Will o’ The Wisp

“CO is a will o’ the wisp.” said Doug Lucas, my mentor and retired director of the Centre of Forensic Sciences. “Because CO is a small, light molecule with almost the same density as air, its distribution is subject to the movement of ambient air such as drafts, wind and air currents. This property can cause great variations in its concentration over short distances. This in turn can create considerable confusion in cases where- for example- two people are found in relatively close proximity with one dead from CO poisoning and the other only slightly affected.”

Fortunately Dr. Doug Lucas has published 2 early case reports that illustrate the difficulties with CO poisoning, in his book, “A Life of Crime: My Career in Forensic Science.”

Before modern gas detectors, canaries had been used to detect toxic gases (mainly CO) in coal mines in Britain. Due to their high metabolism and respiration, the canaries would be affected by poisonous gases much earlier than miners, and fall off their perches.

Imagine Lucas’ surprise when he attended at an old house on Manning Ave in Toronto in June 1960, in which the CO from a defective gas furnace had caused the death of a middle age man, but there was a canary in the same room in a cage, singing merrily away. Lucas’ ambient CO measurements showed that there was a lethal concentration of CO in the air everywhere in the room except near the bird cage. He found that there was a tiny hole in the window beside the bird cage which allowed fresh air to the canary, thus saving its life.

In another case in a small town in southwestern Ontario in February 1961, a man telephoned to ask for assistance because his wife who was sleeping beside him was unconscious. By the time the police arrived, the wife was dead but he appeared unaffected. Of course in a small community the rumours started spreading that he had murdered his wife. The cause of death, however, was due to CO poisoning as a result of a defective water heater. Lucas again used his CO detector and found that the air around the wife’s pillow had a high CO concentration, but around the husband’s pillow, the CO concentration was virtually negligible.

This was due to a current of fresh air from a ill-fitted window drifting over his side of the bed and not hers.

CO is a will o’ the wisp and can appear in the strangest of places. Without modern forensic science and the skill of its practitioners, these 2 cases would have been explained as due to witchcraft or the supernatural. The husband in the second case would probably have been convicted of murder of his wife, or else some poor old, isolated woman would have been blamed for her death, convicted of being a witch, and burned at the stake.

References

Lucas, Douglas M., “A Life of Crime: My Career in Forensic Science”, 353 pp, Boca Raton, CRC Press, 2018