History : 20th century

The same trend continued through the Victorian era, and was still labelled as an epidemic of sorts, and with poison still being considered one of the easiest and simplest ways to commit murder.[29] However, several changes occurred in the Victorian era, such as the rise of the life insurance industry, made poisoning the 'fashionable' crime considering the guaranteed and lucrative profit in the killing of a life-ensured relative with a large price on their head.[29] But as the move into the 1900s occurred, the technology of preventing poisoning became better and more efficient, and criminal poisoning become much harder than in previous centuries.[30] Criminal poisoning had to be made cleaner and better planned to match the ever-advancing technologies employed against would-be poisoners.[30] However, because of a wider range of educated people, more people were able to understand how to use poison and were intelligent or skilled enough to plan out a logical poison-induced murder, whereas in past times, usually only a select few knowledgeable people knew enough to conduct a successful homicide.[30]


Old poisons
Poison used in the past were also present in 20th-century murders. In the early 20th century, arsenic was often used, but during the mid-century, cyanide became quite popular. It was used during World War II by captured agents of the Resistance as a means of suicide to escape the heinous torture of their enemies.[30] Nazi war leader Herman Goering even used it to kill himself the night before he was supposed to be hanged during the Nuremberg Trials.[31] Adolf Hitler had also taken a pill of cyanide shortly before the fall of Berlin along with his wife, Eva Braun.[32]

However, new poisons later became more used, so as to outmatch the knowledge of the current toxicology field of science. In this way, wielding a new and unknown poison, a poisoner could kill someone, and the death might be mistaken as an unfortunate case of a rare illness.[30] This put a new strain on toxicology and other branches dealing with poison, and they were forced to work hard to keep up with the criminals who were using poisons that they had never previously encountered.