On July 4th 2018, a paramedic was hurrying through a hospital in England when a supervisor flagged him down, looking very concerned.
She asked him if he had been one of the paramedics on a very specific call a few days earlier.
Surprised, the paramedic said yes.
The call had been completely typical, so he didn't really understand why this particular call mattered so much.
But the instant he confirmed he had been there, his supervisor said she would explain in a minute, but for right now he had to take off all of his gear.
Like all of it right now.
Because there was a chance that what he was wearing could kill him.
So if you're a fan of the strange, dark and mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right show, because that's all we do.
So if that's of interest to you, please sneak into the Follow Buttons house and remove all of their outlets and replace them with blank plates.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
On the afternoon of June 29th 2018, a 44-year-old woman named Dawn Sturgis sat on a blanket in a park in Salisbury England, drinking some wine with a few friends and her boyfriend, Charlie Rowley.
It was Dawn's favorite way to spend a Friday, especially since it involved Charlie.
So they'd been dating for 16 months and she was completely in love with him, primarily because Charlie was truly like the lone bright spot in Dawn's otherwise really difficult life.
So Dawn was an alcoholic who had struggled with an undiagnosed case of bipolar disorder for years.
And so she had a hard time finding work.
And for the last two years, she'd actually lived in a therapeutic group home.
But it was a little after she had moved in there that she had very fortunately met Charlie.
Now, on paper, Dawn and Charlie did not seem like they would be good for each other.
Charlie was addicted to heroin.
He also didn't have a job and he was frequently in trouble with the law.
And so when they first got together, people in Dawn's life worried that Charlie ultimately, was just going to pull her down even further into her own problems.
But they did make each other really happy, and so they spent basically all of their time together, going between each other's apartments and visiting the park and hanging out with their friends.
And for Dawn, this taste of happiness had made her want to make some positive changes in her life.
Now she still drank alcohol, but she finally got her bipolar disorder diagnosed and properly medicated and she was feeling stable for the first time in years.
She was even planning to move out of that group home and into a new apartment soon and hope that you know that would give her a chance for a true fresh start.
And because of all these changes, Dawn had planned a get-together with her family to show them how well she was doing.
It was in a few days, and she'd really wanted Charlie to come with her, since their relationship, at least in her mind, was a huge reason she'd been so motivated to turn this corner.
Except despite how much she adored Charlie and really was excited for her life with him at the current moment, as they sat in the park on this Friday, she actually was really mad at him.
So before arriving at the park, Charlie and their friends had done some heroin and some other drugs.
And being under the influence of these substances was making Charlie act like a total jerk.
Dawn had just bought some new hair dye to give herself a new look for this get-together with her family.
And now Charlie, high on drugs, was wasting it by putting it in his beard and his eyebrows as a joke.
And so Don ultimately was really mad, not so much because he was wasting the dye, but because by dyeing your beard and eyebrows and all that that Charlie was gonna look like a total deranged mess when he met her family for the first time in a few days.
And so when she expressed her concerns to Charlie, he did go and wash out the dye from his face and he got most of it out.
But even after, Don still felt just so annoyed by the whole thing.
It's like he knew how important this meeting with her family was going to be.
Why would you jeopardize that?
And so, in the end, even after he had cleaned himself up, Dawn just got up and stormed off, leaving Charlie and the friends to pack everything up.
She was done.
Hours later, around 10 pm that night.
Dawn lay on the couch in Charlie's living room listening to Charlie and their friend Sam Hobson talk about life and how unpredictable and how unfair it could be.
Now Dawn was still feeling annoyed at Charlie, but overall she was mostly back to being in a pretty good mood.
After she had stormed away from the park, she had gone to her place and she had dyed her hair with the rest of the dye that was left.
And then she'd called her mom.
Dawn actually had three kids of her own, and two of them were adults.
But her own mother, so Dawn's mother, had custody of the youngest child.
And Dawn was hoping that maybe they could all see each other tomorrow at this get-together.
And her mother had said yes.
So Dawn was really looking forward to that.
But at this exact moment, all Dawn really wanted to do was just go to sleep.
So she got up off the couch to go grab her nightly medication out of the bathroom.
