April 25, 2024 • 47 mins
When host Becky Milligan receives a surprise call from a crucial witness, she realizes she must revisit King Boris III’s autopsy. Shocking new evidence about his death comes tantalizingly close to solving the mystery, but time is not on anyone’s side. When an old friend turns up with a killer suggestion, it leaves a bad taste in Becky’s mouth.
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Speaker 8 (02:13):
Goodbye.
Speaker 5 (02:18):
I want to talk to you about the King's heart
and how it ended up where it did. So remember
that after Boris died in nineteen forty three, the official
cause of death was given as cardiac arrest, but a
few of the doctors tending the king on his sick
bed firmly believed he'd been poisoned. Now for religious and
(02:41):
emotional reasons, the Queen didn't want an autopsy performed, but
during the embalming process of the King's body, a mini
autopsy was performed on his heart, and somehow, when the
king was buried at the real a monaster, his heart
(03:02):
was not replaced inside his chest. You'll probably recall that
the king was kicked out of his real ar resting
place by the new Soviet regime in nineteen forty six.
They didn't much care for all the nationalist fervor his
tomb inspired, and a new grave was dug for him
at Vrana, But after the queen and the royal children
(03:24):
Simeon and Maria Louisa were sent into exile, the tomb
was dug up once more, and the King's body went missing,
never to be found again. But in nineteen ninety one,
(03:46):
his heart suddenly turned up in a picklejar, allegedly in
the empty grave, but more probably on a dusty shelf
of a medical institute. Okay, now, in the last chapter,
we just received a cryptic voicemail from someone inviting us
(04:06):
to meet up with him to talk about the Butterfly
King's mysterious death. He was addressing his message to EJ
my producer.
Speaker 6 (04:18):
Thank you for.
Speaker 5 (04:22):
So That voice belongs to a man called Dr Deutschenoff.
He's well into his nineties and has Parkinson's. He remembers
King Boris his death. He was in his early teens
when the King died. But that's not really what he
wants to chat about.
Speaker 9 (04:38):
He's fascinating for me, you should.
Speaker 5 (04:44):
He's telling me he'd be fascinated to meet an English
journalist looking into the death of the King.
Speaker 8 (04:51):
Thanks so yeah, and they hope to see you.
Speaker 5 (04:55):
And why are we so happy to receive this message?
Because Deutscheneff is actually the one witness we thought would
never agree to speak out because that pickle jar that
showed up in the early nineteen nineties, the one that
turned out to contain King Boris's heart. Well, the doctor
(05:16):
who examined that royal heart was doctor Deutschenoff from Blanchard House,
and exactly right, Media, this is the butterfly King. I'm
Becky Milligan, Chapter seven, The Heart of the Matter.
Speaker 10 (06:21):
We have lots of tree that shouldn't be here, really,
because the dying tree is spreading disease and kill more trees.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
We're taking a guided tour around the grounds of Rana
Palace with the King's suave and charming Aid Jarvil. He's
almost as knowledgeable about trees and plants as King Boris
himself was.
Speaker 10 (06:43):
And now you see there is a fallen tree on
the road. I will call now the gardens to cut it.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
It's dangerous.
Speaker 10 (06:51):
Secondly, it's ugly and it's spread diseases.
Speaker 5 (06:56):
Sickness and disease seem to be the order of the day.
Sofia to meet pathologist Dr Deutschenov. But unfortunately that meeting
isn't to be just yet because poor Dr Deutschenev goes
down with COVID and as he's now in his nineties,
we can't push for an interview until he's completely recovered.
(07:18):
But we speak to the doctor's daughter in law on
the phone. She tells us Dr. Deutchenev is even more
disappointed than we are. Apparently he has so much he
wants to tell us, so much he needs to tell us.
But all we can do is be patient and wait.
And of course spending time with Yavor is always a
(07:40):
lovely distraction.
Speaker 10 (07:41):
It's a fall of mushrooms in the garden. There is
animals as in the garden now they have years, foxes, rabbits, elephants,
not anymore.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
Foxy. Ferdinand Boris his father used to keep a small
zoo in the grounds of Rana Buffalo's exotic birds and elephants.
Speaker 10 (08:03):
But after the accident with the elephant, they move it
in the center.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
So what accident And we're not sure.
Speaker 10 (08:11):
But probably one of the people that take care about
the elephant probably beat him or something.
Speaker 5 (08:17):
The man beat the elephant, yes, right, My hunch is
this doesn't end too well for the elephant keeper.
Speaker 10 (08:24):
And one morning when this person go inside the cage
of the elephant, the elephant just without saying anything to
just push the men on the law trodden him, yeah,
smash him like a stamp.
Speaker 5 (08:40):
Oh, so there we have the Royal Palace's first sort
of murder. But was it really the only murder? I mean,
so many people hated King Boris and wanted him dead.
A heart attack seems like a convenient excuse. Sometimes in
an investigation like this one, you get the most extraordinary
(09:03):
strokes of luck, like finding a document in some old,
dusty library, an overlooked paper that gives you a brand
new lead, or a new witness suddenly springs up from
nowhere and takes your case in a whole new direction.
But sometimes difficult things happen which completely throw you off course.
(09:25):
And today is one of those days. We've just received
a text message from Dr Deutschenev's daughter in law, Maya,
and it contains some devastating news. I'm going to read
it to you. Unfortunately, Dodr Deutschenev passed away peacefully this morning.
He wanted to meet you so much. We're so sorry
(09:50):
for Dodr Deutschenev's family. In the last few weeks, we've
been in regular contact with them, and they've quite often
mentioned that the prospect of talking to us and getting
the chance to tell his side of King Boris's story
was what was keeping doctr Jeutschenov alive. But now, of
course we'll never know exactly what he was burning to
(10:11):
tell us. He didn't share those details with his family,
and understandably they've declined to do an interview with us.
They're not only grieving. They don't want to second guess him.
They don't want to put words into his mouth. But
what we do know is this, Cast yourself back in
(10:32):
time to a medical lab in Sofia, October nineteen ninety one,
and a man in his early sixties is hunched over
a microscope. He wears a white coat, and he's studying something.
Closely before him. On the table is a glass jar,
(10:52):
the sort of large jar you'd store jamming, maybe pickles.
There's no label on the jar, but you don't really
need a medical degree to recognize what's inside it, because
floating in the clear preserving liquid is a heart, a
human heart. On the workbench sits a smaller glass file.
(11:19):
There's a scrap of paper inside it. It reads the
Heart of His Majesty King Boris the Third and it's
signed by the Bulgarian doctors who tended the monarch in
his final hours, who claim the cause of death was
a cardiac arrest. The pathologist in the lab coat has
(11:39):
spent hours examining and measuring the heart. There's no doubt
it's the royal heart. Its description perfectly matches the autopsy
report written in nineteen forty three. But it's almost fifty
years since that document was tight and in that time
science has moved on can considerably. As the pathologist sits
(12:04):
back and begins to write up his notes, you can
read the name bad Pin to his lapel. Dr Deutschen Deutschenov.
He's smiling because Dr Deutschenev has carried out exhaustive tests
on the King's heart and he's made a huge discovery.
