A Passion for Poison by Carol Ann Lee

Author:Carol Ann Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Blake

Although Graham had apparently decided on delivery driver John Durrant as his next victim, and ruled out Jethro Batt due to friendship, before the week was out he had changed his mind, leaving his fellow Hadlands employee – and friend – in agony.

Batt had worked at Hadlands for five years as a self-employed prototype electronic wireman; for the past 18 months he had been employed in the Imacon test department of the laboratory. He and Graham had hit it off within a month of the younger man beginning work in the stores. Batt lived with his wife and children in Harlow but was originally from West Hendon and, as such, the two of them struck up what Batt referred to as an ‘exile friendship, as none of the other workers to my knowledge came from that district of London’. From then on, they would converse on a wide range of subjects, although Graham usually turned them round to his own favourite topics: Nazi Germany, poison and true crime. ‘He often spoke of people like the Acid Bath Murderer, Jack the Ripper and [John] Christie. He seemed disgusted at the stupid mistakes [Haigh, the Acid Bath Murderer] made, which enabled the police to catch him. Most of his conversations turned to the macabre.’ Batt nicknamed his new friend ‘the Keeper of the Black Museum’ and admitted finding Graham depressing at times: ‘I’d just walk away because of the macabre nature of his conversations.’482

Other colleagues had similar conversations with Graham, including Eric Baxter, quality-control engineer, who described Graham as ‘a compulsive talker. He was impressed by the method Christie used to murder his victims. He knew all the dates and even the number of layers of wallpaper on the kitchen walls at Christie’s home in Rillington Place.’ Baxter also recalled Graham’s occasional habit of taking a nip from a flask at midday and asked him why he did it: ‘He said it gave him confidence. When I asked him why he needed confidence, he replied, “Ah, you don’t realise.”’483

But of all his colleagues, Batt was the one whom Graham regarded as more than simply a co-worker with whom he got along. Batt often visited other parts of the factory, including the stores and production department, usually working until 7pm and, earlier that month, Graham had also begun to stay behind, telling Batt it was to catch up on paperwork and because his bus didn’t arrive until 7:30pm. Batt would then offer to give him a lift home to Hemel Hempstead. The only other person around at that time was May Bartlett on her cleaning duties. During the last half an hour, the two men would have coffee together and chat. Batt remembered one conversation in particular:

He said to me something on the lines of that you could obtain this liquid and introduce it into their drink and by gradually increasing the dose it would cause a heart attack and that it would cause death. He further said that the death would seem normal and any ordinary doctor would diagnose natural causes and murder would never be suspected.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.