And just to get there she had to carefully step around all the junk and just sort of random items that were laying strewn about all over Charlie's apartment.
Charlie was always going out and finding things out on the street or even in dumpsters and bringing those things back home.
Sometimes he would sell these things afterwards, but a lot of the things he just sort of kept around.
So the apartment was very cluttered.
But Dawn successfully navigated the pathway to the bathroom.
She grabbed her pills and then went back to the couch, swallowed the medication and then she lay back into the cushions.
Then minutes later, she was asleep.
The next morning, Dawn woke up on Charlie's couch a little bit before 9.30 a.m.
She did have a small hangover, just a little headache, but by her standards, that was not so bad.
She had not drank a ton the day before, so this was a good start to her day.
Just a few minutes later, Charlie came into the room and he sat on the couch next to her and said good morning.
And between Dawn, not feeling that great physically and remembering how obnoxious Charlie had been yesterday with the hair dye.
Dawn really didn't feel like talking to him right now.
But before she could say as much, Charlie's eyes lit up and he said he'd almost forgotten.
He actually had a present for her that he'd gotten a few days ago.
And then Charlie, he jumped up and he disappeared into the kitchen.
And then he came back with a box, which he said was for her.
It was her gift.
And this made Dawn forget all about her irritation with him.
Dawn didn't get very many gifts.
I mean, she had a lot of friends in her life who, you know, wanted to give her gifts.
But, you know, they, much like her and Charlie, didn't have much money.
And so gifts were not a common thing in her life.
And so to be receiving this gift right now was really exciting.
And so Dawn smiled widely and she opened up the box's lid.
And inside was this clearly very expensive bottle of perfume.
And she gasped when she saw it.
It was brand new.
She would never have been able to afford something like this.
And she was shocked, frankly, that Charlie had managed to get it for her.
Like, how could he have gotten this?
Dawn gave Charlie a very excited hug and she told him she absolutely loved it.
And so she pulled it out and she sprayed some on her wrist and she rubbed them together and she thought it smelled so good.
And then she handed the bottle to Charlie and told him to please put this somewhere safe.
Then she stood up from the couch with a big smile on her face and she went to get her makeup to go get ready for the day.
About five minutes later, Dawn was sitting back on the couch with her makeup bag now on her lap, and she was applying foundation to her face and telling Charlie about how she was thinking about putting more dye in her hair, maybe a blue streak this time.
But as she finished her foundation and reached for her powder, she felt her headache suddenly intensify.
She winced, hoping it would pass.
But pretty soon she started feeling pretty lightheaded and realized she was sweating quite a bit.
She stopped talking about her hair and told Charlie she was feeling really weird.
Charlie seemed worried and asked if she wanted some pain relievers, but Dawn just shook her head.
She'd already taken her meds that day and didn't want to take more pills because it could upset her stomach.
Instead, she handed her makeup bag to Charlie and asked him to go put it back in the bedroom, and then she hurried to the bathroom to splash some water on her face.
And by the time she got in there and actually began putting the water on her face, it was like her whole body felt like it was on fire.
She was sweating so much to the point where she felt like this water wasn't enough.
And so she actually just climbed into the empty bathtub and just figured the cold tile of the tub would feel good against her hot skin.
But as soon as she climbed in and laid down, she felt her breath start to catch in her chest.
From the living room.
Charlie heard Dawn in the bathroom and he heard the sound of the water turning on and then off, and then the sound of Dawn rustling around in there.
Now he was somewhat worried about her.
But he also knew she regularly had hangovers and she clearly had one now.
And so he figured, you know, that's what this was.
He also really wanted to leave right now and go meet up with his friend Sam to shoot up some more heroin, because that would take the edge off his headache and his nausea.
However, before he could do that, he heard a weird sound coming out of the bathroom where Dawn was.
At first, he wasn't even sure what it was. but then he realized it was a gurgling sound.
And so at this point, he jumped to his feet and he hurried to the bathroom door.
And as soon as he opened it he gasped because Don was laying there in the empty bathtub, fully clothed and frothing at the mouth.
Charlie had no idea what was happening, but he instinctively ran over to her, pulled her out of the tub and he laid her on the floor and he could tell that she was basically unconscious and she was limp.
