ANTIFREEZE AS A POISON, WHEN A CASE GETS PERSONAL, AND NETWORKING WITH COPS ​- EPISODE 003 -

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TRANSCRIPT:

This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau: Antifreeze as a poison, when a case gets personal, and my super ninja trick for networking with cops.

I'm Adam Richardson and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau.

Welcome to Episode #3 of the Writer's Detective Bureau podcast, which is dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters with the craft of writing crime related fiction. You can submit your own questions at writersdetective.com/podcast and I'll do my best to answer them on an upcoming episode.

Before we get into this week's listener questions, I would like to wish a gigantic thank you to Joan Raymond at joanraymondwriting.com. She is my very first patron over at patreon.com. This show would not be possible without the support of listeners like Joan. Most listeners of this show are writers and we all know that writers make the best readers so please consider checking out Joan's website at joanraymondwriting.com to learn more about her work.

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Author Kim Hunt Harris writes, "My murder victim was given antifreeze in an alcohol drink. Then was suffocated with a pillow to finish him off. My amateur sleuth performed CPR. Would my sleuth be able to taste or somehow know that the victim had ingested antifreeze? Would it, for instance, cause a tingling sensation or anything like that?"

That's an excellent question and I cannot say that I have ever encountered an antifreeze case so I don't know if it tingles or not. I do know that it tends to be sweet and as a result, it actually kills a lot of cats and dogs because they're attracted to the taste. As of late, antifreeze manufacturers have actually tried to add a bitterness taste to keep that from happening at least for children, but I believe it is still rather sweet to the taste, but I don't know about it actually tingling.

Doing some online searches, I'm seeing that the antifreeze would very likely cause nausea and vomiting. Your sleuth would most likely find signs that they had thrown up and actually, the descriptions of ingesting antifreeze, which is ethylene glycol, often presents itself very much like alcohol poisoning. It's a good call of having it go into an alcohol drink so your sleuth would most likely believe that it was strictly just over-drinking with the alcohol. I don't know that they would detect the taste by any means, especially if the victim had vomited.

You then went on to say that there was suffocation with a pillow. Now the suffocation with the pillow would actually be the indicator that... 

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