Hippolyte Visart de Bocarmé murders Gustave Fougnies

One was a nuclear engineer known for his devious intelligence. The other was a 19th century nobleman with a penchant for reckless behaviour.

Both of them murdered with nicotine.

And they nearly got away with the murders, if not for the dedicated work of the medical scientists and the criminal justice officers of both their times.

A 20-Year-Old Murder Investigation

It was Tuesday, 30 September 2014. Paul Curry showed no emotion in court as the jurors pronounced him guilty of the murder of his wife, Linda Curry, in 1994.

Linda’s family and friends wept and held hands as the verdict was announced. It was a satisfying moment for the prosecutors. It had taken twenty years for the police homicide department to gather enough evidence to prosecute Curry. Linda’s family had waited painfully for two decades for justice to be delivered to the man who had cold-bloodedly murdered his wife for money.

But why had the investigation taken so long?

Why had it taken twenty years for the case to close?

It was because Curry had murdered with nicotine.

A May-December Marriage

The story began in 1989 when Curry and Linda met each other at the San Onofre nuclear plant where they worked. Curry was a Mensa member and a two-time “Jeopardy!” champion. Linda was a career driven woman known for her sense of fashion. They began to date. Three years later, they decided to marry. It was arguably a May-December marriage. When the couple exchanged their wedding vows in 1992, Curry was in his mid-thirties and Linda was approaching her fifties.

Curry was no stranger to marriage. Linda was his third wife. It was not clear if Linda knew the circumstances under which Curry had divorced his former wife. Perhaps if she had known, her future might be very different.

Because over a year later, Linda would be dead.

On 9 June 1994 near midnight, Curry called 911 and said that his wife was not breathing and needed help. Paramedics who arrived were unable to revive Linda. Linda was pronounced dead in the hospital. An autopsy revealed fatal amounts of nicotine in Linda’s body, despite the fact that she was a non-smoker. There was also evidence of toxic levels of Ambien, a sedative, in her system. A needle puncture was discovered behind her right ear as well.

Curry became the prime suspect in a potential murder case.

All the circumstantial evidence surrounding Linda’s death pointed to him.

Curry was the designated beneficiary of the multiple life insurance policies that Linda had taken out before she died. He began applying for the life insurance payouts one day after Linda’s funeral. Investigators who interviewed Curry five months after the death of his wife, noted that he had bought a new Cadillac for himself.

A Debilitating Sickness

According to records, Linda started falling ill nine months into the marriage. She was suffering unusual bouts of stomach pains, diarrhoea and vomiting. Curry was the very picture of the devoted husband. He accompanied her to numerous doctors to figure out what was ailing her. However, the doctor visits never turned up anything conclusive.

Linda’s gastronomical problems led her to be hospitalised twice in 1993. On both occasions, her IV bag was found to have been tampered with right after Curry’s visits. On the first occasion, nurses discovered that the IV bag had been punctured and laced with Lidocaine, a local anaesthetic and cardiac depressant that Linda had not been prescribed with.

On the second occasion at a different hospital, something similar happened again. The alarm on Linda’s IV bag went off after Curry left the room. The hospital staff put up a sign on Linda’s door, specifically forbidding Curry to enter Linda’s room without company.

Police investigators also questioned Leslie, the former wife of Curry.

Leslie relayed to investigators that during her final year of marriage to Curry, she began to suffer from a “debilitating” sickness that left her bedridden. Doctors were unable to diagnose the cause of her illness. In 1989, Curry suggested to her that they both get life insurance policies. After her insurance application was rejected, he divorced her. Leslie said her health problems disappeared after Curry left her and he began going out with Linda.

Still, the police were unable to build a strong case against Curry.

They couldn’t link Curry to Linda’s death. There was nothing to connect Curry to the nicotine, the sleeping pills or even a syringe. The case remained unsolved for several years as it passed through the hands of multiple investigators. It would be 16 years before authorities brought murder charges against him and another 4 years before he was put on trial for it.

Sergeant Yvonne Shull was one of the investigators who worked on the case.

“At the time, we didn’t have a nicotine expert,” she said.

Nicotine, A Rare Murder Weapon

The difficulties surrounding the case partially had to do with the fact that nicotine was an unusual choice as a murder weapon at the time. Dr. Neal Benowitz, an expert on nicotine, said he had never seen an actual case before he was asked to help out with the Curry case. He had previously only read about nicotine being used for murder.