And in fact, when he listened closely to her mouth, he couldn't even tell if she was breathing.
And so Charlie's thinking, this is not a hangover.
This is something way more serious.
So he ran and got a phone and he called the emergency line.
And when the dispatcher picked up, Charlie frantically explained what was going on.
That Dawn his girlfriend had just collapsed in the bathtub out of nowhere.
The operator got his address and said they would send a paramedic, but they also told Charlie he would have to do CPR on Dawn while he waited, and so they explained to him how to do that over the phone.
Charlie was horrified, but he tried to take a deep breath and do what they said so he could help Dawn.
So he kept the phone by his side while he straddled Dawn and gave her chest compressions.
It would take an agonizing 19 minutes before a single paramedic finally arrived.
And by that time, dawn had begun to turn blue.
Charlie paced around anxiously inside of his apartment while the paramedic took over chest compressions.
Charlie could hear the paramedic calling for more help on his radio.
And sure enough, a few minutes later, more paramedics streamed inside.
And at first this made Charlie feel hopeful, like more medical support meant that Dom was gonna be okay here.
But then from his spot out in the living room he heard one of the paramedics say something about drugs like this could be an overdose or something.
Charlie heard that and he called out that Don didn't do drugs.
But the paramedics did not seem to hear him.
And a second later, their voices got more urgent.
They were using a lot of medical terminology that Charlie didn't understand, but he did catch one thing.
Don's heart had apparently stopped.
Now the paramedics were actually able to get her heart beating again, but it took them more than an hour to get her stable enough to move her from Charlie's apartment to the hospital.
And Charlie.
He just watched in panic and despair as they loaded his girlfriend on a stretcher, and then he followed them out of the apartment to stay with Dawn for as long as he could.
And then, before they put her into the ambulance, he leaned in and he told her he would meet her at the hospital.
As the ambulance doors closed and the sirens came on, Charlie's friend Sam appeared looking very shocked by the commotion.
They'd had plans to go to a church event that day that had free food, which Charlie had totally forgotten about.
But Charlie told Sam everything that had happened and said he had to skip out on that event because he needed to go to the hospital as fast as he could to meet Dawn.
But even as he was saying this out loud, he knew he really couldn't do that.
Because if he went to the hospital right now, he had no idea how long he'd be there.
And since he was addicted to heroin...
He would start to get sick from withdrawal if he didn't get some drugs in his system first.
And so Charlie felt trapped.
He really didn't know what to do here.
And he sort of felt like he was on the verge of breaking down.
You know, this was just so much.
But then he remembered he had a methadone prescription at the local pharmacy.
Methadone is a drug that's often given to people who are addicted to heroin, who are trying to get clean, and this drug is used to help them with addiction and withdrawal symptoms.
It sort of closely mimics what the body would feel if it shot up the drug, but without the euphoria and the actual high sensation of using the drug.
Now, Charlie had not actually filled his methadone prescription yet, mostly because he was not focused on getting clean.
But as he's thinking about needing to be at the hospital all day and needing to be, you know, coherent and being able to talk to doctors and nurses and Dawn, he thought well hey, I'll go fill my methadone prescription.
I'll take that.
It'll keep me, you know, from getting sick, but I'll also be clear-minded so I can be in the hospital and help Dawn.
So Charlie asked Sam if he would come with him on a different outing to go to the pharmacy to get his methadone.
A couple of hours later, at around 3.30 PM, Charlie got back to his apartment with Sam.
It had been incredibly hot outside, and walking around for that long, they now were both dripping with sweat.
After they had gone to the pharmacy.
Charlie and Sam had actually gone by that church event, but not really to get food, but instead to literally go say a prayer for Dawn.
Now they were back at his place to pack up a bag, both for himself and also for Dawn, that they would bring to her at the hospital.
And then Charlie didn't really know how long he would be there, but he now had his methadone and figured he'd be okay.
But as Charlie was doing this, it was like he couldn't think straight.
He had this really intense headache and even though it had been hot outside, it was like he just couldn't stop sweating.
And so Charlie was thinking to himself, you know, maybe it's the methadone.
He had never done it before, and maybe this is like a byproduct.
Maybe these are symptoms from taking methadone.
