Girl poisons mother and blogs about it

A 16-year-old Japanese girl laced her mother's food with rat poison and wrote about it online.

The girl, who is from rural Shizuoka, central Japan, was apparently inspired by Graham Young, the notorious Teacup Poisoner of Bovingdon, Hertfordshire, who, in 1962, aged 14, slowly killed his stepmother with what was thought to be the same lethal substance. Asked by the compilers of her school yearbook to identify the historical figure she admired the most, she named Young.

In further emulation of her deranged hero, who poisoned numerous family members and work colleagues and died in Parkhurst after nine years in Broadmoor, the Japanese girl recorded her mother’s horrific daily sufferings in a matter-of-fact internet diary.

The girl’s blog has been removed from the internet but extracts apparently copied from it survive on other Japanese websites.

“It’s a bright, sunny day today, and I administered a delivery of acetic thallium,” the girl wrote in August. “The man in the pharmacy didn’t realise he had sold me such a powerful drug.”

Other entries attempt to match the meticulously scientific style of Young’s macabre diary, where he transcribed in detail the effects of each poison he administered and weighed up whether his subjects should live or die in excruciating pain.

The girl refers directly to Young’s diary in her blog, and is said to have been heavily influenced by a 1995 film, The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, which was dubbed into Japanese and dramatises Young’s macabre fascinations with lethal substances.