Nicotine is a rare murder weapon because it is notoriously difficult to murder with.

Nicotine is a liquid alkaloid. It is a pale, odourless oily liquid in its base form. However, when exposed to light or air, the liquid nicotine turns brown and reeks of the sharp odour of tobacco. In addition, it is also bitter to the tongue, a potential red flag to any unsuspecting victim who finds nicotine in his tea or sandwich.

During a recent murder investigation in Korea, police discovered that their suspect had attempted to poison an ex-girlfriend two years earlier with a nicotine-infused drink. The woman told police that the drink had “tasted weird” and that she “did not finish the drink” that her former boyfriend had given her. Fortunately for her, the poisoning attempt did not succeed. Unfortunately, having learnt from the failed attempt, the man succeeded in killing his new wife two years later with an injection of liquid nicotine instead.

Nicotine E-Liquid

Nicotine is widely available today in liquid form as commercial cartridges for e-cigarettes. Dubbed as ‘e-liquids’, they are tinctures of water, nicotine, flavourings and other solvents sold to feed the burgeoning electronic cigarette market.

Toxicologists had warned of the dangers of these nicotine-laced concoctions. The nicotine levels in e-liquids ranges from 1.8 percent to 2.4 percent. At these concentrations, they are toxic enough to cause severe illness in adults, and sometimes death for young children.

According to New York Times, a woman in Kentucky suffered cardiac problems after her e-cigarette broke on her bedsheets, spilling e-liquid that was absorbed through her skin. In Fort Plain, New York, a one-year-old boy was rushed to the emergency room after he drank from a bottle of his aunt’s nicotine liquid. He started convulsing and became unconscious. He was pronounced dead in hospital.

What Is Nicotine?

Nicotine occurs naturally in nightshade plants (Solanaceae). It is predominantly present in tobacco and coca plants, and appears in lesser quantities in tomato, potato, eggplant and green peppers. Both nicotine and the tobacco plant (Nicotiana tabacum) are named after a French ambassador, Jean Nicot, who sent tobacco seeds to Paris in 1550.

Nicotine is largely known for being the addictive agent in tobacco cigarettes. As nicotine is inhaled, it takes around 7 seconds for the nicotine to travel from the lungs to the brain. The nicotine level in cigarettes ranges from 6mg to 24mg per cigarette, depending on the type of cigarette. However, much of the nicotine is burnt or dissipated in the air through exhaled smoke. On average, a smoker absorbs around 1mg of nicotine per cigarette. At such low concentrations, nicotine acts as a stimulant.

However, nicotine is also a powerful neurotoxin that destroys nerve tissue. Because of its toxicity, it was widely used as an insecticide in the past. Gardeners and farmers used to steep tobacco leaves in water to make insect sprays to kill aphids and caterpillars.

Nicotine can poison humans through skin absorption, ingestion, inhalation or eye contact.

If nicotine is ingested in large doses, it quickly becomes a toxic poison that will cause burning of the mouth, throat and stomach. Other symptoms include vomiting, nausea, stomach pains, diarrhoea, headaches and breathing difficulties. In severe cases, convulsions, cardiac irregularity and coma may occur. Death happens when the respiratory muscles fail due to paralysis.

Medical opinions differ on the toxicity level of nicotine. But it is estimated that the lethal dosage for human adults is about 40–60 mg (0.5–1.0 mg/kg).

Detection of nicotine poisoning is an established practice in forensic science today, thanks to a nicotine murder case that happened more than 150 years ago. For that, we need to hark back to Belgium in 1850.

It was considered the nicotine murder case that changed toxicology history and laid the foundation of today’s modern forensic science.

The Bungled Nicotine Murder of Gustave Fougnies

By all accounts, Count Hippolyte Visart de Bocarmé was set for life.

He was young and wealthy, and he belonged to one of the oldest noble families in Belgium. His father was the vice-governor of Java and his mother descended from the Marquess of Chasteler and Moulbaix. At the relatively young age of 24, he had inherited his father’s title and the family estate Château de Bitremont, near the Belgian community of Bury.

However, he was also a spendthrift, a swindler and a womanizer. Hippolyte was known to be a reckless and undisciplined young man. He lived an extravagant lifestyle and squandered his inheritance money away. Heavily in debt and desperately short on cash, he began to cast around for ways to increase his fortunes.