So he decided he would just take a shower, thinking that would kind of, you know, clear out these symptoms and he'd be back to normal.
But after the shower, he felt even worse.
And when he looked in the mirror, he saw his pupils were now constricted to little pinpricks.
But he still tried to press on here and he went into his room to get dressed and to finish packing Don's bag.
But as just a couple of minutes went by, he noticed his heart began to race.
And as it raced, it got faster and faster like he couldn't calm it down.
Now over the past couple of days between the methadone and heroin.
You know Charlie had basically used a lot of drugs, but he did drugs all the time and he'd never felt this combination of symptoms before.
And so Charlie, he leaves the bedroom and he goes into the living room and he just sits down on the couch, feeling completely awful.
And he has this thought come to him.
He's thinking, okay, I don't think it's the drugs because I always do drugs and this is not it.
I'm not.
I've never felt this way looks over at Sam, his friend, and he has this weird thought that it's like what if Sam poisoned me?
What if that's what's going on here?
What if I've been poisoned?
And without really thinking through how or when this could have happened or why, Charlie began berating Sam saying, And Sam was so caught off guard that he was like what are you talking about?
And he began backing away.
And Charlie.
He just jumped up off the couch and began to pursue Sam, like he was going to attack him.
But after only taking a couple of steps away from the couch...
Charlie's mouth filled up with so much saliva that he stopped being able to speak clearly.
All he could do was kind of gurgle and spit out this froth.
And then his legs got so weak and wobbly that he had to lean against the wall just to keep from falling down.
And then he felt his whole body begin to seize up.
And then the last thing Charlie was aware of was his friend Sam grabbing a phone and calling for an ambulance.
About an hour later, inside of the emergency room of the Salisbury District Hospital, the on-call doctor stood in Charlie Rowley's treatment room while a nurse at his bedside took his blood.
The doctor had just finished examining Charlie, who was now unconscious.
He'd clearly had a seizure, and now he had a fever.
He had constricted pupils, and he had labored breathing.
So clearly, to the doctor, Charlie's condition was very serious.
But the doctor was sure he knew exactly what had caused it.
Charlie had overdosed on drugs and the doctor really felt strongly about this because Charlie's girlfriend Dawn, had been treated that morning for the exact same thing.
She'd been brought in after her heart stopped, and she'd had a lot of the same symptoms as Charlie.
Now they had stabilized her, but she'd been admitted to the intensive care unit and was still listed in critical condition.
And so the doctor felt really confident in his diagnosis of both Don and Charlie, because the symptoms fit.
And the officer in charge of both cases had confirmed that Charlie, at least, was a known drug user.
And the apartment where they'd both been found had been full of needles and other drug paraphernalia.
Over the next 24 hours, neither Don nor Charlie got any better.
In fact, they both got much worse.
Their nervous systems began to completely break down, meaning that essential body functions like breathing were beginning to fail.
Don was literally in a coma and being kept alive by a life support machine, and Charlie was also still unconscious and his breathing had declined to the point where they had to put him on a ventilator.
He'd also been moved to the intensive care unit, same as Don.
And so at this point, Charlie and Dawn no longer looked like they had simply overdosed on drugs.
It seemed like maybe they actually took a bad drug, like there was poison in the drugs they took perhaps, or something completely different.
But none of the medical staff could figure out what was actually wrong.
It was totally anomalous.
By the afternoon of July 3rd, so three days after Don and Charlie were hospitalized.
One of the doctors in the intensive care unit where they were his name was Stephen Jukes.
He had officially taken over both of their cases.
Dr Jukes had seen the results from the initial toxicology screenings and they showed that, while Charlie did have a significant amount of heroin and other drugs in his system, Don did not.
All her results showed was that she'd taken some prescription psychiatric medication.
And so Dr. Jukes had sent more of their blood to another lab to test for a wider range of drugs.
So he was waiting on those results.
But admittedly, he was losing faith that the results he was going to get would give him his answer.
Now, by this point, Dr. Jukes had ruled out some things that could have caused their symptoms.
Like at one point they believed that maybe the two had been exposed to a gas leak in Charlie's apartment, because some of the symptoms you get with the gas leak are similar to what they had.
