Aunt Carrie Always Made the Tea

She was a plump, bespectacled great-grandmother who baked, who fussed, who visited the sick and the elderly, and who was beloved across a wide circle of family and in-laws. They called her Aunt Carrie.

She was also, patiently and over years, killing them.

In 1950s Sydney, Caroline Grills poisoned her family with thallium — the active ingredient in a rat poison you could buy over the counter, no questions asked, during the city's rat plague. It was close to the perfect weapon: colourless, tasteless, dissolved in a cup of tea without a trace. And it was cruel. It mimicked ordinary illness on the way to killing you — cramps, numbness, hair falling out in clumps, failing sight — so no doctor thought to test for it. Four deaths in her family over two years were written off as bad luck and old age.

She was caught only when a relative — already half-blind from an earlier dose — sat across from her and watched her hand pass over a teacup. He carried the cup quietly to the kitchen, poured it into a bottle, and handed it to police. The lab found a lethal dose. When detectives told Grills that two exhumed bodies had tested positive, she offered just two words: "Fancy that."

The women she was later locked up with gave her a nickname that stuck. They called her Aunt Thally.

Australia eventually banned the poison. But it couldn't ban the vulnerability she exploited — the trust we place in the people who feed us.

Aunt Thally is one of twelve cases in my new book, The True Crime Verdict Files: Poisoners— the first volume in an ongoing anthology series.

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