He now knows exactly what killed King Boris. He has
(12:28):
scientific proof and he can sum up his findings in
just two small words, heart attack. He can find no
trace of poison and no signs of foul play. Dr
Deutschenov concludes that King Boris, the Third of Bulgaria died
(12:52):
a natural death. After all the decades of theories, speculation
and finger pointing, is it possible that this isn't a
case of murder? After all, we'll never know if Dr
Deutschenev had more specific information he wanted to disclose to us.
(13:17):
We just know he believed the King died of a
heart attack. So I've decided to talk over his findings
with another forensic pathologist to try and understand what a
pathologist really does, what someone like Dr Deutschenev would have
been looking for. So I want to introduce you to
someone you met briefly in our very first chapter, Dr
(13:38):
Stuart Hamilton. He's fascinated by how the body works and
how it goes wrong. He is not quite so bothered
about his bedside manner though.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
I am not particularly good with poorly people, which is
somewhat unfortunate. So my patients are very, very quiet.
Speaker 5 (14:00):
As quiet as the grave. In fact, Dr Hamilton has
been working with the dead for the past twenty years.
What should I say on the dead?
Speaker 1 (14:11):
So our main role is to examine bodies in cases
of suspicious deaths or homicides. We investigate as best we
can what the cause of death might be.
Speaker 5 (14:25):
I mean, if I'm honest, it sounds a bit gruesome.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
It is gruesome. It is examining and cutting into dead
human beings as a day job.
Speaker 5 (14:36):
Gruesome for sure, but essential so that the living get
answers and the dead can rest in peace. So let's
imagine King Boris had ended up on Dr Hamilton's marble slab.
What proof would he need to confirm that the monarch
had indeed died of a simple cardiac arrest.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
A heart attack to a doctor, to a pathologist, is
also known as a myocardial infact, and that means that
part of the muscle of your heart is not receiving
enough blood for it to stay alive, and that means
that the muscle will die, and if that is enough damage,
(15:20):
it can kill the person. It essentially stops the heart working,
stops the pump working.
Speaker 5 (15:25):
So that's fairly clear. No pump, no pulse. But what
makes that heart muscle die?
Speaker 1 (15:32):
You get fatty deposits building up in the arteries that
supply the heart itself. They become narrowed and they don't
let as much blood through as they should, and that
can produce symptoms such as angina that chest pain on exertion.
Speaker 5 (15:49):
Hang on a second, tell me a little more about angina.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Angina is a warning sign for a heart attack.
Speaker 5 (16:00):
That's what I feared. Remember how King Boris went climbing
with his brother Kirol after that dreadful final meeting with Hitler.
We know he was in very low spirits, that he
felt sick, and that he was suffering from bad chest pain. Well,
here's Dr Hamilton's description of how someone would feel in
(16:21):
the early stages of a heart attack.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
You have crushing chest pain, as if there's a metal
band around your chest crushing it. That pain will often
go down your arm. It may go up into your jaw,
sweatin us, some nausea. Some people even describe a feeling
of impending doom.
Speaker 5 (16:46):
Apparently Boris had confided in his wife and in his
brother and sister that he feared he was suffering from
angina pectorus and that he feared he'd die from it.
But how did the king guess this? I mean it
was nineteen forty three, way before the Internet and doctor Google.
He must have consulted a specialist for the diagnosis. And
(17:10):
that unsettles me because if he was suffering from a
mangina but then pushed himself to his physical limits climbing mountains,
a heart attack seems less surprising, less suspicious. Plus the
time frameworks.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Some people may die straight away, some people may survive
a day or so. Some people may survive two or
three weeks.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
But hang on a sec Let's remember that Boris was
a bit of a health reek. I mean, okay, he
wasn't pumping iron in the gym every two minutes, but
he was extremely fit. And someone who takes regular exercise
and who eats healthily is fairly well insured against heart failure.
Speaker 11 (17:52):
Right, that's sort of my point.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
Remember Colonel Hamish, our chemical weapons expert who served for
twenty three years in the British Army. Well, to say
he is a fitness fanatic is a bit of an understatement.
As a younger man, he actually held the world push
ups record.
Speaker 11 (18:09):
But well, I have sudden cardiac death syndrome, which is
a genetic heart condition. It's one of those things that
if you know about it, you can do things about it,
and if you date then that's very sadly when when
things can go wrong.
Speaker 5 (18:28):
Thinking about Boris, he was very fit. He was a mountaineer,
he loved walking, he loved getting out in the wild, shooting, hunting.
He was that type of king and in that way
he could have it could have been a natural death
if he'd had a condition that we just don't.
Speaker 11 (18:44):
Know about absolutely, and you know, if he had a
condition like mine, all the sort of things he did
would potentially, you know, lead to his demise. And in
those days people didn't know very much about the condition,
so couldn't do very much about it.
Speaker 5 (19:00):
Could the king have had some kind of heart defect,
a congenital problem from birth that was a ticking time
bomb waiting to explode. I can't help thinking about something
art learned, but rather in discreete. Historian Tessa Dunlop said
about the shallow genetic pool that European royal families shared
(19:22):
at the time.
Speaker 12 (19:23):
Loads of them were in bred, and that can give
you weird, you know, dicky hearts and stuff like that,
can't it. I mean, we know that Boris, with a
nose like that, probably had a few other malformations for
want of for better expression, including the left cavity of
his heart or is it a chamber?
Speaker 5 (19:37):
It is a chamber. But there's no way I was
going to mention a subject like in breeding with King
Boris's son Simeon, but actually he brought it up.
Speaker 9 (19:49):
All the royal families at one point were intermarried, related
among themselves, which in a way it was the generational
my parents.
Speaker 5 (20:01):
It really was protocol means you really cannot ask a king,
even a sort of king like Simeon, about the state
of his health. But here's what I'm thinking. If there
was a heart problem in Boris's family, it probably would
have been passed down the line to Maria Luisa or Simeon,
who are ninety and eighty six, respectively, and still going strong.
Speaker 9 (20:27):
Did my father die from a massive heart attack? Of fine,
I mean, it happens, and this is still an open question.
I don't mention it because I have no rational proof.
Speaker 5 (20:40):
But did the doctors who performed Boris's autopsy in nineteen
forty three have proof? How did they or even Dr
Deutschenoff nearly fifty years later know they were making the
right call. R. Stuart Hamilton are forensic pathologist.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
It's one of those things that the naked eye examination
can identify straight away. There will be changes that you
can see down the microscope. So you will start with
inflammation in the heart, and then you will see the
dead muscle starting to be eaten away and replaced with
early scar tissue. So again, for a true heart attack,
(21:22):
the findings are quite specific and quite clear.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
So was the official cause of death? Correct. All along.
The science now seems to be stacking up in its favor.
But Boris wasn't even fifty.
Speaker 12 (21:41):
You're presuming that it's not possible for a man to
dive a weak heart in nineteen forty three, aged forty nine.
I would like to point out to you that at
the turn of the twentieth century, the average American male
live to the age of forty nine. It's not such
a devastatingly awful age to live to in the middle
of a wall.
Speaker 5 (21:58):
Tessa's not the only since Dr Stuart Hamilton thinks Boris
could have just been unlucky in the genetic lottery.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
As a pathologist, you can become very cynical, and you
deal with people who lived eighty five having drunken smoked
and lived on chips and crisps and die happily in
their beds, and you deal with fifty year olds who
collapse on the treadmill at the gym. So we can't
(22:26):
rule out that it's just plain unlucky.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
But Simeon can't rule it in.