But the main reason this theory didn't really work out is, you know, Don and Charlie had been in the apartment together that morning that Don was brought into the hospital, but only Don was affected.
Charlie wasn't.
And so presumably they were both being exposed at the same time to you know if there was a gas leak.
But then Charlie, he leaves the house for several hours.
So he's out completely unexposed to whatever was in there.
He comes back into the apartment and then he feels sick.
It just, it didn't really add up.
If he got sick from a gas leak in the apartment, it should have happened at the same time as Dawn.
Also the first responders.
When they were in there working on Dawn they didn't report smelling anything odd.
Now, of course, some leaks like carbon monoxide.
You wouldn't be able to smell that, but a typical gas leak you would be able to smell.
It smells like rotten eggs.
Plus, you also have the fact that when Charlie got sick Sam, his friend, was in the apartment as well and he did not get sick.
So all told, the gas leak theory seemed to not be it.
Dr Jukes had also briefly wondered if maybe what had happened to Don and Charlie was connected to this strange toxin exposure case that had come through the hospital a couple of months earlier.
However, the victims in that case were from out of the country and Don and Charlie had not been out of England, so Dr Jukes had ruled that out as well.
But Dr. Jukes did have one theory he still thought was a good one.
Maybe this was pesticide poisoning.
It matched with their symptoms and Dr Jukes knew that sometimes street drugs can be contaminated with pesticides.
So if Don and Charlie had both taken something that Dr Jukes hadn't tested for yet and they could have maybe been exposed that way,
He had told the police about this theory, and so they'd issued a press release encouraging drug users to be extra cautious.
In case you know, there was this pesticide out there.
But Dr. Jukes also knew that drugs were not the only way people could be exposed to pesticides.
Simply eating, drinking, or breathing in contaminated food or water or air could be fatal.
And this was extremely troubling to Dr. Jukes. and everybody else involved with the case.
Because if Don and Charlie had been exposed to potentially deadly chemicals just by doing normal things in their home or neighborhood, that meant that basically everybody else in their neighborhood was also in danger of getting sick too.
Now, until Don or Charlie woke up again, They were not going to be able to figure out you know where they had been or what they had touched or ingested before they got sick.
So Dr. Jukes felt like he needed to get that information from somewhere else and fast.
The next morning, July 4th, so four days after Dawn and Charlie got sick Dr Jukes pushed open a door to a room where Dawn's mother, her three sisters and her son were all waiting.
He'd heard they were all here visiting Dawn, and so he had had one of the nurses send them to one of these hospital family rooms so he could speak to them.
He was hoping that they might be able to shed some light on where Dawn had been and what she might have eaten or drank before she got sick.
Now Dawn's family was staring at him with anxious expressions on their faces, barely got out his introduction before they started lobbing questions at him about what was going on and why the news was describing Dawn as some kind of drug addict.
Dr Jukes just held up his hand to slow them down and once they were quiet he explained that at first they had believed this was an overdose, because she had all the symptoms for it.
But now, based on how the symptoms had progressed, he knew overdose was very likely.
Not the case here.
Then he told them his theory about the pesticides and said he really needed their help with it.
He asked them to tell him everything they could about Dawn, her habits, her health history and the people she typically saw.
Dawn's mother said she had spoken to Dawn on the phone the night before all this started.
And she said Dawn seemed fine.
She had even asked to see her young daughter the next day at the big family get-together they were planning.
Aside from that though, the family said that Dawn struggled with alcoholism and her mental health, and she didn't always tell them everything.
And so they just didn't know much about Dawn's daily life with Charlie or her friends in Salisbury, although they were pretty sure that she rarely ever went outside of the city.
But what the family primarily wanted to communicate to Dr Jukes was that Dawn was not just some nobody, the way the news had portrayed her.
She was a loving mother and sister and daughter and friend and she was really trying to do better and she was doing better.
She didn't want much.
She just wanted a place of her own and a little more stability in her life, and that's the path she was on.
And so they begged him not to give up on her.
Dr. Jukes promised he would not.
But as he left the room, he couldn't help but feel disappointed.
He was glad to know more about Dawn as a person.
She seemed wonderful.
But he had been hoping for some kind of breakthrough about what exactly had happened to her.
And he hadn't gotten that.