Marrying For Money

Lydie Fougnies, the bourgeoisie daughter of a retired grocer, caught his eye. But it was not her beauty, but her wealth he was attracted to. Lydie, on the other hand, was seduced by the idea of marrying into aristocracy. They married in 1843 and Lydie became Countess Bocarmé.

But unfortunately for Count Bocarmé, Lydie was nowhere as rich as he thought she was. She only bought in a small annual income of 2,000 francs a year, a number that barely matched his own income. Even when her income more doubled after the death of her father, it still wasn’t enough to support the exorbitant expenses of their parties and their hunts, their family of four children, the upkeep of the château and a large household staff (as well as Hippolyte’s mistress).

To maintain their lavish lifestyle, the Count and the Countess borrowed 40,000 francs from a notary which they were unable to repay. Hippolyte was soon forced to pledge Lydie’s jewels and sell off some of his land to to fend off his creditors.

As Hippolyte’s debts mounted, he turned his attention to Lydie’s brother, Gustave Faugnies.

Gustave Faugnies

When Lydie’s father passed away, Gustave had inherited the bulk of the fortune. If Gustave was to die unmarried, all his possessions would be inherited by his sister. It was not an unlikely prospect as Gustave had suffered from ill health ever since his leg was amputated. Hippolyte was so desperate that he even went to the extent of consulting a physician to find out when Gustave might die.

Gustave was certainly not unaware of his brother-in-law’s intentions.

Gustave was known to tell his servants to burn any meat gifts that the Count had sent him. He also shunned any drink that Hippolyte offered him, out of fear that the Count will poison him. Gustave was so careful that he would even carry his own wine whenever he ate at the château with the Bocarmés.

In any case, any hopes that the Bocarmés may hold for a windfall from an unmarried Gustave were soon dashed.

In early 1850, there were rumours that Gustave was romantically involved with a Mademoiselle de Dudzech.

An Interest In Chemistry

It was also around this time in the spring of 1850 that Hippolyte developed a sudden interest in chemistry. He contacted a number of chemists under a false name to ask for advice regarding the extraction of nicotine from tobacco leaves. He also got in touch with a manufacturer of distilling apparatus to procure the necessary equipment to do so.

During summer, Hippolyte began to acquire large amounts of tobacco leaves that he said was for the manufacture of eau-de-cologne. Hippolyte created a laboratory in the château washhouse where he made extracts of the tobacco leaves.

Around October, animals began to go missing around the château. The bodies of these cats and ducks were later found buried on château grounds, bearing marks of poisoning.

It was in November 1850 when Gustave announced that he was getting married to Mademoiselle de Dudzech.

The Stage Set For Murder

The Bocarmés tried to talk Gustave out of the marriage. The Countess wrote letters to Gustave to speak ill of his fiancée’s character, but Gustave remained adamant.

The Count and the Countess decided that Gustave must die. The Bocarmés planned to make it appear as if Gustave had died of natural causes. But as it turned out, it was one of the most bungled murders in criminal history.

On 20th November 1850, Gustave arrived for dinner with the Count and the Countess at their château. The servants later testified that the couple’s preparations for the 3 p.m. dinner were odd. The children who usually ate with the family in the main dining room were sent away to the nursery. And the Countess insisted on serving the meal herself, instead of leaving it to the servants.

That afternoon, the maid heard the thud of a body falling to the floor in the dining room and the voice of Gustave calling out “Aie! Aie! Hippolyte! Pardon!” The Countess later called to the servants for help, where they found Gustave lying dead on the floor of the dining room. As shocking as Gustave’s death was to the servants, the behaviour of the Count and the Countess alarmed them further still.

The Count was in a disheveled state, sponging Gustave’s face frantically with vinegar. The maid noted with horror that he was forcing the vinegar down Gustave’s throat as well. In a great state of excitement, the Count ordered that Gustave’s body be carried away, undressed and washed down with vinegar. The cook was told to bring in hot water to scour the dining room floor. Afterwards, the Count fell to the floor and busied himself scraping the floorboards with a knife.

The Countess gave orders for Gustave’s cravat and waistcoat to be burnt. She took the rest of Gustave’s clothes and her husband’s jacket to the laundry. The clothes were first soaked in cold water, and then washed in boiling soapy water. She also had Gustave’s wooden crutches scrubbed thoroughly with hot water as well. But later, she changed her mind and decided that the crutches should be burnt as well.