Speaker 9 (22:32):
All this is again it's just conjectures. I like facts.
Speaker 5 (22:43):
Well, here are two undeniable facts. In the middle of
the Second World War, with Bulgaria's precarious future in his hands.
King Boris must have been stressed out of his brain.
And heart attacks and stress, well, everyone knows they go
hand in hand.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Stress is a very well recognized factor to precipitate a
heart attack.
Speaker 5 (23:10):
And that awful meeting with Hitler could have been the
straw that broke the camel's back. We know he couldn't
get it off his mind.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Remembering a stressful situation that stresses you again, that can
do it right.
Speaker 5 (23:25):
So it looks like the mystery is over. There is
no mystery. Dr Deutscheneff nailed it. King Boris simply died
of a cardiac arrest.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
It would be an easy conclusion to draw a middle
aged man who dies suddenly. Look he's at a heart attack.
End of story. But it's context. We're talking about powerful
people in a very difficult point in history. When you're
(23:58):
talking about geo politics, which is essentially what we are here,
there is a why. It leaves the whole situation unresolved
for me.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
So it's a case of don't let sleeping kings lie.
Really no, let's just go over the brief of a
forensic pathologist. It's not just to examine dead bodies to
find out what caused them to fail mechanically. It's also
about putting those dead bodies into context, into historical context,
(24:32):
and asking was there anyone else around who wanted that
body to fail, who maybe caused it to fail.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
One should look at the evidence, and the evidence in
this case as I see it is that we have
got somebody who would be a candidate for being bumped
off with good reason. So there is a mystery there.
Speaker 5 (24:54):
I agree. I honestly don't think we can separate this
case from the background of war. There was just two
much of an agenda.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
I would never stand up in a court and say,
beyond all reasonable doubt this is a homicide. But there
is too much to it for me to comfortably say
write it off. Never need to look at that again.
Job's done. In my profession. We don't like loose end
sort of hanging there going you haven't got to the
bottom of me yet.
Speaker 5 (25:24):
And Dr Hamilton's not the only one who thinks there's
more to this than meets the eye. King Boris's daughter
Maria Louisa, is convinced her father was murdered, despite being
aware of Dr Deutschene's findings that it was just a
heart attack.
Speaker 8 (25:40):
You can induce a heart attack. You know, that's not
an answer in many ways of bringing somebody to a
heart attack, you.
Speaker 5 (25:50):
Know, so you still questioned it after that. It wasn't
the end of the story at that point.
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Speaker 5 (29:13):
What better way of taking stock of things than over
tea and biscuits in our hotel room. I want to
mull over what I'm now feeling about Boris's death. At
least that was the plan until EJ flaws me with
a confession about our visit to Varana Palace.
Speaker 12 (29:31):
Can I ask you a question about the royal toilet?
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (29:35):
Yeah, so we both went to the royal tolet.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Did you use the comb?
Speaker 10 (29:40):
No?
Speaker 5 (29:41):
What did you comb your hair with his comb?
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Yes? What was it made out of gold stick plastic?
Speaker 5 (29:49):
What color was it gray? You literally picked up his
comb from the bit and brushed your hair with it.
Speaker 13 (29:55):
I didn't really think that it was his, so I
just did.
Speaker 5 (29:58):
It was there with some bounder puffs, and I thought it.
Speaker 8 (30:00):
Thank you.
Speaker 5 (30:00):
Did you use the powder puffs as well? I didn't
use the powder puffs.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
No.
Speaker 5 (30:03):
I just can't believe he used his comb. I just
I actually can't believe that. Talk about making yourself at
home in a royal palace, I.
Speaker 8 (30:12):
Went to know.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
I didn't.
Speaker 5 (30:13):
I just went in and out for me because it
was a bit of a rush. I hate you wash
your hands, of course I did, thank you, Hm. Of
course I did. In COVID and everything wouldn't bothered otherwise Actually,
(30:33):
since we're getting all confessional here, I'm going to let
you in on another little secret. Well it's really Yavel's
little secret. You'll remember that Maria Louisa is celebrating her
ninetieth birthday. Well, Yarville has been working on a little
surprise for her, and I'm sure she's going to love it.
Speaker 8 (30:53):
I hate surprises because you know you don't know what's
going to happen.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
Oh well, let's not mention that to Yarville.
Speaker 15 (31:02):
The surprise is the cake with penguins with a T
shirt of Bulgarian football team Lefski, because princess very much
like penguins and this football team Lefski, which is from
the period of King Boris time.
Speaker 5 (31:17):
She'll be so excited, won't she.
Speaker 15 (31:19):
I mean, also, I hope so.
Speaker 5 (31:22):
If I were a princess, I honestly couldn't imagine a
nicer rate than Yavel. But how do royal families trust
their staff? I mean, how do they know that Javel
hasn't slipped a little poison and that penguin cake? Simeon's
rather horrified when I ask him, can you trust him?
Speaker 9 (31:42):
Who?
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yevo secretary?
Speaker 9 (31:49):
I hope you see, I can't possibly visualize anything like,
because if you don't trust someone you see every day,
finally you become insane.
Speaker 5 (32:00):
I'm only teasing, of course, Yavill's a total star, but
I asked the royal siblings about him because I wanted
to make a serious point. When King Boris was here
in Varana Palace, in the gritty heart of the Second
World War, trust was not something one could take for granted.
And even at the tender age of six, Simeon was
(32:22):
made well aware that walls have ears.
Speaker 9 (32:27):
What I remember is that mother will tell us that, well,
we just should know how to keep our mouth shut.
But that was as far as will go into anything
sort of weird or secret or what have you. I
think it was more for is anybody eavesdropping or I
(32:49):
don't know.
Speaker 5 (32:50):
But interesting that the royal children were taught to be
careful about what they said. In earshot of palace staff,
did the queen suspect someone was listening out for information
information she feared they might use to kill the king.
Speaker 9 (33:06):
It wasn't any spy phobia agent phobia. It's much later
that you realize that somebody might betray you or not.
Things happen like in any war like in any royal
quarto or something. So it wasn't really specifically sinister or something.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
Now, let's be clear about something. I'm not in any
way ignoring Dr Deutschenef's scientific conclusions or overriding them. I
absolutely acknowledge that as the pathologist who actually performed an
autopsy on the King's heart in nineteen ninety one, Dr
Deutschenev's testimony is unique. But I do still have to
(33:52):
push forward with other lines of investigation, especially as Dr
Stuart Hamilton, our own forensic pathologist, has cast doubt on
whether everything adds up quite so neatly, whether we really
can just accept that the King's death was unfortunate but
completely natural. King Boris was pretty cautious about his health.
(34:17):
He wasn't a hypochondriac like his father Foxy Ferdinand, but
he did go in for cures and remedies. According to
Stefan Grueff in his book Crown of Thorns, King Boris
went everywhere with a substantial amount of pills and potions.
He owned a sort of traveling pharmacy.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Certainly there are substances which can mimic a heart attack.
The one that immediately leaps to mind in normal everyday
life to some extent, would be cocaine. Cocaine can cause
the arteries to your heart to spasm to close down.
Speaker 5 (34:56):
Are you saying King Boris may have been on cocaine.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
I'm not suggesting he on cocaine, but I'm thinking of
things that can cause a similar outcome. Anything that causes
your arteries to spasm will stop the blood flowing through them,
and that means the heart muscle can be damaged.