I mean, none of them had been able to give him any answer.
It could maybe even begin to explain what was going on.
And so at this point, he really wasn't sure what else he could even do.
But as Dr Jukes headed back towards his office to try to figure out his next move, he saw a lab tech rushing towards him down the hallway.
The tech was holding a piece of paper and when he reached Dr Jukes he shoved the paper into his hands.
The tech was out of breath, but told Dr. Jukes he had to read this right now.
So Dr. Dukes, he looked at the paper and he saw that it was the lab results for Dawn and Charlie.
And when he scanned its contents, he could not believe what he was reading.
The new blood tests that he had ordered did not confirm the presence of pesticides or of any other street drugs, but they did show something else.
Something so unexpected and so dangerous that Dr Jukes now knew for certain that Don and Charlie were not the only ones at risk here.
Everyone was like literally everyone in Charlie's apartment building, everyone in Don and Charlie's neighborhood all the paramedics, all the doctors, all the nurses that had treated them and all the patients in the hospital.
Literally everybody.
In fact, it was even possible that everyone in the whole city was now in danger.
And it might already be too late.
And so Dr. Jukes sprinted down the hall towards his office.
He picked up the phone and he called the police.
A few hours later, the deputy head of investigations for one of England's counter-terrorism units, Philip Murphy, stood on the street outside of Charlie's apartment building.
His team had completely cordoned off the whole building and evacuated everybody who was inside.
Dozens of officers and crime scene technicians were going in and out of the space wearing these big protective suits, and they were swabbing surfaces and collecting evidence.
Because of those tests that Dr Jukes had run, Murphy knew exactly what substance had sickened Don and Charlie, but he had no idea how they could have come in contact with it.
And answering that question was now a matter of international security.
Now, not only was Murphy's counterterrorism unit involved, but so were multiple other agencies, including the UK's Secret Service, which is known as MI5.
MI5 would deal with the other countries outside of Europe that were now getting involved in this.
In addition to Charlie's apartment, the counterterrorism unit had been deployed to the hospital and were making anyone who visited Don and Charlie now wear protective gear.
They had contacted all the paramedics and all the officers who'd interacted with Don and Charlie and made them bag up their uniforms and equipment as biohazards.
Some police officers were now sifting through literally thousands of hours of CCTV footage from all around the city from the past few weeks, looking for any signs of Don or Charlie.
And others were contacting Don and Charlie's friends to try to get a sense of their recent movements.
At least one friend had already taken officers on a tour of a park.
They'd all gone to the day before Don and Charlie got sick.
Murphy actually had a team headed there right now to close it off and start taking more samples.
He also had another team at Don's place doing the same thing.
And so, as Murphy stood there watching the officers in suits go in and out of Charlie's apartment...
He knew that really as big as this was, this was actually just the beginning.
He was going to have to be patient because, even though the situation was clearly urgent, he also knew it could take a long time to figure out exactly what happened and why.
And so, at this point, all Murphy or anybody else for that matter could do here was just hope that, you know, the authorities found some answers before more people got hurt.
But just four days later, on July 8th, Dawn was taken off life support and died in the hospital.
And of course that was incredibly tragic.
But specifically for Murphy, he was hoping to get a chance to speak to her.
She was, you know, a potential treasure trove of information about how this whole thing happened.
And now, of course, he would never get that chance.
On July 11th, so 11 days after Don and Charlie first got sick, with Don now deceased and Charlie alive but still unable to talk.
The agencies working on the case had managed to eliminate almost every location that Don and Charlie had visited as the source of this toxic substance, except for one.
And that was Charlie's apartment.
And so Murphy sent the forensics team back to the apartment to search it all over again.
That afternoon a lead officer with the forensics team stood in the middle of Charlie's small apartment alongside some of his colleagues.
This lead officer and his team were all dressed in these very heavy-duty protective suits, so they moved slowly around the cramped space as they took samples of surfaces and bagged potential evidence.
All the stuff, all the clutter in the apartment made it really hard to get around.
There were clothes on the floor and open bags of fabric and dirty dishes stacked in the sink and on the counters and overflowing trash cans.
And in the bedroom there was a bunch of makeup and some hair dye boxes scattered on the floor, along with needles and other drug paraphernalia.
