is not a fact about a weapon.
Javed Iqbal confessed in December 1999 to killing a hundred boys in Lahore and dissolving them in acid, and posted an account of it to a newspaper. Same again. The acid is disposal. He was found dead in his cell in 2001.
So three of the archive's signature weapons are not weapons but methods of getting rid of what was left, and the fourth is a story that attached itself to a man who happened to own alligators. In each of those three files the detail that carries the case is something done to a body after death. In none of the three does the archive record the acid or the soap as having caused a death.
There is one genuine exception, and it is instructive for a different reason. Stephen Griffiths killed three women in Bradford between 2009 and 2010 with a crossbow, while enrolled as a doctoral student writing about serial murder. Asked his name in court, he gave it as the Crossbow Cannibal. He was recorded on his own building's CCTV. His entry records dismemberment alongside the crossbow, and the name he gave the court joined the two together.
The weapon in that case is unusual and it is also the point of the case, in the sense that the man chose it and then chose to be known by it. A crossbow is not a practical instrument for killing anybody. It is a costume. He was a student of the subject who assembled himself out of it, and the name he offered the court is the clearest evidence of that anywhere in the file. What ended it was a camera in his own building recording him, which is the least mythological way a case can close.
Set those aside and look at what the archive actually records as the means of death, and it is relentlessly ordinary.
Arsenic appears in twenty-nine entries. Fire in twenty-one. Drowning in sixteen, smothering in fifteen, an axe in thirteen, a hammer in ten. Insulin, cyanide, strychnine, a length of wire, a stocking. None of that is exotic. All of it is what was in the house, in the shed, or available over a shop counter to anybody who asked.
Some of those categories are not really about an implement at all. Fire and drowning and smothering describe a situation rather than a tool, and they turn up in the entries where the victim was a child, an elderly relative or a patient. There is no weapon to name in those cases, which is one reason they never appear on a list like this one, and no reason at all to think them less common.
The poisoners are the largest group and the most domestic. Velma Barfield poisoned her mother, her fiance and two elderly people she was employed to care for, using arsenic-based rat killer. She became the first woman executed in the United States after the reinstatement of the death penalty. Nannie Doss poisoned four husbands and at least seven other relatives across three decades in the American South, giggled through her confession, and escaped execution because Oklahoma would not execute a woman.
Barfield's poison was bought as rat killer. Doss worked through four husbands and at least seven other relatives across roughly three decades, which is the more remarkable fact about her by a distance. Neither case turns on an implement, and neither would appear in a curiosity cabinet, because arsenic is not strange. It is only effective, and available, and quiet.
Neither of them needed an unusual weapon. What they had instead was access: a kitchen, a sickbed, a marriage, a job caring for someone. The instrument was rat poison because rat poison was in the cupboard.
There is a reason a subject like this fills up with things that are not true. A weapon that makes a good sentence gets repeated, and repetition is all most of these details have behind them. This archive keeps running into the same problem from the other direction, with confessions: Javed Iqbal's hundred is his own figure, sent to a newspaper, and Joe Ball's alligators are a story told about a bar. In both cases what survived was the version that reads best.
That is the finding worth taking from a subject that is usually presented as a curiosity cabinet. An unusual weapon is almost never a fact about the killing. It is one of three other things.
It is a fact about disposal, as with Haigh, Cianciulli and Iqbal, where the strange detail belongs to a body that was already dead. It is a fact about self-presentation, as with Griffiths, who picked an implement and then wore it as a title. Or it is a fact about nothing at all, as with Joe Ball, where the archive's most repeated image is one this project's own record calls folklore.
The dull answer is the true one. People are killed with what is to hand, by people who are close enough to have hands on it. The pit of alligators is a much better story, and it is the part that did not happen.