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As...an antidote?

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... to... life?

In the story, the guy didn't inject it into a vain or something but under
the nail of the big toe so they wouldn't discover any "injection-holes"
during autopsy.
Now is it true the coronor doesn't look for holes under the (toe)nails?
In the story the poisening was successful but i wonder in real life
would the potassium chloride be effective at all if injected under a
nail instead of directly into the bloodstream using a vain?

If you look at "forensic detectives" and other programs like that, they
always show casses where easily traceble poisons are used like Arsenic,
cyanide,nicotine and Caffeine.
But never with potassium chloride.
In my opinion this could mean it is very hard to trace and they don't want to show
it to the public.

Someone knows this stuff?

It is certainly detectable in the blood.

However, when writing a murder mystery, you can make almost anything true by having someone with authority make the statement.

I can't count the number of myths/legends make it into crime dramas as facts. Heck, for any given myth you could probably find that half of the investigators believe it to be fact.

Is that also a myth than?

ps. potassium chloride is called KCl and not KCL i believe.

A good one would notice the high Potassium Chloride in the blood and investigate - looking everywhere for needlemarks, inlcuding under the nails.

Another might just shrug off high Potassium Chloride levels in the blood as a fluke unless there were hypothetical reasons to suspect foul play.

And what if the victim were the kind of person to have naturally high levels and the extra 100mg would throw them off the chart? If they were the kind of person to have extremely low Potassium chloride levels, it might not show up at all. -- I don't know the natural range of it, but I suspect that 100mg, even in the whole bloodstream, is high. (The natural salt in the blood is mostly NaCl but is still only in trace quantities.)

Not everywhere in the body will be a good place to stick a needle and inject poison. Without hitting a vein, you risk putting the poison into a pocket where it is absorbed into the blood slowly - possibly so slowly that the body can process it harmlessly.

I have another one for u.

A few weeks ago i was watching "dr G medical examiner" on the Discovery channel.
She was working on a really sad case where two young children were murdered.
At first she could't find any clues at all but later she discovered that the oldest child had imprints of his teeth on the inside of his upper lip.
This ment that the child had been suffocated with a pillow or something.
The youngest child didn't have any teeth yet so dr G said that there was no proof of the younest being suffocated but because the older one was proven to be mudered, it was safe to say the young child also was suffocated, and so the killer got convicted.

But the whole story made me wonder, if it wasn't for the teethmarks, dr G said, she wouldn't have been able to solve the case.
Would this than mean that if you would knock someone out and put a plastic bag over his head and seal it of somehow, this would leave now trace of murder?
Perhaps leaving enough air in the bag so there won't be any over/under pressure and the victim can breeth normaly and dies when the oxygen runs out.

Could this be a "perfect crime" then?

A plant dubbed the suicide tree kills many more people in Indian communities than was previously
thought. The warning comes from forensic toxicologists in India and France who have conducted a
review of deaths caused by plant-derived poisons.

Cerbera odollam, which grows across India and south-east Asia, is used by more people to commit
suicide than any other plant, the toxicologists say. But they also warn that doctors, pathologists
and coroners are failing to detect how often it is used to murder people.

A team led by Yvan Gaillard of the Laboratory of Analytical Toxicology in La Voulte-sur-Rhône,
France, documented more than 500 cases of fatal Cerbera poisoning between 1989 and 1999 in the
south-west Indian state of Kerala alone. Half of Kerala’s plant poisoning deaths, and one in 10
of all fatal poisonings, are put down to Cerbera.

But the true number of deaths due to Cerbera poisoning in Kerala could be twice that, the team
estimates, as poisonings are difficult to identify by conventional means.

Unnoticed homicides
Using high-performance liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry to examine autopsy
tissues for traces of the plant, the team uncovered a number of homicides that would otherwise
have gone unnoticed. This also suggests that some cases put down to suicide may actually have
been murders, they say.

Although the kernels of the tree have a bitter taste, this can be disguised if they are crushed
and mixed with spicy food. They contain a potent heart toxin called cerberin, similar in structure
to digoxin, found in the foxglove.

Digoxin kills by blocking calcium ion channels in heart muscles, which disrupts the heartbeat.
But while foxglove poisoning is well known to western toxicologists, Gaillard says pathologists would not be able to identify Cerbera poisoning unless there is evidence the victim had eaten the plant. “It is the perfect murder,” he says.

Three-quarters of Cerbera victims are women. The team says that this may mean the plant is being
used to kill young wives who do not meet the exacting standards of some Indian families.
It is also likely that many cases of homicide using the plant go unnoticed in countries where it
does not grow naturally.

Journal reference: Journal of Ethnopharmacology (vol 95, p 123)

The real problem in that case is that suspicious deaths aren't being investigated carefully enough in India. Which is hardly surprising. The first step in getting away with murder is to avoid a homicide investigation in the first place. I'll be frank, I actually know someone who got away with homicide. Definite homicide, but the circumstances were such that there wasn't likely to be an investigation. If there had been, the homicide would have been detected easily.

I should say, I know I know at least one person who got away with homicide. I probably know more than one, but just don't know about the actual circumstances. Not having everyone know about it is most of getting away with it, right?

( BTW I prefer the term murder to homicide -- when it's murder. )

Anyway, the police were there and they were sorting it out, more or less. I scoured the papers for days for news about what had happened.

Nothing.

Weird thing is, almost exactly the same thing happened once before, not far from there. No one cared about it that time either.

Accomplished may not be the right word, considering we know about them. The most accomplished we probably never hear of.

In the homocide I mentioned, I guess that technically it would qualify as murder. It didn't change my opinion of the perpetrator, and others might argue that it wasn't really murder. I'm content to call it homocide, myself.

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Posted by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury:

e.coli

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Mmmm...spinach.

Inkwell
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"The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp."
-Anonymous

"Ho, ho, hooo...ugh, E. Coli!"

Inkwell
-----------------
"The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp."
-Anonymous

Is that possible than?

I was told that nowadays all poisons could be traced during autopsy.

In addition to this, one must remember that not all forensics labs have a Grissom on hand.

In the article (on this forum) it is said "But while foxglove poisoning is well known to western toxicologists, Gaillard says pathologists would not be able to identify Cerbera poisoning unless there is evidence the victim had eaten the plant"

http://www.emedicine.com/emerg/topic913.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_15

half a bottle of Jack in me now

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It's odd that a thread detailing various ways to die keeps getting resurrected.

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has anyone mentioned a peanut allergy? those are lethal. grind up some peanuts and put them in the champaigne. while it may taste salty, it probably wont be noticed, except perhaps by a peanut fanatic.

the question is would the victim notice, since he has rarely, if ever, tasted peanuts.

or maybe you could just kill him with a bullet in the middle of the night... I hear that lead is very toxic.

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People kept bringing up snake venom.

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Eeewww!