Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly abbreviated to LSD. LSD is now a very well-known and well documented hallucinogenic and psychedelic drug, the most powerful known hallucinogen. In 1963 in Australia it was still mostly unknown, but there was a belief that it was an aphrodisiac. It did not become illegal until 1966.
Until supplanted by the hydrogen sulfide theory in September 2006, LSD was the firm favourite for being the poison that killed Bogle and Chandler. While not the initially suspected -- at the time of the deaths, the only known death due to LSD was that of an elephant 19 -- by mid-1963 it was regarded as a possible poison. Curiously, Geoffrey Chandler in So you think I did it says that LSD was suggested as a possibility and dismissed. The most probable reason for this dismissal is that the moment LSD is extracted from a body and exposed to light, it decomposes. None of the forensic scientists in Sydney at the time of the Bogle-Chandler deaths would have been aware of this, so no physical tests that were conducted would have shown any trace of the drug. Nevertheless, the picture that Bogle took to the party was seen by many as evidence that he had used LSD. The picture is rather bizarre even when reproduced without colour, showing a severed hand and a woman with two faces. It is the sort of picture that a person might draw thinking that it looks like a Picasso.
The first real evidence suggesting that LSD might have been the cause of death came in 1987 with a death in Britain featuring very similar symptoms 20 . An inmate of Brixton Prison had arranged for a girlfriend to transfer some LSD into his mouth during a visit. He swallowed the LSD by accident and died soon after. The symptoms associated with the poisoning and death were the same as those of Bogle and Chandler.
In 1993, Dr Jo Duflou, deputy director and senior forensic pathologist at the NSW Institute of Forensic Medicine, attended a scientific conference in Dusseldorf, Germany. During lunch he sat next to Dr Fredric Rieders, a forensic toxicologist from Pennsylvania, USA. Dr Rieders was an expert in detecting toxic substances from tissue samples in poor condition, as well as being an authority on LSD. As Dr Duflou and Dr Rieders talked, Dr Duflou realised that Dr Rieders had the expertise to help in the Bogle-Chandler case. It is a little-known fact that the hearts of Bogle and Chandler (and indeed, of Linda Agostini, the Pyjama Girl) were preserved in formalin.
On 7 January 1994, Dr Duflou sent samples to Dr Rieders. Since the 1970s there have existed three techniques for forensic toxicologists to identify substances. These are mass spectrometry, gas chromatography and radio immunoassays. While some of these techniques may have existed before, they were not used optimally until the development of sufficient computing power to process the data they provided.
The samples were tiny, each no bigger than a fingernail, and suffered further from the fact that they had been stored in formalin. While this had been done years before to preserve them for microscopic analysis, it created further problems in that formalin interferes with toxicological analysis. It does this by altering the acidity of the sample, as well changing molecules within it. Rieders overcame this problem by freezing part of the samples and reducing the air pressure around them, causing the formalin to evaporate, but otherwise leaving the samples unaffected.
Having removed the formalin, Rieders ran a probe. Probes are the basis of radio immunoassay, and are designed to bind with a specific target substance. For example, a probe for LSD will not detect heroin or arsenic. Rieders accordingly ran an LSD probe, and detected LSD in the tissue samples both of Dr Bogle and Mrs Chandler.
These results were widely publicised, and seemed to confirm existing speculation. However, the results needed to be confirmed and so a second, more sensitive, series of test were conducted. These failed to find any traces of LSD in the tissue samples. This appears to rule out the possibility that LSD was the poison.
Other speculation: