Speaker 1: Andrew Rule. This is Life and Crimes today. We come
Speaker 1: to you from a village in Wales, so if the
Speaker 1: sound quality is not great, I apologize in advance. The
Speaker 1: reason we're doing this is because I happened to be
Speaker 1: in the UK at the same time that the murder
Speaker 1: verdict came down in the Eron Pattison mushroom case, and
Speaker 1: I have to say it is amazing how big that
Speaker 1: story is in the UK. The BBC World News coverage
Speaker 1: has carried the Eron Patterson trial faithfully most days, and
Speaker 1: when the verdict came down earlier this week, the BBC
Speaker 1: and other news services carried the story either at the
Speaker 1: top of the bulletin or very close to it. It's
Speaker 1: quite an amazingly thorough coverage, and they're throwing to their
Speaker 1: reporters in more Will, which they describe as a small
Speaker 1: town in Victoria, and give their viewers the full treatment.
Speaker 1: And people here are very familiar with the case. It's
Speaker 1: so pervasive here that it's even affected the way that
Speaker 1: news magazines have selected stories. And last weekend, when the
Speaker 1: jury retired to consider its verdict in the Patisan case,
Speaker 1: obviously the guilty verdict. The Sunday Times magazine here ran
Speaker 1: a massive magazine piece not about the mushroom case, but
Speaker 1: about other cases in history where women have poisoned men,
Speaker 1: and they selected as their main example a story from
Speaker 1: one hundred years ago in a Hungarian town where a
Speaker 1: group of women got their heads together and decided that
Speaker 1: their husbands were violent, drunken lunatics, which some of them
Speaker 1: obviously were, and under the guidance of a local midwife
Speaker 1: who knew a lot about poisons, they cooked up arsenic
Speaker 1: poisons by boiling up fly paper that is made up
Speaker 1: for poison flies and insects. It was made up in
Speaker 1: those days using arsenic and us think it was a
Speaker 1: very common item in household products that they'd use it
Speaker 1: for poisoning rats. It was also used in some tonics
Speaker 1: for livestock. It was relatively easy to get, and the
Speaker 1: fly paper trick was one that was used in Hungary
Speaker 1: and also by poisoners in England and elsewhere. They popped
Speaker 1: the fly paper in boiling water for a certain time
Speaker 1: and then strain it off, and the resulting mixture was
Speaker 1: heavy in arsenic, and they could use it to lace
Speaker 1: the target victims their tea or their coffee, or their whisky.
Speaker 2: Or wine or whatever it might be.
Speaker 1: And this group of women led by this midwife, over
Speaker 1: the span of eighteen years from nineteen eleven until nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty nine, they killed at least one hundred men, but
Speaker 1: the real figures might have been higher. Of course, it
Speaker 1: was a time when post mortems were not routine and
Speaker 1: probably not that accurate, and so there were a lot
Speaker 1: of unexplained deaths that were probably put down to heart
Speaker 1: attacks or whatever that went unnoted at the time, But
Speaker 1: the real number of victims in that eighteen year period
Speaker 1: might have been approaching more like three hundred, and so
Speaker 1: we have here somewhat of a history of poisoning of
Speaker 1: men by women who thought it was the easiest way
Speaker 1: to get rid of the men in their life that
Speaker 1: were causing trouble. And this was something that was reasonably
Speaker 1: well known in England back in the Victorian era, when
Speaker 1: there was a spate of poisonings from eighteen sixties onwards,
Speaker 1: often using that same flypaper method of getting hold of
Speaker 1: arsenic or using rat poison that was based on arsenic
Speaker 1: or other poisons that were available on farms and households
Speaker 1: and refining them to get the arsenic so they could
Speaker 1: poison people. None of them, interestingly, seemed to be using
Speaker 1: death cap mushrooms. Obviously, the effect of death cap mushrooms
Speaker 1: was known to people for centuries that people would avoid
Speaker 1: eating them by trial and error, animals and birds and
Speaker 1: everything else fairly careful with what's poison and what's not,
Speaker 1: and people, especially in the country areas, knew from a
Speaker 1: very young age which things were edible and which weren't.
