Fluoroacetate is very toxic - LD50 below 10 mg / kg. One of a relatively small number of fluorine-containing natural products, it gets taken into the citric acid cycle analogously to acetate and bolloxes it up good. It can be isolated from a range of different plants, apparently. Also used as rat poison in the old days.
How about if she takes a toxin from a known poisonous animal, like a box jellyfish or a blue-ringed octopus?
You know, if the guy is taking 1 gram capsules, several times a day, you could do him in easily by replacing the contents of his capsules with potassium chloride. KCl is available at garden stores.
Hyperkalemia
He would have to take a good bit of it, I’ve seen therapeutic doses of 1500 mg twice a day regularly.
too bad it has to be in a capsule. much easier if it were in a soup… “oh goodness, i thought those were onions!”
It also doesn’t need to be something that’s sure to kill. LD50 means a dosage that’s deadly 50% of the time, but maybe she gave him a smaller dosage, that’s only lethal 5% of the time, and he was just one of the unlucky ones. This would work especially well if you want to emphasize her lack of technical knowledge of poisons: If all she knows is that a particular substance is poisonous, she might not get the dosages right.
Copper Sulphate is pretty toxic, and easy to get hold of - you could gather a fatal amount from a few children’s chemistry sets available in a store.
Getting it into the guy though, might be tough since it is bright blue.
If you’re swapping out his medicine, and it’s medicine that he desperately, immediately needs, swapping it with baking soda or sugar would work as well as anything. And it wouldn’t leave any trace of poison.
Now you just have to find a medicine that a person would be that dependent on.
Well, snooping around somewhat, the main poisonous ingredients of the plant are digoxin and digitoxin, both of which seem to have a LD50 in the tens of mg/kg. This article on the purple foxglove claims that the pollen of the plant contain up to 80% digitalis, so it seems all you’d have to do is harvest enough and put them into the capsules.
Ricin has been mentioned already and the seeds of the suicide tree are another option. She would just have to have a friend in India ship her some or order it online.
Depending on the people she has contact with, a couple of capsules of uncut heroin would probably be fatal.
Yes on the first, and on the second, depending on the husband’s condition, make it be capsules and the wife substitute their content with flour. He doesn’t die from being poisoned by the flour, but from not taking his medicine. Much easier, and much less likely to be detected.
And tell the chemist to stop metagaming, she’s supposed to use the knowledge her character has and not her own!
Ground Hemlock seeds may work. Ricin is a poor choice for an oral poison, since the protien can be digested. Cyanide is, of course, ideal. Any gold/silver plating shop is likely to be swimming in potassium cyanide. If the murderer worked in a plating shop, it would be easy to access. OTOH, elementary police investigators looking into a cyanide poisoning would immediately look for any association with the plating industry.
I had a boss that was questioned in regards to the Tylanol case. He was questioned for no other reason than that the company sold cyanide solutions.
Well she’s putting it in his prescription capsules, so the color shouldn’t be a problem, but I like this.
I like this too.
Heh. It’s mostly a matter of pride, but it does help the game flow. I wouldn’t want a GM basing a game on a totally hokey computer event.
So is potassium cyanide something you could buy off the shelf somewhere? Is electroplating jewelry something people can do at home? If they did, how would they get it?
A medicine for high blood pressure might fit the bill. They have warnings about how going off the medication suddenly can cause your blood pressure to spike up.
Easier than that. I have two big bottles of it in my basement. You flush it down the toilet to kill tree roots in your sewer line. IIRC, we bought it at Home Depot or Lowe’s.
That reminds me- I should flush some down our toilet tomorrow, to keep the tree roots from building up too much in the sewer line.
If you want something easy to procure, easy to extract poison out of, and doesn’t require any special knowledge to use, seeds of the Rosary Pea produce abrin, of which only 3 micrograms (3 millionths of a gram) can kill a full grown adult.
How much succinylcholine does it take? If the dosage is maybe 2 capsules is that enough?
Another possibility, if he’s taking two or more medications (call them A and B), is to replace B with a medication that can interact lethally with A. Even an OTC medication could work for this.
Or, if he’s taking certain medications, she could give him grapefruit juice- it can interact lethally with some medicines. Herbal supplements might be another possibility to interact with medications.
You know, now I’m getting curious. Would running tobacco chaw water through coffee filters ungunk it enough to let someone evaporate it into a nicotine-rich powder?