Speaker 5 (35:16):
And it wouldn't have been difficult for someone, someone who
had close access to Boris to substitute his vitamin kills
and headache remedies for something more sinister. But who a
close aid the jarv ore of times past. The only
problem is it seems that Boris used his portable medicine
(35:38):
cabinet as a kind of comfort blanket. He liked to
know it was nearby, but he rarely actually used its contents.
A close aid would have known that, they'd have known.
There were no guarantees that Boris would have swallowed any
poisonous pills. And here's the old sticking point, of course.
(36:00):
Dr Deutschenef was adamant that he found no traces of
poison in the King's heart. When he re examined it
in the nineteen nineties, he only found the proof that
Boris had had a cardiac arrest. But Dr Stuart Hamilton
still thinks it's perfectly possible that Deutscheneff may have missed something,
(36:20):
not because he thinks Deutschenef wasn't doing his job properly,
but because he simply didn't test for the right poison.
Dr Hamilton's made the same mistake himself.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
I dealt with one person who ate U seeds oh
to end their life, which was an interesting one.
Speaker 5 (36:41):
Unsurprisingly, testing for plant seed poisoning is not standard procedure
in the crime scene handbook. But luckily one of the
crime scene investigators was a horticultural fanatic, and he alerted
Dr Hamilton to the fact that the body was found
among U trees, whose seeds he knew are deathly.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
If one of the crimson investigators hadn't been a keen gardener,
I'm not sure I would have picked that up.
Speaker 5 (37:10):
So for all the certainty and expertise, there is an
element of luck.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
There is an element of luck I would have missed
because we don't routinely test for the poison that is
in seeds from a U tree.
Speaker 5 (37:25):
That story reminds me of something something Colonel Hamish, our
chemical weapons expert, once said when we were wondering if
the Nazis poisoned Boris, that the lack of scientific know
how at the time was definitely advantageous to want to
be assassin.
Speaker 11 (37:42):
At that time, they hadn't developed the sort of detectors
that we have now that would signal that sort of
suff So technology was there or lack of it was
their friend in those days.
Speaker 5 (37:52):
Absolutely, And we know that the Soviets had established two
poison laboratories with the soul aim of poisoning people and
getting away with it. Remember, they were using a poison
that could fool pathologists into thinking the victims had died
of a heart attack, one that couldn't be detected back then.
(38:13):
But that was nineteen forty three. The last examination of
the heart was in nineteen ninety one. But doesn't it
stand to reason that in the last thirty years technology
and toxicology has moved on leaps and bounds Again.
Speaker 11 (38:29):
When I was dealing with al Qaeder biological weapons attack
in her Art fifteen years ago, it was taking us
thirty six hours to do DNA sequencing. It's moved so
far forward.
Speaker 9 (38:40):
Now.
Speaker 11 (38:40):
What you could do in thirty six hours fifteen years ago,
you could do it fifteen minutes now. And not only
has the speed increased, but also the breadth of what
you can do.
Speaker 5 (38:52):
As I suspected, but as you know, the king's body
has gone missing. The Soviets dug it up from real
Monastery where it was laid to rest in nineteen forty three,
Boris was reburied at Varana. Then at some point during
Simeon and Maria Louisa's exile, the Communists exhumed the body
(39:17):
again and disposed of it goodness knows where. So when
the heart turned up in a picklejar in nineteen ninety one,
it was reburied again at the realer monastery. Could the
heart still hold clues clues that today's forensic medicine might
(39:37):
be able to detect that the forensic pathologists of the
nineteen nineties simply couldn't.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Pickling is a good way to preserve tissue.
Speaker 5 (39:46):
Doctor Stuart Hamilton are forensic pathologist.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
You can't get perfect toxicology from it, because obviously the
tissue will be affected by the thing. It's preserved in.
But as I say to people many times, when it
comes to investigations, if you don't look, you won't find.
If you look, you may or may not and you
don't know, and we've done it.
Speaker 5 (40:11):
Gosh, that's a tough call. Should the remains of King
Boris really be exhumed for a fourth time on the
off chance that some new trace of poison could be found.
Simeon has already told me he still worries about his
father's body, that it's not resting peacefully at Varana.
Speaker 9 (40:32):
I'm not the person who goes into any emotional moods
or things I simply regret. And now that you bring
it up, I think of it again, it's disturbing.
Speaker 5 (40:44):
It does seem almost sacrilegious to disturb the remains of
the king again, the remains of Simeon and Maria Louisa's
beloved papa.
Speaker 8 (40:56):
You know, one has to make one's peace with these things,
everyone to bring him back.
Speaker 5 (41:02):
And that's Dr Hamilton's feeling too. There's no point in
a further autopsy.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Digging up the heart would not give us a definitive.
Speaker 5 (41:11):
Answer, because of course you just can't prove a negative.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Even if we were to do tests. Even if it
came back and said no substance as present, then the
counter argument would be A, it could be something you
can't pick up. B. If it was something he was
given several days before that set this in motion, it
could have got out of his system by the time
he died. So you'll never You'll never prove one way
(41:39):
or the other.
Speaker 5 (41:41):
So I need to find new evidence elsewhere because my
gut feeling is still that King Boris was murdered poisoned.
And although I agree that many of his symptoms, the
chest pain, the sweating, etc. Do match the signs of
a heart attack, there are still two unexplained signs. Those
(42:04):
brown spots that covered his skin and the fact that
his red blood cells, as Simeon put it, exploded. It
was those brown spots on the King's skin, remember that
first alerted the German doctors to a possible poisoning. They
just couldn't explain them away, can doctor Hamilton?
Speaker 1 (42:25):
A rash or spots and breakdown of red blood cells
does not sound like a typical consequence of a cardiac event.
Speaker 5 (42:34):
That would set you off investigating, wouldn't it.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
That would set my concern levels tingling? I think there
may be something underhand gone on. I really do.
Speaker 5 (42:48):
And remember our snake expert Mark O'Shea. He rubbished my
theory that snake venom killed the king. That he's been
back in touch about those spots.
Speaker 16 (42:59):
The blotches do so like a hypercentsitive reaction to me
to something they do, maybe a poison.
Speaker 5 (43:05):
And Mark's been doing a bit of thinking.
Speaker 16 (43:08):
Maybe you have a hyper sensitive reaction if you'd eating
something toxic like poisonous mushrooms. Maybe mushrooms, and there are
plenty of highly toxic mushrooms that are toadstools that could
have been put into his food.
Speaker 5 (43:23):
As it happens, King Boris had one favorite dish, a
dish that he asked for again and again. Have you
guessed yet? Next time on the butterfly King, a chat
with a Russian micologist leaves us with a bad taste
(43:45):
in our mouths. Some poisonous found. They are known to
have some bitter taste, but these ones that are really poisonous.
They had tasteless and a fairy tale ending for Princess
Maria Louisa and King Simeon when there finally allowed home
from exile.
Speaker 8 (44:03):
It was an unbelievable dream that came through because for
almost fifty years, you know, the idea of Bulgaria was like,
you know, for the for the Jewis Jerusalem or something
like that, the dream that would never come true.
