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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.