The Perfect Poison
The main ingredients of Tofana’s poison, Aqua Tofana, are known: Atropa belladonna, also known as “deadly nightshade”, combined with arsenic, and lead. However, while the chief components are known, the manner in which they were blended has been lost to history. What is known is that the final product was a colorless, odorless, and tasteless liquid, which was almost impossible to detect when added to water or wine. Only a few drops were needed, broken into a few doses, to do in a victim.
Once ingested, Aqua Tofana was slow-acting and produced symptoms that mimicked death from natural causes, such as those seen in a steadily progressing disease. The first dose produced symptoms similar to those of the common cold. A second dose, and the symptoms progressed to those of a nasty flu. A third dose, and the victim was seriously ill, complaining of a stomachache, suffering from diarrhea, dehydration, and throwing up. A fourth dose would finish the victim off.
From the user’s perspective, Aqua Tofana was the perfect poison, that almost guaranteed the perfect crime. Given the state of medical knowledge back then, Tofana’s concoction was virtually undetectable in post mortem examinations carried out on its victims’ cadavers. Moreover, the symptoms it produced en route to carrying off its victims resembled the stages of a steadily advancing illness. That was the perfect cover in an era when so many routinely fell ill and died for reasons that physicians could not readily explain.
As one journal described it: “Administered in wine or tea or some other liquid by the flattering traitress, [Aqua Tofana] produced but a scarcely noticeable effect; the husband became a little out of sorts, felt weak and languid, so little indisposed that he would scarcely call in a medical man…. After the second dose of poison, this weakness and languor became more pronounced… The beautiful Medea who expressed so much anxiety for her husband’s indisposition would scarcely be an object of suspicion, and perhaps would prepare her husband’s food, as prescribed by the doctor, with her own fair hands. In this way the third drop would be administered, and would prostrate even the most vigorous man. The doctor would be completely puzzled to see that the apparently simple ailment did not surrender to his drugs, and while he would be still in the dark as to its nature, other doses would be given, until at length death would claim the victim for its own…
To save her fair fame, the wife would demand a post-mortem examination. Result, nothing — except that the woman was able to pose as a slandered innocent, and then it would be remembered that her husband died without either pain, inflammation, fever, or spasms. If, after this, the woman within a year or two formed a now connection, nobody could blame her; for, everything considered, it would be a sore trial for her to continue to bear the name of a man whose relatives had accused her of poisoning him.”