Speaker 5 (44:37):
The Butterfly King is a production of Blanchard House and
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executive producer and head of Content at Blanchard House is
(45:18):
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Karen Kilgareth Georgia Hardstark, and Daniel Kramer, with consulting producer
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Speaker 8 (02:13):
Goodbye.
Speaker 5 (02:18):
I want to talk to you about the King's heart
and how it ended up where it did. So remember
that after Boris died in nineteen forty three, the official
cause of death was given as cardiac arrest, but a
few of the doctors tending the king on his sick
bed firmly believed he'd been poisoned. Now for religious and
(02:41):
emotional reasons, the Queen didn't want an autopsy performed, but
during the embalming process of the King's body, a mini
autopsy was performed on his heart, and somehow, when the
king was buried at the real a monaster, his heart
(03:02):
was not replaced inside his chest. You'll probably recall that
the king was kicked out of his real ar resting
place by the new Soviet regime in nineteen forty six.
They didn't much care for all the nationalist fervor his
tomb inspired, and a new grave was dug for him
at Vrana, But after the queen and the royal children
(03:24):
Simeon and Maria Louisa were sent into exile, the tomb
was dug up once more, and the King's body went missing,
never to be found again. But in nineteen ninety one,
(03:46):
his heart suddenly turned up in a picklejar, allegedly in
the empty grave, but more probably on a dusty shelf
of a medical institute. Okay, now, in the last chapter,
we just received a cryptic voicemail from someone inviting us
(04:06):
to meet up with him to talk about the Butterfly
King's mysterious death. He was addressing his message to EJ
my producer.
Speaker 6 (04:18):
Thank you for.
Speaker 5 (04:22):
So That voice belongs to a man called Dr Deutschenoff.
He's well into his nineties and has Parkinson's. He remembers
King Boris his death. He was in his early teens
when the King died. But that's not really what he
wants to chat about.
Speaker 9 (04:38):
He's fascinating for me, you should.
Speaker 5 (04:44):
He's telling me he'd be fascinated to meet an English
journalist looking into the death of the King.
Speaker 8 (04:51):
Thanks so yeah, and they hope to see you.
Speaker 5 (04:55):
And why are we so happy to receive this message?
Because Deutscheneff is actually the one witness we thought would
never agree to speak out because that pickle jar that
showed up in the early nineteen nineties, the one that
turned out to contain King Boris's heart. Well, the doctor
(05:16):
who examined that royal heart was doctor Deutschenoff from Blanchard House,
and exactly right, Media, this is the butterfly King. I'm
Becky Milligan, Chapter seven, The Heart of the Matter.
Speaker 10 (06:21):
We have lots of tree that shouldn't be here, really,
because the dying tree is spreading disease and kill more trees.
Speaker 5 (06:31):
We're taking a guided tour around the grounds of Rana
Palace with the King's suave and charming Aid Jarvil. He's
almost as knowledgeable about trees and plants as King Boris
himself was.
Speaker 10 (06:43):
And now you see there is a fallen tree on
the road. I will call now the gardens to cut it.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
It's dangerous.
Speaker 10 (06:51):
Secondly, it's ugly and it's spread diseases.
Speaker 5 (06:56):
Sickness and disease seem to be the order of the day.
Sofia to meet pathologist Dr Deutschenov. But unfortunately that meeting
isn't to be just yet because poor Dr Deutschenev goes
down with COVID and as he's now in his nineties,
we can't push for an interview until he's completely recovered.
(07:18):
But we speak to the doctor's daughter in law on
the phone. She tells us Dr. Deutchenev is even more
disappointed than we are. Apparently he has so much he
wants to tell us, so much he needs to tell us.
But all we can do is be patient and wait.
And of course spending time with Yavor is always a
(07:40):
lovely distraction.
Speaker 10 (07:41):
It's a fall of mushrooms in the garden. There is
animals as in the garden now they have years, foxes, rabbits, elephants,
not anymore.
Speaker 5 (07:53):
Foxy. Ferdinand Boris his father used to keep a small
zoo in the grounds of Rana Buffalo's exotic birds and elephants.
Speaker 10 (08:03):
But after the accident with the elephant, they move it
in the center.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
So what accident And we're not sure.
Speaker 10 (08:11):
But probably one of the people that take care about
the elephant probably beat him or something.
Speaker 5 (08:17):
The man beat the elephant, yes, right, My hunch is
this doesn't end too well for the elephant keeper.
Speaker 10 (08:24):
And one morning when this person go inside the cage
of the elephant, the elephant just without saying anything to
just push the men on the law trodden him, yeah,
smash him like a stamp.
Speaker 5 (08:40):
Oh, so there we have the Royal Palace's first sort
of murder. But was it really the only murder? I mean,
so many people hated King Boris and wanted him dead.
A heart attack seems like a convenient excuse. Sometimes in
an investigation like this one, you get the most extraordinary
(09:03):
strokes of luck, like finding a document in some old,
dusty library, an overlooked paper that gives you a brand
new lead, or a new witness suddenly springs up from
nowhere and takes your case in a whole new direction.
But sometimes difficult things happen which completely throw you off course.
(09:25):
And today is one of those days. We've just received
a text message from Dr Deutschenev's daughter in law, Maya,
and it contains some devastating news. I'm going to read
it to you. Unfortunately, Dodr Deutschenev passed away peacefully this morning.
He wanted to meet you so much. We're so sorry
(09:50):
for Dodr Deutschenev's family. In the last few weeks, we've
been in regular contact with them, and they've quite often
mentioned that the prospect of talking to us and getting
the chance to tell his side of King Boris's story
was what was keeping doctr Jeutschenov alive. But now, of
course we'll never know exactly what he was burning to
(10:11):
tell us. He didn't share those details with his family,
and understandably they've declined to do an interview with us.
They're not only grieving. They don't want to second guess him.
They don't want to put words into his mouth. But
what we do know is this, Cast yourself back in
(10:32):
time to a medical lab in Sofia, October nineteen ninety one,
and a man in his early sixties is hunched over
a microscope. He wears a white coat, and he's studying something.
Closely before him. On the table is a glass jar,
(10:52):
the sort of large jar you'd store jamming, maybe pickles.
There's no label on the jar, but you don't really
need a medical degree to recognize what's inside it, because
floating in the clear preserving liquid is a heart, a
human heart. On the workbench sits a smaller glass file.
(11:19):
There's a scrap of paper inside it. It reads the
Heart of His Majesty King Boris the Third and it's
signed by the Bulgarian doctors who tended the monarch in
his final hours, who claim the cause of death was
a cardiac arrest. The pathologist in the lab coat has
(11:39):
spent hours examining and measuring the heart. There's no doubt
it's the royal heart. Its description perfectly matches the autopsy
report written in nineteen forty three. But it's almost fifty
years since that document was tight and in that time
science has moved on can considerably. As the pathologist sits
(12:04):
back and begins to write up his notes, you can
read the name bad Pin to his lapel. Dr Deutschen Deutschenov.
He's smiling because Dr Deutschenev has carried out exhaustive tests
on the King's heart and he's made a huge discovery.
He now knows exactly what killed King Boris. He has
(12:28):
scientific proof and he can sum up his findings in
just two small words, heart attack. He can find no
trace of poison and no signs of foul play. Dr
Deutschenov concludes that King Boris, the Third of Bulgaria died
(12:52):
a natural death. After all the decades of theories, speculation
and finger pointing, is it possible that this isn't a
case of murder? After all, we'll never know if Dr
Deutschenev had more specific information he wanted to disclose to us.
