Product Description

"Insulin Murders" is the first book on the market to describe real life cases of murder using insulin (and other hypoglycaemic agents) as a murder weapon. Written by a leading authority on insulin and its use as a murder weapon, this is a gripping account of true life crime, intended for doctors and laypeople alike. "Insulin Murders" is a unique collection of real life tales and includes details of the evidence that proved the innocence of Claus von Bulow, played by Jeremy Irons in the well known Hollywood film about the case, "Reversal of Fortune", in the first criminal trial ever to be televised in the US. "Insulin Murders" is written by Vincent Marks, author of the well known and critically acclaimed "Panic Nation" and world authority on insulin, and Caroline Richmond, a well known medical journalist and writer, with a foreword by Nick Ross, journalist and broadcaster. It will appeal to both the medical and non medical communities, and especially to all those with an interest in forensic medicine or true life crime.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38274 in Books
• Published on: 2007-04-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 189 pages

Customer Reviews

Creepy Clinical Crimes
I had a physiology professor who said that as a physiologist, he knew many ways of committing the perfect, undetectable murder. He would not tell us what they were, but he joked that he was tempted to go into the business of writing whodunits, except that he didn't know enough bad words. He knew plenty about poisons, of course. The perfect poison would be one that not only produced a death that seemed natural, but was undetectable by the medical examiners thereafter. Many potential murderers have thought that insulin would be perfection. It is a substance produced by the body, and it is available for injection; diabetics use it to prolong life, but given in overdose, it can drive blood sugar down and produce a coma and death. And because it is in everyone's body naturally, a poisoner could count on its presence being overlooked and thus get away with murder. But the poisoner would not be counting on the skills of people like Dr. Vincent Marks, a physician with a special expertise in measuring insulin and in its potential misuse. He has compiled such cases of poisoning, some of which he himself investigated or testified about, in _Insulin Murders: True Life Cases_ (Royal Society of Medicine Press). Dr. Marks writes, "I realized that my writing style was not necessarily conducive to easy reading" (good for you, Dr. Marks) and so he enlisted the help of a co-author, a journalist who has written on medical issues, Caroline Richmond. Some of the book is still not easy reading, but that is part of its appeal. There is a great deal of physiology in these pages, with discussions of laboratory procedures, glucose levels, insulin levels, and more. This means that readers will understand not only what insulin poisoners are up against, but will also have a wider understanding of what insulin does naturally and also as a medication. The cases themselves are creepy and sometimes gruesome, and will appeal to anyone interested in true crime stories.

Marks takes care to make all the physiology plain in each case. Among the poisoners described here are an Australian professor of psychiatry; he was a fantasist who poisoned his wife presumably to get her insurance money and to settle in with his lover. Another one was a poisoner only inadvertently; he had administered insulin to a friend to get her high. The side effects of insulin, regarded as undesirable by diabetics who have to take it, include amphetamine-type symptoms which drug abusers might value. In this case, the involuntary poisoner administered it to three pals, and one died from it. Not all the accused here are actual poisoners. The most famous case is that of Claus von Bülow, whose eventual retrial (into which Marks gave evidence) cleared him of poisoning his wife Sunny.

Less happy was the outcome for Dee Winzar, a nurse found guilty in 2000 for the murder of her paraplegic husband. When Marks first saw some of the evidence in the case, he was convinced that the husband had died in an insulin-induced coma, but upon seeing the whole clinical presentation, he changed his opinion. "I could not be certain - you so rarely can in the practice of clinical medicine," he says, in a highly technical and fascinating description of how he changed his mind. Among the lessons here are that the sort of vomiting that the husband had done before his death was highly unlikely in insulin-induced hypoglycemia. The explanation is that in a body that has too much insulin and thus needs to get the blood glucose up, food in the gut will be rushed down to the intestines for digestion, not expelled. And there is a fine clinical lesson for doctors in this case: labwork test results are meaningless in themselves, and must be used to support a clinical diagnosis; if they are inconsistent with such a diagnosis, the labwork must be distrusted. Unfortunately for the defendant, the evidence of the labwork was considered damning, and though Marks is convinced there was no crime, and though Winzar's case is under review, she continues to serve her minimum fifteen year sentence. Despite the book's title, these cases are not all insulin murders, but given the expert knowledge and explanations so well presented here, any would-be murderers considering the use of insulin should consider alternative techniques.

Highly technical, fascinating book
I'd give this 5 stars for a medical/ scientific readership, however, I must warn those who are not entralled by numerical details, for example, about concentrations of various markers of endogenous versus exogenous sources of insulin and descriptions of the advantages of one assay technique over another, that the book is full of this kind of detail. Nevertheless, it's a very good read that relates many interesting and notorious cases of murders by insulin injection detected by forensic scientists, including the first author. The book is also a salutary reminder of how over confidence in faulty scientific tests can lead to miscarriages of justice.

I am an author of thsi book, and ...
... I'd like to tell you more about it.
My co-author, Vincent Marks, is a distinguished diabetes expert and a former vice-chairman of the Royal College of Pathologist. He is also emeritus professor of medicine as Surrey University.
I am a medical writer, mainly of specialist obituaries for several UK national newspapers and for the British Medical Journal.
The book came about because Vincent has been an expert witness at most of the world';s most important criminal trials where insulin, or other anti-diabetes agents, were alleged to have been involved.
There are two terrible injustices in the book. One was to the reputation of Claus von Bulow, who was arraigned for the attempted murder of his wife. (She is still in a persistent vegetative state in 2008, and has been so for 28 years.) In fact there was no crime, and the book explains why.
The other case is that of Dee Winzar, a Midlands nurse who was married to a social worker, Nic McCarthy, who was paraplegic. Nic suffered from endless urinary infections, and it is a virtual certainty that one of these led to septicaemia and death. It happened on a night when Dee was awy from the family home.
A biochemical test showed a high level of insulin in Nic's blood. But Prof Marks, whe designed the test, points out that every clinical test has its false positives and should never be looked at in isolation. In every other respect, Nic had the symptoms of septicaemia; moreover, it would have been logistically impossible for Dee to inject him.
But, in a travesty of justice, Dee was found guilty of murder and is in prison. By 2006 she had been there for 8 years, so her son is without either parent. As she has not pleaded guilty or 'admitted' guilt (for which I admire her), she will have to serve the full 15 years.
And society has lost a good nurse, her son has lost 15 years of his only surviving parent, and we are all paying for her wrongful imprisonment.