In 2022, an English family court found an unnamed doctor guilty of using thallium in a pot of coffee to kill his partners father and injuring the partner and her mother in 2012. The case is unusual because it was in a family court, arising out of child-custody matters, rather than a criminal case. In fiction
Ngaio Marsh used thallium acetate in her 1947 detective novel, Final Curtain. It was being used legitimately for scalp problems in a group of school children just after World War II, housed in a private estate. A relative living there used it in place of the heart medicine intended for the owner. Agatha Christie, who worked as an apothecarys assistant, used thallium in 1961 as the agent of murder in her detective fiction novel The Pale Horse – the first clue to the murder method coming from the hair loss of the victims. This novel is notable as being credited with having saved at least two lives after readers recognised the symptoms of thallium poisoning that Christie described. The Pale Horse was found among possessions of convicted thallium poisoner George Trepals wife, the orthopedic surgeon Dr. Diana Carr (see above), who was herself considered a suspect in the Peggy Carr (no relation) murder for a time. In Nigel Williams 1990 novel The Wimbledon Poisoner, Henry Far uses thallium to baste a roast chicken in a failed attempt to murder his wife.
First known was to use Prussian blue, which is a solid ion exchange material, which absorbs thallium. Up to 20 g per day of Prussian blue is fed by mouth to the person, and it passes through their digestive system and comes out in the stool. Hemodialysis and hemoperfusion are also used to remove thallium from the blood stream. At later stage of the treatment additional potassium is used to mobilize thallium from the tissue. Notable cases
There are numerous recorded cases of fatal thallium poisoning. Because of its use for murder, thallium has gained the nicknames "The Poisoners Poison" and "Inheritance Powder" (alongside arsenic). Australias "Thallium Craze"
In Australia, in the early 1950s, there was a notable spate of cases of murder or attempted murder by thallium poisoning. At this time, due to the chronic rat infestation problems in overcrowded inner-city neighbourhoods (notably in Sydney), and thalliums effectiveness as a rat poison, it was still readily available over the counter in New South Wales, where thallium sulphate was marketed as a commercial rat bait, under the brand Thall-rat . In September 1952 Yvonne Gladys Fletcher, a housewife and mother of two from the inner Sydney suburb of Newtown, was charged and tried for the murders of both her first husband, Desmond Butler (who died in 1948), and her abusive second husband, Bertrand "Bluey" Fletcher, a rat-bait layer, from whom she had obtained the thallium poison that she used to kill him earlier that year.