(13:17):
We just know he believed the King died of a
heart attack. So I've decided to talk over his findings
with another forensic pathologist to try and understand what a
pathologist really does, what someone like Dr Deutschenev would have
been looking for. So I want to introduce you to
someone you met briefly in our very first chapter, Dr
(13:38):
Stuart Hamilton. He's fascinated by how the body works and
how it goes wrong. He is not quite so bothered
about his bedside manner though.
Speaker 1 (13:50):
I am not particularly good with poorly people, which is
somewhat unfortunate. So my patients are very, very quiet.
Speaker 5 (14:00):
As quiet as the grave. In fact, Dr Hamilton has
been working with the dead for the past twenty years.
What should I say on the dead?
Speaker 1 (14:11):
So our main role is to examine bodies in cases
of suspicious deaths or homicides. We investigate as best we
can what the cause of death might be.
Speaker 5 (14:25):
I mean, if I'm honest, it sounds a bit gruesome.
Speaker 1 (14:28):
It is gruesome. It is examining and cutting into dead
human beings as a day job.
Speaker 5 (14:36):
Gruesome for sure, but essential so that the living get
answers and the dead can rest in peace. So let's
imagine King Boris had ended up on Dr Hamilton's marble slab.
What proof would he need to confirm that the monarch
had indeed died of a simple cardiac arrest.
Speaker 1 (14:58):
A heart attack to a doctor, to a pathologist, is
also known as a myocardial infact, and that means that
part of the muscle of your heart is not receiving
enough blood for it to stay alive, and that means
that the muscle will die, and if that is enough damage,
(15:20):
it can kill the person. It essentially stops the heart working,
stops the pump working.
Speaker 5 (15:25):
So that's fairly clear. No pump, no pulse. But what
makes that heart muscle die?
Speaker 1 (15:32):
You get fatty deposits building up in the arteries that
supply the heart itself. They become narrowed and they don't
let as much blood through as they should, and that
can produce symptoms such as angina that chest pain on exertion.
Speaker 5 (15:49):
Hang on a second, tell me a little more about angina.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Angina is a warning sign for a heart attack.
Speaker 5 (16:00):
That's what I feared. Remember how King Boris went climbing
with his brother Kirol after that dreadful final meeting with Hitler.
We know he was in very low spirits, that he
felt sick, and that he was suffering from bad chest pain. Well,
here's Dr Hamilton's description of how someone would feel in
(16:21):
the early stages of a heart attack.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
You have crushing chest pain, as if there's a metal
band around your chest crushing it. That pain will often
go down your arm. It may go up into your jaw,
sweatin us, some nausea. Some people even describe a feeling
of impending doom.
Speaker 5 (16:46):
Apparently Boris had confided in his wife and in his
brother and sister that he feared he was suffering from
angina pectorus and that he feared he'd die from it.
But how did the king guess this? I mean it
was nineteen forty three, way before the Internet and doctor Google.
He must have consulted a specialist for the diagnosis. And
(17:10):
that unsettles me because if he was suffering from a
mangina but then pushed himself to his physical limits climbing mountains,
a heart attack seems less surprising, less suspicious. Plus the
time frameworks.
Speaker 1 (17:28):
Some people may die straight away, some people may survive
a day or so. Some people may survive two or
three weeks.
Speaker 5 (17:35):
But hang on a sec Let's remember that Boris was
a bit of a health reek. I mean, okay, he
wasn't pumping iron in the gym every two minutes, but
he was extremely fit. And someone who takes regular exercise
and who eats healthily is fairly well insured against heart failure.
Speaker 11 (17:52):
Right, that's sort of my point.
Speaker 5 (17:54):
Remember Colonel Hamish, our chemical weapons expert who served for
twenty three years in the British Army. Well, to say
he is a fitness fanatic is a bit of an understatement.
As a younger man, he actually held the world push
ups record.
Speaker 11 (18:09):
But well, I have sudden cardiac death syndrome, which is
a genetic heart condition. It's one of those things that
if you know about it, you can do things about it,
and if you date then that's very sadly when when
things can go wrong.
Speaker 5 (18:28):
Thinking about Boris, he was very fit. He was a mountaineer,
he loved walking, he loved getting out in the wild, shooting, hunting.
He was that type of king and in that way
he could have it could have been a natural death
if he'd had a condition that we just don't.
Speaker 11 (18:44):
Know about absolutely, and you know, if he had a
condition like mine, all the sort of things he did
would potentially, you know, lead to his demise. And in
those days people didn't know very much about the condition,
so couldn't do very much about it.
Speaker 5 (19:00):
Could the king have had some kind of heart defect,
a congenital problem from birth that was a ticking time
bomb waiting to explode. I can't help thinking about something
art learned, but rather in discreete. Historian Tessa Dunlop said
about the shallow genetic pool that European royal families shared
(19:22):
at the time.
Speaker 12 (19:23):
Loads of them were in bred, and that can give
you weird, you know, dicky hearts and stuff like that,
can't it. I mean, we know that Boris, with a
nose like that, probably had a few other malformations for
want of for better expression, including the left cavity of
his heart or is it a chamber?
Speaker 5 (19:37):
It is a chamber. But there's no way I was
going to mention a subject like in breeding with King
Boris's son Simeon, but actually he brought it up.
Speaker 9 (19:49):
All the royal families at one point were intermarried, related
among themselves, which in a way it was the generational
my parents.
Speaker 5 (20:01):
It really was protocol means you really cannot ask a king,
even a sort of king like Simeon, about the state
of his health. But here's what I'm thinking. If there
was a heart problem in Boris's family, it probably would
have been passed down the line to Maria Luisa or Simeon,
who are ninety and eighty six, respectively, and still going strong.
Speaker 9 (20:27):
Did my father die from a massive heart attack? Of fine,
I mean, it happens, and this is still an open question.
I don't mention it because I have no rational proof.
Speaker 5 (20:40):
But did the doctors who performed Boris's autopsy in nineteen
forty three have proof? How did they or even Dr
Deutschenoff nearly fifty years later know they were making the
right call. R. Stuart Hamilton are forensic pathologist.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
It's one of those things that the naked eye examination
can identify straight away. There will be changes that you
can see down the microscope. So you will start with
inflammation in the heart, and then you will see the
dead muscle starting to be eaten away and replaced with
early scar tissue. So again, for a true heart attack,
(21:22):
the findings are quite specific and quite clear.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
So was the official cause of death? Correct. All along.
The science now seems to be stacking up in its favor.
But Boris wasn't even fifty.
Speaker 12 (21:41):
You're presuming that it's not possible for a man to
dive a weak heart in nineteen forty three, aged forty nine.
I would like to point out to you that at
the turn of the twentieth century, the average American male
live to the age of forty nine. It's not such
a devastatingly awful age to live to in the middle
of a wall.
Speaker 5 (21:58):
Tessa's not the only since Dr Stuart Hamilton thinks Boris
could have just been unlucky in the genetic lottery.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
As a pathologist, you can become very cynical, and you
deal with people who lived eighty five having drunken smoked
and lived on chips and crisps and die happily in
their beds, and you deal with fifty year olds who
collapse on the treadmill at the gym. So we can't
(22:26):
rule out that it's just plain unlucky.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
But Simeon can't rule it in.