There was not a ton of furniture in the apartment, but it was all over the place because paramedics had pushed it around during their response.
And other areas of the place were littered with medical debris like rubber gloves and plastic wrappers.
And there was also just some trash and just kind of like random objects water bottles, plastic toys piled up on the windowsills.
It was almost like there was literally too much in the apartment to even effectively test it all.
But as the lead officer walked around doing his best to identify things to be tested, something on a counter caught his eye.
It was an object that looked very different from anything else in the apartment.
Now, to understand what happened to Don and Charlie, you have to go back in time to three and a half months before they got sick, when an unrelated older man and a younger woman were found unresponsive on a park bench in Salisbury and brought to the Salisbury District Hospital, the same one that Don and Charlie would go to.
Now this older man and the young woman.
When they came into the hospital, they were experiencing seizures and they couldn't stop vomiting.
But after being treated at the hospital, they actually both fully recovered.
And at first the doctors there, including Dr Jukes, thought this man and woman were just regular civilians who had gotten sick, maybe from an overdose.
But soon it became clear that both of those things were not true.
Number one, they were not just regular civilians.
The older man was a Russian spy who had defected to England.
And the young woman was his daughter.
And they had definitely not overdosed.
They had been poisoned.
An investigation discovered that the substance that had been used to poison them was this very rare and deadly chemical weapon created by Russia called Novichok, a kind of nerve agent.
And so three and a half months later, after Don and Charlie were hospitalized and getting worse and worse, and then that lab tech rushed down the hallway to show Dr Jukes their new lab results.
It was Novichok, the deadly chemical that Dr Jukes saw printed on the paper.
That was in their system.
Investigators in the spy poisoning case had never been able to figure out exactly how the poison had been administered to the spy and his daughter.
But the item that Murphy's forensics team had found on the counter in Charlie's apartment the one that kind of stood out and didn't really appear like it belonged in the space was the item that ultimately solved that mystery.
It would turn out, Charlie actually found the source of the poison, unintentionally.
It was that brand new bottle of perfume that he had given to Dawn on the morning they both got sick.
Because Charlie hadn't actually bought this gift at a store, he couldn't have afforded it.
Instead, he had found it in a dumpster during one of his many dumpster diving excursions.
And that dumpster just so happened to be the exact same dumpster where a Russian agent had discarded the poison perfume after the attempted assassination.
So when Dawn accepted Charlie's gift and sprayed it on her wrists in excitement, she had accidentally exposed herself and Charlie to the deadly nerve agent.
Charlie would eventually recover from his exposure to Novichok.
As for the three Russian agents that authorities suspect were involved in this thing, they went back to Russia and have never been prosecuted, and Russia has denied involvement in the poisoning.
A quick note about our stories.
They are all based on true events, but we sometimes use pseudonyms to protect the people involved and some details are fictionalized for dramatic purposes.
The Mr Ballin Podcast Strange Dark and Mysterious Stories is hosted and executive produced by me, Mr Ballin.
Our head of writing is Evan Allen.
Our head of production is Zach Levitt.
Produced by Jeremy Bone.
Story editing by Evan Allen.
Research and fact-checking by Shelley Hsu, Samantha Van Hoose, Evan Beamer, Abigail Shumway and Camille Callahan.
Research and fact-checking supervision by Stephen Eare.
Audio editing and post-produced by Wit Lacascio and Cole Lacascio, Perry Kroll, and Jordan Stidham.
Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain.
Production coordination by Samantha Collins.
Production support by Antonio Minata and Delaina Corley.
Artwork by Jessica Clogston-Kiner.
Theme song called Something Wicked by Ross Bugden.
Thank you for listening to the Mr. Ballin Podcast.
And just a reminder every new and exclusive episode we put out on the Mr Ballin Podcast you can also now watch on the Mr Ballin YouTube channel that very same day.
And trust me, some of these stories you truly have to see to believe.
Again, my YouTube channel is just called Mr. Ballin.
If you want to listen to episodes one week early and ad-free, you can subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit SiriusXMcom slash podcast plus to listen with Spotify or another app of your choice.
So that's going to do it.
I really appreciate your support.
Until next time, see ya.
