The Horrific Unsolved Strychnine Poisonings of Alice Springs’ Aboriginal Community
WARNING: This article contains the names and descriptions of people who have died.
On Sunday the 29th of March 1981, a group of Indigenous Australians gathered outside the Todd River camp settlement in Alice Springs, Northern Territory. It was 7:30am and the campers, mostly from the Pitjantjatjara and Pintubi tribes, were setting up for breakfast when another Aboriginal man arrived with a bottle of wine in his hand. The wine — a bottle of Yalumba Barossa Sweet Cream Sherry — was known to be popular among indigenous Australians at the time and with its deliciously sweet, toffee-like flavour, how could it not be?
The man with the wine told the group he’d gotten it from another man, who’d gotten it from another man, who’d found it lying beneath a peppercorn tree in the nearby church grounds. The bottle was abandoned; completely untouched with its label still perfectly in tact, displaying a vintage date of 1978.
It was Indigenous culture to share food and drink with others, and it was also custom not to waste. So, when the bottle finally made its way to the largest camp along the Todd River, the finder was more than willing to pass it around and the group were more than willing to share it.
Once the group took a sip, however, things quickly turned sour.
Some began to vomit. Some passed out. Some fell to the floor in bouts of violent seizures, their loved ones left with nothing to do but watch on in horror and cry for help.
An ambulance arrived quickly, but for two men, it just wasn’t enough. Charlie David, a South Australian in his 30's, and Nabbutta Abbott Narabula, a man in his 50’s who was reported to have a wife at the Todd River camp, both died on their way to the hospital.
In all, 16 people were poisoned that day, seven of whom were admitted to hospital for rigorous treatment.
Police were quick to respond to the crime but without no evidence to lead them to a suspect, there wasn’t much to investigate. All they could do was track down and question the men who’d handled the wine bottle but they all came back with the same story: they got it from a guy, who got it from another guy, who found it abandoned in the local church grounds. They were at a dead end, and a killer was roaming free.
The Indigenous Australian community began to panic. Was the poisoning a targeted attack? A racism-fueled ploy to take out the local Aboriginal people? Many believed so.
When an autopsy was conducted on the two deceased victims, a high volume of the toxin ‘strychnine’ was found. The bottle of Sweet Sherry, with only 2cm drunk, was found to have contained less than a teaspoon of strychnine. It was amounted to 68–136 times the lethal limit.
The chemical strychnine, along with its cousin arsenic, was well known to Australia’s Aboriginal population. Between the mid-1800’s and early 1900’s, hundreds if not thousands of Aboriginal men, women and children became victims of food and drink-related poisonings. In 1842, two white men gave arsenic and strychnine-laced flour to a local Aboriginal tribe, leading to the deaths of 30–60 people. In 1847, a further 23 people were killed after being handed flour mixed with arsenic. Later that same year, 50–60 people of the Gubi Gubi tribe were killed after consuming arsenic-laced flour, which had been left abandoned in a hut to deliberately entice the Aboriginal tribes people. In 1857–58, an unknown number of the Yeeman tribe were killed after being gifted Christmas pudding that had been made using toxic levels of strychnine as a revenge plot for spearing sheep.
For Aboriginal Elders who had lost family in these devastating massacres, the Todd River killings brought back horrifying memories. The world they finally felt somewhat safe in had been flipped upside down and they’d been thrown back into a time of fear and cruelty.
That, however, wasn’t the only thing that caused the Aboriginal community to grow suspicious.
The use of sweet sherry was known to be extremely popular among Aboriginal communities, so much so that there was racist anti-Aboriginal propaganda that depicted sweet sherry as a ‘stereotypical Aboriginal drink’, mocking the growing and incredibly serious alcoholism problem many Indigenous Australians suffered with.
To the Indigenous community, it was just too coincidental to ignore. The use of sherry and strychnine — known by most Aboriginal people as ‘white man’s poison’ — screamed racially motivated, and most had a strong feeling they already knew who their killer was.
