Pharmacist kills wife with insulin

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MrBonita

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C-peptide levels will convict you every time
 
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He did it to be with his lover? Why not just divorce....
 
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Seriously, they didn't go over hypoglycemia in school? Do you know what a glucagon emergency kit is for?!
Too many pharmacy schools = too many dumb people being admitted.
 
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What can’t you kill someone with in the pharmacy? “The dose makes the poison”

Oral vanco would probably be safe. Amoxicillin would be tough to OD on. I can’t think of any injectables that would not be lethal in overdose.
 
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Reminds me of a story from a long time ago...this was once the lead story on national news (back when there were only three networks)
Claus von Bülow - Wikipedia

The Brits do seem to love homicide by insulin.

That's actually more of an example of a botch rather than a murder, lol. Yes, insulin definitely kills, but insulin is not dose reliable, and most amateurs don't know how critical hypoglycemia presents, so don't administer enough. The pharmacist on the other hand shouldn't screw this up. The variability and progression chaos is why insulin has never been considered seriously for executions.
 
To OP,

Can't say I typically criticize people for their (lack of) clinical knowledge on this forum, as we have enough a-wods on SDN already doing this - but you should know that. The nerds on this forum won't ever let you live that down.
 
My local serial killer commonly used insulin to kill patients, or, as he saw it, spare them the pain of resuscitation associated with going into cardiac arrest. But intravenous digoxin seemed to be his drug of choice. He was a nurse with a history of mental illness and job hopping, to which employers turned a blind eye due to the ongoing nursing shortage at the time. Number of confirmed victims: 29 - 35. Possibly as many as 400.

Charles Cullen - Wikipedia
 

Sorry, the pharmacist isn't referring to you, I was referring to the murderer. I did read the article, and that's a pity. Some of the greatest truths (especially about interactions), one can gather from literature, and this person didn't even read basic police procedurals for guaranteed catches. What I wanted to bring out is that if you're going to murder someone in the UK, don't go with poisoning or a hunting accident as the crime laboratories at New Scotland Yard are fairly competent. They are always prosecuted as murder. Instead, hit them with a car (especially getting T-boned on the passenger side seems to be a real common way over there), gas leak the place after dosing her with benzos, sell her off to Polish or Russian very polite gentlemen who'll take care of the dirty work, or take a tour of rural Scotland where you can push someone off the heather and drown them in the bog, or simply just get a divorce...Option 3 isn't illegal and would have probably been the best course even if financially punitive. But if you do the other two, accidents happen and even with a guilty verdict, it's rarely going to be the UK equivalent of Murder 1 due to the way prosecutorial conduct works. There's actually quite a bit of criminal justice literature in the UK on the difficulty of prosecuting indirect killing, because their law has a different tradition of culpability in those cases (where in the US, you still get nailed for it because we believe in looser interpretations of cause and duty that we can creatively deal with the circumstances where a strict interpretation actually disallows creativity). Just makes policing so much harder.
 
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Sorry, the pharmacist isn't referring to you, I was referring to the murderer. I did read the article, and that's a pity. Some of the greatest truths (especially about interactions), one can gather from literature, and this person didn't even read basic police procedurals for guaranteed catches. What I wanted to bring out is that if you're going to murder someone in the UK, don't go with poisoning or a hunting accident as the crime laboratories at New Scotland Yard are fairly competent. They are always prosecuted as murder. Instead, hit them with a car (especially getting T-boned on the passenger side seems to be a real common way over there), gas leak the place after dosing her with benzos, sell her off to Polish or Russian very polite gentlemen who'll take care of the dirty work, or take a tour of rural Scotland where you can push someone off the heather and drown them in the bog, or simply just get a divorce...Option 3 isn't illegal and would have probably been the best course even if financially punitive. But if you do the other two, accidents happen and even with a guilty verdict, it's rarely going to be the UK equivalent of Murder 1 due to the way prosecutorial conduct works. There's actually quite a bit of criminal justice literature in the UK on the difficulty of prosecuting indirect killing, because their law has a different tradition of culpability in those cases (where in the US, you still get nailed for it because we believe in looser interpretations of cause and duty that we can creatively deal with the circumstances where a strict interpretation actually disallows creativity). Just makes policing so much harder.

Ah I got you now. I don't read murder mysteries but my wife like to watch those murder mysteries from time to time. They usually mentioned how detective are able to trace back to the murders. I agree with you that poisoning can always be traced back since they have to do an autopsy and he was very careless with the searches and text communication.

Thanks for the info.
 
I had a wacky professor in college who told us that insulin would be a great, virtually untraceable way to kill someone. (wonder what pharmacy school this murderer went to?) The wacky professor I had, always had a good story about what methods he would use to kill or torture someone....if he wanted to, but of course, he wouldn't want to.
 
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I had a wacky professor in college who told us that insulin would be a great, virtually untraceable way to kill someone. (wonder what pharmacy school this murderer went to?) The wacky professor I had, always had a good story about what methods he would use to kill or torture someone....if he wanted to, but of course, he wouldn't want to.
If his initials are JV, I had the same guy.
 
I had a wacky professor in college who told us that insulin would be a great, virtually untraceable way to kill someone. (wonder what pharmacy school this murderer went to?) The wacky professor I had, always had a good story about what methods he would use to kill or torture someone....if he wanted to, but of course, he wouldn't want to.
That seems pretty inappropriate information to tell a class full of young minds. Someone could easily use that information in a very real way. Is it inciting violence? no. But it is still poor judgment for a mature adult.

Is it educational to describe how to remove the new binders in pseudoephedrine with tetrachloroethylene? or how to chemically concentrate the red phos from red match strike pads on match boxes? maybe but who is it really helping / educating ?
 
They did the insulin murder idea TWICE in Dexter. And in the movie Memento. So it's hardly a novel murder plan.

I had a wacky professor in college who told us that insulin would be a great, virtually untraceable way to kill someone. (wonder what pharmacy school this murderer went to?) The wacky professor I had, always had a good story about what methods he would use to kill or torture someone....if he wanted to, but of course, he wouldn't want to.

My best friend and I loved to think up scenarios like that. I think it's a combination of love of gallows humor, mystery novels, and an overactive imagination. Our dumbest/most brilliant one was to wait until someone was medically diagnosed with pneumonia and then drown them. Water was already in the lungs, THE PERFECT CRIME!
 
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The most notable thing in this thread for me is that I learned what a Tesco Bag for Life is. And how it was ironically used as a bag-of-death.
 
If his initials are JV, I had the same guy.

Actually, they aren't. Which is kind of disturbing that there is more than one pharmacy professor like that. I always wondered at the time, if my professor were secretly bragging to the class about crimes he had committed and got away with?

That seems pretty inappropriate information to tell a class full of young minds. Someone could easily use that information in a very real way. Is it inciting violence? no. But it is still poor judgment for a mature adult.
Is it educational to describe how to remove the new binders in pseudoephedrine with tetrachloroethylene? or how to chemically concentrate the red phos from red match strike pads on match boxes? maybe but who is it really helping / educating ?

Oh, I would agree. With my professor, I assume he is probably dead at this point. He was pushing retirement age when I went to school long, long ago. He hasn't been a professor for many years.
 
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