Speaker 1: But it's interesting that death cap mushrooms don't come up
Speaker 1: a lot in the literature of poisoning in the way
Speaker 1: that arsenic does. Interestingly, one of the big poisoning cases
Speaker 1: in Victoria back home in Victoria, also involved arsenic. Now,
Speaker 1: this was the case that some of our business will
Speaker 1: recall vaguely, and that's the case of Lorraine Moss, the
Speaker 1: Bendigo housewife who back in the eighties decided to poison
Speaker 1: her husband Johnny. His real name was Leonard Moss. He
Speaker 1: was known by everyone as Johnny, popular figure at the
Speaker 1: local abatars where he worked. He was a meat worker,
Speaker 1: a good guy apparently. I think they had two or
Speaker 1: three daughters. They lived, you know, a quiet life in
Speaker 1: suburban Bendigo. But Lorraine Moss decided that she no longer
Speaker 1: wanted to be with her husband, Johnny, but she didn't
Speaker 1: want to actually go through the routine of divorce or
Speaker 1: things like that. She had started an affair with one
Speaker 1: of his workmates, a guy called Robert White, and her
Speaker 1: way out of this tricky domestic situation was to get
Speaker 1: hold of some poison that was used. I think this
Speaker 1: poison might have been used that the meatworks to kill
Speaker 1: rats or things like that. Anyway, she was able to
Speaker 1: get hold of the poison fairly easily, and she started
Speaker 1: to lace her husband's sandwiches for his lunch with the poison.
Speaker 1: Instead of making his own sandwiches, which would have been wise,
Speaker 1: she had the habit of making them, and she would
Speaker 1: sprinkle this powder in the sandwiches, and it was noticeable
Speaker 1: that Johnny Moss got sicker and sicker. This is about
Speaker 1: eighty two eighty three, and in fact, one day he
Speaker 1: felt sick and he didn't want to eat his lunch.
Speaker 1: A couple of his mates had his lunch instead, and
Speaker 1: they got very sick. In fact, one of them was
Speaker 1: so sick that he couldn't work for months. This is
Speaker 1: how potent this poison was, and Johnny Moss would get
Speaker 1: very sick, and then he would be taken to hospital,
Speaker 1: and Lorraine Moss would make a great show of being
Speaker 1: the concerned wife and all the rest of it. And
Speaker 1: when he was in the hospital he would recover, he
Speaker 1: would get hospital food and hospital care, and she wasn't
Speaker 1: supplying the food anymore to him, and he would gradually
Speaker 1: get better, and he'd come home and he go back
Speaker 1: to work, only to sick him again, because of course
Speaker 1: she would start poisoning his food again. Now this went
Speaker 1: on for I think I said eighteen months, and he
Speaker 1: died in early nineteen eighty four. John Moss's death should
Speaker 1: have really sparked a searching inquest that would have pointed
Speaker 1: to suspicious circumstances and pointed to Lorraine Moss's complicity. But
Speaker 1: a strange thing happened. Lorrain Moss, not a terribly intelligent woman,
Speaker 1: got very lucky for a while. It turned out that
Speaker 1: there was a report made up about the poisoning of
Speaker 1: Johnny Moss at the Austin Hospital.
Speaker 2: He'd been sent down there and they'd.
Speaker 1: Done some tests and a report was completed by the
Speaker 1: doctors and other medical which indicated that he'd been poisoned
Speaker 1: with arsening. Now, that report, had it been produced at
Speaker 1: his inquest, would have pointed squarely to Lorraine Moss poisoning
Speaker 1: her husband, and it would have led to charges and
Speaker 1: she would have been prosecuted for murder or manslaughter at
Speaker 1: least homicide back then, back when it all happened in
Speaker 1: the early eighties. But that didn't happen simply because that
Speaker 1: report got lost, and in the absence of the report,
Speaker 1: a very kindly coroner, a coroner took it upon himself
Speaker 1: to say there was no evidence that Lorraine Moss had
Speaker 1: poisoned her husband, despite the fact that he clearly had
Speaker 1: been poisoned by something.