Both the Count and the Countess claimed that Gustave had died from apoplexy. A doctor was called in. He was shown to a dark bedroom where the body lay. The doctor, seeing no reason to doubt the Bocarmés’ account of what happened, verified Gustave’s death and left.

The couple spent the night burning papers in the fireplace. Eventually, they went to bed, exhausted by their labours.

A Suspicious Death

The château servants, frightened by what they witnessed, decided to call on the local parish priest to tell him what happened. By then, rumours that Gustave had died a suspicious death had reached the ears of Heughebaert, the examining magistrate of Tournai. He decided to make a trip down to Bury to investigate.

On the 22 November, Heughebaert arrived at the château with three doctors and the town clerk, where he found the Countess having breakfast. What he saw wasn’t reassuring. The fireplace was jammed with the ashes of burnt papers. The newly scraped floor of the dining room was strewn with wood shavings. And the Count seemed strangely hesitant to appear before the magistrate.

When the magistrate insisted on seeing Gustave’s body, the Count led him reluctantly to a darkened bedroom where Gustave lay in bed. The Countess refused to draw the curtains to let more light in. When the magistrate dragged the bed to the window for a better view of the body, the Count tried to hide Gustave’s face with his hand.

What the magistrate saw appalled him.

Gustave’s face was scratched and bruised. His lips and tongue were swollen and blackened. Doctors who examined the body found that Gustave’s throat and stomach showed signs of inflammation. They concluded that Gustave had died from drinking a corrosive substance that might be sulphuric acid. They decided to remove Gustave’s organs for further examination. Gustave’s tongue, gullet, stomach, intestines, liver and lungs were removed and placed in jars of alcohol to preserve them.

The magistrate then turned his attention to the Bocarmés. The Count was unable to give a coherent account of what happened to Gustave. An examination of the Count’s hands revealed bites on his fingers and blood under his fingernails. Upon further enquiry, the Count revealed with tears in his eyes that Gustave had poisoned himself. He had tried his best to pry the poison vial from Gustave’s hands.

The magistrate did not believe him.

He had the Count and the Countess arrested instead.

Circumstantial Evidence

While the police suspected the Bocarmés of poisoning Gustave, they had no direct proof. All the evidence so far — the eyewitnesses’ accounts of the Bocarmés’ suspicious behaviour — were circumstantial.

At the beginning of the 19th century, there was no way to test for poison in a corpse. By 1830, British chemist James Marsh had invented a way to detect the presence of metallic arsenic in a body. However, there was no test to detect plant alkaloid poisons like nicotine in a corpse in 1850.

Three years ago, an exasperated French prosecutor, frustrated by the unsuccessful trial of a morphine murder, had shouted in the courtroom, “Henceforth, let us tell would-be poisoners… use plant poisons. Fear nothing; your crime will go unpunished. There is no corpus delecti (physical evidence) for it cannot be found.”

After considering the case, the magistrate decided to approach one particular chemist to identify the mysterious poison that killed Gustave Faugnies.

Jean Servais Stas, Father Of Modern Toxicology

The man about to shake up medical history and establish the beginnings of modern toxicology was Jean Servais Stas.

At thirty-five years old, he was the professor of chemistry at the Ecole Royale Militaire in Brussels. Stas was a renowned chemist who had gained international fame for his work on the atomic weight of carbon and other elements. His work would later form the basis of the periodic table developed by Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev nearly twenty years later.

After he was approached by the magistrate for his assistance, Stas threw himself into the work of identifying the substance that poisoned Gustave. Stas had built an extensive laboratory in his home at his own expense. He retreated to his home laboratory with the preserved organs of Gustave’s body and began three months of intensive experiments.

Stas did not know what poison he was looking for. His early rounds of experiments on Gustave’s tissues ruled out sulphuric acid. Like many chemists of his time, he used his nose and tongue to identify chemicals. After he detected the smell of vinegar and was told of Hippolyte’s many attempts to wash Gustave’s body with the acid, he suspected that the vinegar was used to camouflage another poison, a plant alkaloid poison perhaps.

Going by this hypothesis, he decided to use ether, acetic acid and ethanol to extract the alkaloid from the preserved tissues. He managed to isolate an oily residue that smelt distinctively of tobacco. Stas had extracted nicotine from the remains of Gustave. He had also pioneered the first test to detect plant poison in human tissue. The Stas-Otto method he created is still a cornerstone of modern toxicology today.