Speaker 9 (22:32):
All this is again it's just conjectures. I like facts.
Speaker 5 (22:43):
Well, here are two undeniable facts. In the middle of
the Second World War, with Bulgaria's precarious future in his hands.
King Boris must have been stressed out of his brain.
And heart attacks and stress, well, everyone knows they go
hand in hand.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Stress is a very well recognized factor to precipitate a
heart attack.
Speaker 5 (23:10):
And that awful meeting with Hitler could have been the
straw that broke the camel's back. We know he couldn't
get it off his mind.
Speaker 1 (23:18):
Remembering a stressful situation that stresses you again, that can
do it right.
Speaker 5 (23:25):
So it looks like the mystery is over. There is
no mystery. Dr Deutscheneff nailed it. King Boris simply died
of a cardiac arrest.
Speaker 1 (23:36):
It would be an easy conclusion to draw a middle
aged man who dies suddenly. Look he's at a heart attack.
End of story. But it's context. We're talking about powerful
people in a very difficult point in history. When you're
(23:58):
talking about geo politics, which is essentially what we are here,
there is a why. It leaves the whole situation unresolved
for me.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
So it's a case of don't let sleeping kings lie.
Really no, let's just go over the brief of a
forensic pathologist. It's not just to examine dead bodies to
find out what caused them to fail mechanically. It's also
about putting those dead bodies into context, into historical context,
(24:32):
and asking was there anyone else around who wanted that
body to fail, who maybe caused it to fail.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
One should look at the evidence, and the evidence in
this case as I see it is that we have
got somebody who would be a candidate for being bumped
off with good reason. So there is a mystery there.
Speaker 5 (24:54):
I agree. I honestly don't think we can separate this
case from the background of war. There was just two
much of an agenda.
Speaker 1 (25:02):
I would never stand up in a court and say,
beyond all reasonable doubt this is a homicide. But there
is too much to it for me to comfortably say
write it off. Never need to look at that again.
Job's done. In my profession. We don't like loose end
sort of hanging there going you haven't got to the
bottom of me yet.
Speaker 5 (25:24):
And Dr Hamilton's not the only one who thinks there's
more to this than meets the eye. King Boris's daughter
Maria Louisa, is convinced her father was murdered, despite being
aware of Dr Deutschene's findings that it was just a
heart attack.
Speaker 8 (25:40):
You can induce a heart attack. You know, that's not
an answer in many ways of bringing somebody to a
heart attack, you.
Speaker 5 (25:50):
Know, so you still questioned it after that. It wasn't
the end of the story at that point.
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Speaker 5 (29:13):
What better way of taking stock of things than over
tea and biscuits in our hotel room. I want to
mull over what I'm now feeling about Boris's death. At
least that was the plan until EJ flaws me with
a confession about our visit to Varana Palace.
Speaker 12 (29:31):
Can I ask you a question about the royal toilet?
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (29:35):
Yeah, so we both went to the royal tolet.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
Did you use the comb?
Speaker 10 (29:40):
No?
Speaker 5 (29:41):
What did you comb your hair with his comb?
Speaker 1 (29:43):
Yes? What was it made out of gold stick plastic?
Speaker 5 (29:49):
What color was it gray? You literally picked up his
comb from the bit and brushed your hair with it.
Speaker 13 (29:55):
I didn't really think that it was his, so I
just did.
Speaker 5 (29:58):
It was there with some bounder puffs, and I thought it.
Speaker 8 (30:00):
Thank you.
Speaker 5 (30:00):
Did you use the powder puffs as well? I didn't
use the powder puffs.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
No.
Speaker 5 (30:03):
I just can't believe he used his comb. I just
I actually can't believe that. Talk about making yourself at
home in a royal palace, I.
Speaker 8 (30:12):
Went to know.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
I didn't.
Speaker 5 (30:13):
I just went in and out for me because it
was a bit of a rush. I hate you wash
your hands, of course I did, thank you, Hm. Of
course I did. In COVID and everything wouldn't bothered otherwise Actually,
(30:33):
since we're getting all confessional here, I'm going to let
you in on another little secret. Well it's really Yavel's
little secret. You'll remember that Maria Louisa is celebrating her
ninetieth birthday. Well, Yarville has been working on a little
surprise for her, and I'm sure she's going to love it.
Speaker 8 (30:53):
I hate surprises because you know you don't know what's
going to happen.
Speaker 5 (30:57):
Oh well, let's not mention that to Yarville.
Speaker 15 (31:02):
The surprise is the cake with penguins with a T
shirt of Bulgarian football team Lefski, because princess very much
like penguins and this football team Lefski, which is from
the period of King Boris time.
Speaker 5 (31:17):
She'll be so excited, won't she.
Speaker 15 (31:19):
I mean, also, I hope so.
Speaker 5 (31:22):
If I were a princess, I honestly couldn't imagine a
nicer rate than Yavel. But how do royal families trust
their staff? I mean, how do they know that Javel
hasn't slipped a little poison and that penguin cake? Simeon's
rather horrified when I ask him, can you trust him?
Speaker 9 (31:42):
Who?
Speaker 1 (31:43):
Yevo secretary?
Speaker 9 (31:49):
I hope you see, I can't possibly visualize anything like,
because if you don't trust someone you see every day,
finally you become insane.
Speaker 5 (32:00):
I'm only teasing, of course, Yavill's a total star, but
I asked the royal siblings about him because I wanted
to make a serious point. When King Boris was here
in Varana Palace, in the gritty heart of the Second
World War, trust was not something one could take for granted.
And even at the tender age of six, Simeon was
(32:22):
made well aware that walls have ears.
Speaker 9 (32:27):
What I remember is that mother will tell us that, well,
we just should know how to keep our mouth shut.
But that was as far as will go into anything
sort of weird or secret or what have you. I
think it was more for is anybody eavesdropping or I
(32:49):
don't know.
Speaker 5 (32:50):
But interesting that the royal children were taught to be
careful about what they said. In earshot of palace staff,
did the queen suspect someone was listening out for information
information she feared they might use to kill the king.
Speaker 9 (33:06):
It wasn't any spy phobia agent phobia. It's much later
that you realize that somebody might betray you or not.
Things happen like in any war like in any royal
quarto or something. So it wasn't really specifically sinister or something.
Speaker 5 (33:28):
Now, let's be clear about something. I'm not in any
way ignoring Dr Deutschenef's scientific conclusions or overriding them. I
absolutely acknowledge that as the pathologist who actually performed an
autopsy on the King's heart in nineteen ninety one, Dr
Deutschenev's testimony is unique. But I do still have to
(33:52):
push forward with other lines of investigation, especially as Dr
Stuart Hamilton, our own forensic pathologist, has cast doubt on
whether everything adds up quite so neatly, whether we really
can just accept that the King's death was unfortunate but
completely natural. King Boris was pretty cautious about his health.
(34:17):
He wasn't a hypochondriac like his father Foxy Ferdinand, but
he did go in for cures and remedies. According to
Stefan Grueff in his book Crown of Thorns, King Boris
went everywhere with a substantial amount of pills and potions.
He owned a sort of traveling pharmacy.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Certainly there are substances which can mimic a heart attack.
The one that immediately leaps to mind in normal everyday
life to some extent, would be cocaine. Cocaine can cause
the arteries to your heart to spasm to close down.
