The Most Extreme Poisoning Cases In History

Nagyrev was a small village in rural Hungary, and in 1911, a midwife named Julius Fazekas arrived on the scene (via Medium). No one knew where she came from, only that she was middle-aged and alone. Her husband, rumor had it, had disappeared under suspicious circumstances. She was a welcome sight, as she was the only person with medical knowledge around, and in addition to routine procedures, there were whispers that she was perfectly fine with performing abortions.

Now, the 1910s was a pretty difficult decade. During World War One, the village was turned into a POW camp, and when the war ended, soldiers returned home. Suddenly, the women of Nagyrev found themselves living with traumatized, wounded, and often violent husbands. They told Fazekas about their problems, and she gave them a solution ... literally. She boiled flypaper in a pot on her stove, removing the arsenic and giving village women bottles of the poisonous water.

At least 50 village women bought arsenic from Fazekas, and they dubbed themselves the "angel makers of Nagyrev." They also developed a code — children, women, and male lovers were off-limits, but it wasn't long before the code was broken. Hated relatives, unwanted kids, and parents all began mysteriously dying, but it wasn't until the 1929 census that authorities got suspicious. Ultimately, 12 women were found guilty of murder, with a death toll estimated (via the BBC) to be as high as 300, with 46 confirmed.

Not all poisonings are done on purpose. Sometimes, they're a terrible, tragic mistake, and one such a mistake happened in Yorkshire in 1858. That's when more than 200 people around Bradford got sick and at least 20 died. The culprit? A particular kind of candy called a humbug, sold from a single market stall. And what happened, says Historic UK, was completely avoidable.

At the time, the price of sugar was ridiculously high. It was so high, in fact, that many confectioners — especially those who catered to the working class — substituted a perfectly safe mix of plaster of Paris and limestone for the sugar in their recipes. It was called "daft," and it was gross but definitely not poisonous. It also looked exactly like arsenic.

But when one local candymaker named William Hardaker — or, more popularly, Humbug Billy — stopped at his usual pharmacy in Shipley to pick up a batch of daft for his candies, he didn't get daft. The pharmacy had mixed up the labels on daft and arsenic, so when the 40-pound batch of humbugs was made, each sweet had enough arsenic that it could theoretically kill two people. It's a miracle more people didn't die, and while those involved were charged with manslaughter, no one was convicted. It did lead to stricter legislation governing the handling and labeling of both poisons and medicines, though.

Back in the day, Mary Ann Cotton was the subject of a nursery rhyme, because the Victorian Era was very messed up. This lovely little poem went, "Mary Ann Cotton, she's dead and she's rotten, she lies in her bed with her eyes wide open." Yeah, it was a different time.

So, who was she? Well, she was a murderer, but according to Executed Today, it's impossible to tell just how many people she killed because her favorite method of poisoning — with arsenic — simply showed up on death certificates as gastroenteritis or a similar ailment of the digestive tract. But given that her first three children and perhaps another four died of mysterious gastric conditions, along with her first husband, well, it's hard not to see a pattern developing. And those were just the first who mysteriously passed away.

Her second husband, George Ward, lasted a year before he died, leaving Mary with an insurance policy as consolation. James Robinson was almost next, but he kicked her out when he caught her stealing, but it wasn't in time to save his three children and two more of hers, who died mysteriously. Next, she was on to Frederick Cotton, and yeah, he also died, alongside one of her lovers and a few more children. 

There's only so long people can look the other way and not get suspicious, and these last deaths coincided with the discovery of a test that would detect the presence of arsenic. As a result, she was hanged in a botched execution, says The Telegraph, but there was little sympathy for her.

On March 20, 1995, Japan suffered a deadly, coordinated attack on three separate train lines in five separate incidents. Around 5,800 people were injured and 13 died when packages filled with sarin — a toxic nerve agent developed in Nazi Germany — started leaking poison into train cars. Behind the attacks was Aum Shinrikyo, a doomsday cult formed in the 1980s. According to the BBC, their mix of Buddhist and Hindu beliefs elevated their founder, Shoko Asahara, to both the reborn Christ and the modern world's Buddha. The group was recognized as a formal religion in 1989, boasting tens of thousands of members, and gradually, they began to preach that only their followers would survive World War III. 

The 1995 attack wasn't the only one, either. They'd previously been behind another sarin incident in 1994 that poisoned around 600 people and killed eight. The BBC says that the attacks were carried out by cult members who thought they were doing something good. Asahara preached that anyone killed by a member of the cult would have their soul saved from a lifetime of damnation. And evidently, Asahara's followers fell for this line of thinking, and they also staged attacks with hydrogen cyanide that ultimately failed. Seven of the cult's leaders — including Asahara — were executed in 2018, but believe it or not, the cult is still active today.

Hawley Harvey Crippen and Cora Turner were married in 1893 and moved from the U.S. to London a few years later. However, Turner was a powerful personality who knew what she wanted, and her husband wasn't it. While she chased her dream of being in show business, her husband chased someone else, a typist named Ethel Le Neve. Then on January 31, 1910, the Crippens threw a dinner party, and afterward, no one ever saw Cora Turner alive again.

According to The History Press, that's when Crippen started claiming she'd returned to America. The story changed a few more times before Crippen and his lover fled the country, and a body — missing a head, limbs, and bones — was discovered under the floorboards of the Crippen home. When tests seemed to confirm that the body was Turner and that her remains contained a poison called hyoscine, it took just half an hour for a guilty verdict to come back, and Crippen was hanging in 1910. 

It seems pretty straightforward, but a century later, some experts aren't so sure for one very important reason. Testing the mitochondrial DNA revealed the fact that the body wasn't Turner's at all. Heck, it wasn't even a woman. But not everyone was swayed, and as the BBC says, even though the case was appealed, it wasn't reopened, as Crippen's champion — a second cousin, three times removed, named JP Crippen — was ruled to be not closely related enough to have an interest in the case.

The series of tragic deaths known as the Chicago Tylenol murders started on September 29, 1982, when a 12-year-old girl complained of cold symptoms, was given a single Tylenol capsule, and died soon after. The next victim was a 27-year-old postal worker, who died from what was originally called a heart attack. In the wake of his death, both his brother and sister-in-law took Tylenol from a bottle in his home to calm their headaches — and yeah, they also died. In total, seven people passed away from taking Tylenol that had been laced with cyanide. Around 31 million bottles of Tylenol were recalled, more poisoned bottles were found, and several more copycat incidents popped up over the next decade. 

According to PBS, the poisoner or poisoners were never found. But the incident did have a long-lasting impact on the pharmaceutical world. Tylenol manufacturers Johnson & Johnson worked with the FDA to create new packaging that made it very, very obvious if anyone opened or punctured seals on bottles. They also redesigned the pills themselves, into a form that couldn't be opened, tampered with, and reassembled. After investing more than $100 million into the redesign, medicine was made much safer — and much more annoying to open for even the most legitimate reasons.