Stas was able to prove the toxicity of the nicotine extracts by feeding a small amount of the residue to some pigeons and swallows. The birds went into convulsions and died within minutes.

He wrote to the magistrate to ask if the Bocarmés had nicotine in their possession. This potential lead allowed the police to follow a different line of enquiry and discover the stash of tobacco leaves in the Bocarmés’ château. The whole chain of evidence unravelled and revealed itself as the police uncovered the Count’s visits to chemists, his purchases of nicotine distilling equipment and the animal remains on the château grounds.

Fragments of the dining room floorboards and the dead bodies of the animals were sent to Stas for testing. He found strains of nicotine in all the items.

In a twist of irony, what helped Stas to identify the nicotine in Gustave’s remains was the presence of both alcohol and vinegar. The organs which were preserved in alcohol had partially deproteinized, dissolving the nicotine into the acidic vinegar and alcohol mix. Hippolyte himself had unwittingly added the vinegar to Gustave’s body, aiding Stas in his chemical investigation and sealing his own fate.

A Sensational Trial

The Bocarmés were put on trial. It was a sensational trial involving the society highborn, wealth, greed and poison. Eighty-six witnesses were called to provide testimonies during the seventeen-day trial. The prosecutors argued that Gustave had been held down while nicotine was forcibly poured down his throat. It was a feat that could only be done by two people working in tandem.

When the Bocarmés took the stand, both the Count and the Countess accused each other of the murder and gave conflicting accounts of what happened.

Lydie claimed that Hippolyte had been the mastermind of the whole plot and had forced her to do his bidding. She had not been in the room when the murder occurred. Hippolyte had seized Gustave and thrown him to the floor in the dining room. She had rushed out of the room in a panic and did not return until Gustave was dead.

Hippolyte had a different version of the events. He confessed that he had distilled the nicotine and placed the nicotine-filled vials on the dining table. Lydie mistook the vials to contain wine and emptied the contents of one of them into Gustave’s glass. It was a tragic accident.

The defending counsel tried to gain sympathy for Hippolyte by playing up his neglected childhood. The prosecution recounted the grim discovery of the dead poisoned animals and presented the nicotine distilling equipment that was found hidden away in the château.

At the end of the trial, the jury deliberated over the verdict for an hour and a half.

The Count was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.

The Countess was acquitted.

Hippolyte was calm when his guilty verdict was announced. A slight flush passed over his face, but otherwise he showed no other emotion. Lydie’s face was veiled. She, too, showed no visible emotion when her verdict was read out. She stepped off the dock without speaking to her husband.

Hippolyte petitioned the king to appeal his sentence. When that failed, he had only one last request.

“I ask one favor,” he said. “See that the ax is well sharpened. I have read of cases in which, owing to the blunt edge of the knife, two or three strokes were necessary — the idea makes me shudder.”

On 19 July 1851, Count Hippolyte Visart de Bocarmé was executed by guillotine, watched by a crowd that numbered in the thousands. The blade was, according to his demands, kept very sharp. It killed him with a single stroke.

The Curry Case Re-opened

Over a decade after Linda died, the Curry case was re-opened in 2007.

As with the Gustave murder case over a hundred years ago, medical science came to the forefront again. A nicotine expert reviewed the evidence and testified that the nicotine injection would have killed Linda within a few hours of her being exposed to it. Damningly, Curry was the only person by Linda’s side for six hours before her death, from 6pm until midnight, on that fateful night.

This singular fact turned the entire case around.

The prosecutors felt they had a strong case on their hands.

Curry was arrested in 2010 and slapped with charges of murder and insurance fraud. He was apprehended in Kansas where he worked as a chief county building inspector. He had since remarried and he was living off the $500,000 insurance payout from Linda’s death.

During the trial, prosecutors argued that Curry had poisoned his wife for insurance money and benefits that amounted to half a million dollars. Curry had sedated his wife with the sedative Ambien, before injecting her with nicotine behind her ear to kill her.

In the courtroom, Linda’s friends held hands as they waited for the jury to announce their verdict.

“I was holding one of Linda’s earrings. And our other good friend … was next to me. And I gave her one of Linda’s earrings, and we just held hands and held her earrings in our hands,” said Merry Seabold, a long-time friend and colleague of Linda.

There were tears and relief in the courtroom when the jury found Paul Curry guilty of first-degree murder, with special circumstances for poisoning and murder for financial gain.

In November 2014, Curry was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.