Chocolate's Poisonous Past
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Though chocolates express love as a Valentine’s or Mother’s Day gift, they’ve been associated with death in history and mystery. Two hundred years ago chocolate was something you drank, but by the mid-19th century, confectioners devised way to create solid chocolate. As truffles and chocolate creams became popular treats, their potential as vehicles for poison became obvious.
Previously, would-be poisoners had to be near their victims' food or drink to accomplish their goals. But poisoned chocolates could be delivered anonymously. Who can resist a box of chocolates from a secret friend or admirer? We don’t know how many murderers got away with using chocolates laced with poison, but here are two famous ones who were caught. |
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Christiana Edmunds, the "Chocolate Cream Killer,” was a serial poisoner in Brighton, England, during the early 1870s. She bought chocolate creams, injected them with strychnine, and returned them to the vendors, who then sold them to others without knowing they were poisoned. She even sent herself a box of poisoned chocolates to suggest she was also a victim.
On the other side of the Atlantic in 1898, Cordelia Botkin mailed a box of arsenic-laced chocolates from San Francisco to her ex-lover’s wife in Dover, Delaware. The transcontinental crime was the earliest known use of the U.S. Mail for nefarious purposes. Botkin was the first person prosecuted for a crime that took place in two different U.S. jurisdictions. Both poisoners were convicted. Edmunds was incarcerated in an insane asylum. Botkin died in prison. |
Cordelia Botkin
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Inspired by such true crimes, mystery writers built plots around similar poisonings. In Anthony Berkeley’s The Poisoned Chocolates Case, six armchair detectives tackle the case of a woman who died after eating liqueur-filled chocolates. Each comes up with a different theory and a murderer no one else has considered. Agatha Christie also explored chocolate as a weapon in Peril at End House and in “The Chocolate Box,” a story in which Poirot chides himself for missing the key clue. What, Poirot missed a clue? Who knew? |
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In my 7th Five-Ingredient Mystery, Gingerdead Man, a murderer acts like the neighborhood’s Secret Santa, leaving holiday gift bags of chocolates on doorsteps. When an elderly victim appears to die of natural causes, the police don’t suspect the chocolates because there’s no sign of tampering. But my sleuth Val recognizes them as homemade. She convinces the police to test the filling in the chocolates by describing how easy it is to make chocolates at home. No need to inject chocolates with poison, as Edmunds and Botkin did, if the poison is mixed into the filling. |
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Read my article about the dark history of gingerbread at CrimeReads.
Find out where to buy Gingerdead Man and read the first chapter.