Speaker 2: And so she got away with it, and she in fact.
Speaker 1: Married her lover, Bob White or Robert White, and they
Speaker 1: lived happily or unhappily in Bendigo forever after, until about
Speaker 1: twenty years later Lorraine Moss did a silly thing. Lorraine,
Speaker 1: for some strange reason, had it in her head. She
Speaker 1: had this notion that once twenty years had gone past,
Speaker 1: or something like twenty years agne past, that she'd be
Speaker 1: home clear that she couldn't be prosecuted. And she must
Speaker 1: have been thinking about this because she brought it up
Speaker 1: with one of her daughters. Lorraine Moss was talking to her,
Speaker 1: I think her oldest girl, and said something strange about well,
Speaker 1: at least at this stage, I can't be prosecuted over
Speaker 1: your father, or words to that effect, and the daughter said,
Speaker 1: what do you mean.
Speaker 2: She said enough to.
Speaker 1: The daughter to suggest that she had had something to
Speaker 1: do with poisoning the girl's father, Johnny Moss, and the
Speaker 1: daughter took this in and understood what she said, and
Speaker 1: she went to the police because she loved her father,
Speaker 1: as did her sister, and she was shocked and horrified.
Speaker 2: She might also have had.
Speaker 1: Her own suspicions because of her mother's relationship with this guy.
Speaker 2: White that she married.
Speaker 1: So the daughter goes to the police, and the police
Speaker 1: put her in touch with the homicide squad, and the
Speaker 1: homicide squad say, we want you to talk to your
Speaker 1: mother about this, and they wired her for sound and
Speaker 1: she spoke to her mother about the death of her father,
Speaker 1: Johnny Moss, and the mother, Lorraine Moss, said enough to
Speaker 1: her that was taped to essentially implicate her in murder,
Speaker 1: and that was what led the homicide squad to charge
Speaker 1: Lorraine Moss with the murder of her husband, Johnny Moss,
Speaker 1: all those years before. And I think we've visited this
Speaker 1: story at least once in our time doing Life and Crimes,
Speaker 1: and we'd be remiss not to point out that when
Speaker 1: the homicide squad would visit Lorraine Musk to interview her,
Speaker 1: which they did on more than one occasion, she would
Speaker 1: always offer them a cup of tea, but those very
Speaker 1: wise detectives would always decline it.
Speaker 2: They didn't want to be poisoned.
Speaker 1: As well, regular listeners of Life and Crimes will know
Speaker 1: that we have visited this topic in the past and
Speaker 1: that there are several women in Victoria who have murdered
Speaker 1: their husbands and some have got away with it and
Speaker 1: some haven't. But those who are interested in this topic
Speaker 1: might revisit the episode where we talked about the murders
Speaker 1: of a man called Utly Man called Osland again at Bendigo, and.
Speaker 2: A third case which was out near Paculum.
Speaker 1: One was convicted because the young daughter of the woman
Speaker 1: who was the chief suspect put her hand up late
Speaker 1: in the piece and said I had done it.
Speaker 2: I killed my dad, and that threw.
Speaker 1: The prosecution into a confusion, and ultimately no one was convicted.
Speaker 1: That's the case of Diane Griffy. Diane Griffy was the
Speaker 1: wife involved there and in the other cases we had
Speaker 1: Heather Osland and Margaret Utley and those stories are well
Speaker 1: worth looking up if anyone's interested in the ongoing topic
Speaker 1: of women who kill. And that's Andrew Rules signing off
Speaker 1: in the village of Pinelli in Pembrokeshire in Wales on assignment,
Speaker 1: but always keeping an eye open for a story for
Speaker 1: life and Crimes.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening.
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