TOXICOLOGIST TELLS WRITERS OF SUBSTANCES THAT KILL

SIKESTON -- Lucy Zahray knows all the best ways to poison someone.

The Michigan pharmacist-toxicologist is sharing her expertise at this weekend's Heartland Writers Conference, which runs through today.

Mystery writers and writers of historical romances often need information about poisons. She provides them with a few facts: the poison's effects, some trivia about its name or physical attributes, and perhaps how a killer could acquire it.

For instance, arsenic is tasteless and was nicknamed "inheritance powder" in Medieval times. Strychnine comes from a seed with an indentation legend that holds to be the fingerprint of the Creator. Cyanide is used to make mirrors. That's the sort of information an author can weave into a story.

A writer at the conference asked if a substance that was around in the 1800s could have induced an abortion. Zahray came up with the plant called yew. She found some yew growing just outside the front door of the motel.

She says the plant's folk name was "bastard killer."

Zahray, who lives in Holland, Mich., brings an array of props to the conferences where she speaks. Many of her bottles and boxes containing cyanide, strychnine and arsenic were gleaned from antique stores and the dusty shelves of old filling stations.

The federal government has regulated all of the "good stuff" off the market, Zahray says. "Most of the things you can get on the market now are pretty innocuous -- even to bugs."

Most of the poisons have antidotes, but Zahray produces a bag of castor beans to illustrate a poison that doesn't.

Castor beans contain ricin, which Zahray calls "the most potent toxin in the world." The 12 seeds in her hand are enough to kill six adults, Zahray says. "But if we extracted the ricin it would be enough to kill Western Michigan."

Ricin was most famously used by the KGB to kill a Bulgarian dissident during the Cold War. He was bumped in the street with an umbrella designed to inject the poison and died a horrible death.

Ricin is a protein that bonds in the body and causes cells to break open, resulting in internal hemorrhaging. The reaction can be delayed as much as 15 days.

Another surreptitious killer is a drug common in all hospitals. Zahray, who works as a hospital pharmacist, says potassium chloride is usually suspected when a medical worker is charged with killing patients. The drug is used to regulate heart activity but if given improperly could disrupt it.

Potassium chloride is almost impossible to trace because potassium appears naturally throughout the body. And it's easily made.

"It pretty much is the perfect poison from a killer's point of view," she says. "I don't like to say that out loud too much."

Zahray is reassuringly jolly for someone who knows so much about substances capable of inflicting ghastly harm.

Most of her reference books about poisons are scientific classics. One is not. "It was written for terrorists," she says.

This book gives instructions on how to kill someone by extracting the nicotine found in two cigarettes.

"It's scary," she says.

Questions about the ethics of dispensing this information invariably come up at the conferences. Zahray says the information is readily available, and she's giving it in nonscientific form to writers who want to make their stories more credible.

"I'm not providing a cookbook," she says.

Poisons are part of our everyday lives, she points out. The iron in multivitamins is extremely toxic to children, for instance.

A bottle of Tylenol is among her props. Acetaminophen is the cause of most ER overdoses, she says.

Aspirin isn't there. "I can kill you with aspirin, but I'd have to buy five pounds of it and beat you over the head with it."

Dosage is the determining factor in whether a substance becomes lethal. "I can kill you with water or oxygen," she says. "... Everything is a poison. It just depends on the dosage."

Zahray started talking to writers about poisons after attending a mystery novel convention 10 years ago and finding nobody there who knew about poisons. She is a mystery fan herself.

One of her favorites is Sharon McCrumb's "If I Had Killed Him When I Met Him I'd be Out of Prison by Now." Another is Margaret Maron's book "Southern Discomfort," in which a character acquires the poison by going to a rural filling station-grocery store.

"I just bought arsenic that way," Zahray said.

Invariably, one of the first questions she's asked at the conferences is, "Is your husband still alive?"

He is. And he's her first husband.