During the 1950’s to 1960’s, a sadistic killer known as the ‘Alice Springs Dog Poisoner’ ravaged Norther Territory. Responsible for well over fifty pet deaths, the Dog Poisoner would lace raw meat and biscuits with strychnine — occasionally adding ground-up glass — and throw the fatal combination into the backyards of known pet-owners or leave it abandoned in public parks for dog-walkers to pass by. In one instance, the killer got so brave as to feed poison to a dog who sat tied up in front of a store. Lassie’s owner, a young boy who’d taken her on a stroll into town for some casual shopping, was only a couple of metres away buying some goods. He only took a few minutes to make his purchase but by the time he finished up and went outside to take Lassie back home, Lassie was already lying on the ground. She died within minutes of the poison’s ingestion.
The killer seemed to target mostly dogs, with the occasional cat. Wild animals were almost never affected. The killer almost always took breaks between sprees.
Many scoffed at the idea of the Dog Poisoner being the Todd River Killer. The Dog Poisoner had been at his prime around twenty years earlier and he’d never once escalated to killing humans. However, there were more frightening red-flags in this story than most cared to see.
The MacDonald Triad lists cruelty to animals as a primary factor in identifying a person who may go on to commit violent crimes later in life, alongside fire-starting and bed-wetting. A high number of known serial killers, such as Ted Bundy and Ivan Milat, also started their criminal career by committing acts of cruelty towards pets.
Many also feared the use of biscuits as poison bait was a deliberate ploy by the killer to target young children. In the 1950’s-60’s, many parents believed it safe for their young children to wonder the streets by themselves or with another young friend. At such an early age and with such little knowledge or experience with basic safety practices, it was only a matter of time before a youngster picked up one of the toxic biscuits and took a bite. With the levels of strychnine used, it was almost guaranteed to kill.
Most frighteningly, however, was that in 1981, the Alice Spring Dog Poisoner returned.
Between January and March of 1981, just months before the Todd River killings, twenty-three animals were killed. On the same weekend as the Todd River murders, five dogs were reported as poisoning victims. All killings involved the use of strychnine.
Though police have never officially identified any suspects, there has been one man who many have kept their eyes on.
In 1983, 29-year-old Aboriginal woman Gloria Pindan was walking along a Darwin entertainment strip when she was approached by a 22-year-old man. The man, who appeared chatty, walked her into a vacant lot where he proceeded to brutally beat her. He used a broken bottle to mutilate her body, severing her nipples and gouging out her eyes.
Her killer, Andy Albury, was quickly apprehended by police, where he admitted to the murder and likened it to “thumping on a cockroach”. He was labelled an “extremely dangerous man” and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison (Dillon, M., 2017).
But Albury wasn’t ready to let his gruesome legacy end there. He soon began confessing to other crimes around Australia, claiming he’d made his first kill at 15 years old by murdering a 14-year-old boy and burying him under a boat shed. He claimed to have stomped a man to death at an Alice Springs river bed in 1982 and to have hacked somebody else and dumped them in the Adelaide River. He also claimed to have ‘used a bottle of poisoned alcohol to kill three Aborigines in the Todd River, Alice Springs’ (Dillon, M., 2017).
However, police had begun to grow skeptical of Albury’s confessions. After admitting to the murders of 12 backpackers, investigators flew down to interview Albury in hopes of some new leads. They soon discovered that Albury’s confessions were less than reputable as he gave very few specific details and seemed only to recount what the media had already announced.
Albury’s eye for media reports could also explain his Todd River poisoning confessions. Early in the case, newspapers had mistakenly reported three poisoning deaths rather than two. This was later corrected once an inquest was held into the Todd River deaths. Apparently Albury didn’t know that.
Who exactly was responsible for the Todd River killings has remained a mystery to this day. Was it the infamous Alice Springs Dog Poisoner, the brutal killer Andy Albury, or somebody else altogether? Somebody who’d managed to hide under police’s radar for over 40 years; the murder of two men, poisoning of 14 others and dread of Australia’s entire Indigenous population sitting on their shoulders.
All the Todd River residents can do now is remember the lives of Charlie David and Nabbutta Abbott Narabula, who mercilessly and aimlessly lost their lives on March the 29th, 1981, and hope that, one day, this mystery will finally be solved.
If you have any information related to the 1981 Todd River Poisonings, or the 1950’s Alice Springs Dog Poisonings, contact Crime Stoppers at 1800 333 000 or go to the Crime Stoppers Northern Territory website at: https://nt.crimestoppers.com.au/
For a full list of Resources used in this article, please visit: https://codylwrites.com/2021/06/05/the-horrific-unsolved-case-of-the-1981-alice-springs-poisonings/