Speaker 5 (34:56):
Are you saying King Boris may have been on cocaine.
Speaker 1 (34:59):
I'm not suggesting he on cocaine, but I'm thinking of
things that can cause a similar outcome. Anything that causes
your arteries to spasm will stop the blood flowing through them,
and that means the heart muscle can be damaged.
Speaker 5 (35:16):
And it wouldn't have been difficult for someone, someone who
had close access to Boris to substitute his vitamin kills
and headache remedies for something more sinister. But who a
close aid the jarv ore of times past. The only
problem is it seems that Boris used his portable medicine
(35:38):
cabinet as a kind of comfort blanket. He liked to
know it was nearby, but he rarely actually used its contents.
A close aid would have known that, they'd have known.
There were no guarantees that Boris would have swallowed any
poisonous pills. And here's the old sticking point, of course.
(36:00):
Dr Deutschenef was adamant that he found no traces of
poison in the King's heart. When he re examined it
in the nineteen nineties, he only found the proof that
Boris had had a cardiac arrest. But Dr Stuart Hamilton
still thinks it's perfectly possible that Deutscheneff may have missed something,
(36:20):
not because he thinks Deutschenef wasn't doing his job properly,
but because he simply didn't test for the right poison.
Dr Hamilton's made the same mistake himself.
Speaker 1 (36:32):
I dealt with one person who ate U seeds oh
to end their life, which was an interesting one.
Speaker 5 (36:41):
Unsurprisingly, testing for plant seed poisoning is not standard procedure
in the crime scene handbook. But luckily one of the
crime scene investigators was a horticultural fanatic, and he alerted
Dr Hamilton to the fact that the body was found
among U trees, whose seeds he knew are deathly.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
If one of the crimson investigators hadn't been a keen gardener,
I'm not sure I would have picked that up.
Speaker 5 (37:10):
So for all the certainty and expertise, there is an
element of luck.
Speaker 1 (37:15):
There is an element of luck I would have missed
because we don't routinely test for the poison that is
in seeds from a U tree.
Speaker 5 (37:25):
That story reminds me of something something Colonel Hamish, our
chemical weapons expert, once said when we were wondering if
the Nazis poisoned Boris, that the lack of scientific know
how at the time was definitely advantageous to want to
be assassin.
Speaker 11 (37:42):
At that time, they hadn't developed the sort of detectors
that we have now that would signal that sort of
suff So technology was there or lack of it was
their friend in those days.
Speaker 5 (37:52):
Absolutely, And we know that the Soviets had established two
poison laboratories with the soul aim of poisoning people and
getting away with it. Remember, they were using a poison
that could fool pathologists into thinking the victims had died
of a heart attack, one that couldn't be detected back then.
(38:13):
But that was nineteen forty three. The last examination of
the heart was in nineteen ninety one. But doesn't it
stand to reason that in the last thirty years technology
and toxicology has moved on leaps and bounds Again.
Speaker 11 (38:29):
When I was dealing with al Qaeder biological weapons attack
in her Art fifteen years ago, it was taking us
thirty six hours to do DNA sequencing. It's moved so
far forward.
Speaker 9 (38:40):
Now.
Speaker 11 (38:40):
What you could do in thirty six hours fifteen years ago,
you could do it fifteen minutes now. And not only
has the speed increased, but also the breadth of what
you can do.
Speaker 5 (38:52):
As I suspected, but as you know, the king's body
has gone missing. The Soviets dug it up from real
Monastery where it was laid to rest in nineteen forty three,
Boris was reburied at Varana. Then at some point during
Simeon and Maria Louisa's exile, the Communists exhumed the body
(39:17):
again and disposed of it goodness knows where. So when
the heart turned up in a picklejar in nineteen ninety one,
it was reburied again at the realer monastery. Could the
heart still hold clues clues that today's forensic medicine might
(39:37):
be able to detect that the forensic pathologists of the
nineteen nineties simply couldn't.
Speaker 1 (39:44):
Pickling is a good way to preserve tissue.
Speaker 5 (39:46):
Doctor Stuart Hamilton are forensic pathologist.
Speaker 1 (39:50):
You can't get perfect toxicology from it, because obviously the
tissue will be affected by the thing. It's preserved in.
But as I say to people many times, when it
comes to investigations, if you don't look, you won't find.
If you look, you may or may not and you
don't know, and we've done it.
Speaker 5 (40:11):
Gosh, that's a tough call. Should the remains of King
Boris really be exhumed for a fourth time on the
off chance that some new trace of poison could be found.
Simeon has already told me he still worries about his
father's body, that it's not resting peacefully at Varana.
Speaker 9 (40:32):
I'm not the person who goes into any emotional moods
or things I simply regret. And now that you bring
it up, I think of it again, it's disturbing.
Speaker 5 (40:44):
It does seem almost sacrilegious to disturb the remains of
the king again, the remains of Simeon and Maria Louisa's
beloved papa.
Speaker 8 (40:56):
You know, one has to make one's peace with these things,
everyone to bring him back.
Speaker 5 (41:02):
And that's Dr Hamilton's feeling too. There's no point in
a further autopsy.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Digging up the heart would not give us a definitive.
Speaker 5 (41:11):
Answer, because of course you just can't prove a negative.
Speaker 1 (41:16):
Even if we were to do tests. Even if it
came back and said no substance as present, then the
counter argument would be A, it could be something you
can't pick up. B. If it was something he was
given several days before that set this in motion, it
could have got out of his system by the time
he died. So you'll never You'll never prove one way
(41:39):
or the other.
Speaker 5 (41:41):
So I need to find new evidence elsewhere because my
gut feeling is still that King Boris was murdered poisoned.
And although I agree that many of his symptoms, the
chest pain, the sweating, etc. Do match the signs of
a heart attack, there are still two unexplained signs. Those
(42:04):
brown spots that covered his skin and the fact that
his red blood cells, as Simeon put it, exploded. It
was those brown spots on the King's skin, remember that
first alerted the German doctors to a possible poisoning. They
just couldn't explain them away, can doctor Hamilton?
Speaker 1 (42:25):
A rash or spots and breakdown of red blood cells
does not sound like a typical consequence of a cardiac event.
Speaker 5 (42:34):
That would set you off investigating, wouldn't it.
Speaker 1 (42:37):
That would set my concern levels tingling? I think there
may be something underhand gone on. I really do.
Speaker 5 (42:48):
And remember our snake expert Mark O'Shea. He rubbished my
theory that snake venom killed the king. That he's been
back in touch about those spots.
Speaker 16 (42:59):
The blotches do so like a hypercentsitive reaction to me
to something they do, maybe a poison.
Speaker 5 (43:05):
And Mark's been doing a bit of thinking.
Speaker 16 (43:08):
Maybe you have a hyper sensitive reaction if you'd eating
something toxic like poisonous mushrooms. Maybe mushrooms, and there are
plenty of highly toxic mushrooms that are toadstools that could
have been put into his food.
Speaker 5 (43:23):
As it happens, King Boris had one favorite dish, a
dish that he asked for again and again. Have you
guessed yet? Next time on the butterfly King, a chat
with a Russian micologist leaves us with a bad taste
(43:45):
in our mouths. Some poisonous found. They are known to
have some bitter taste, but these ones that are really poisonous.
They had tasteless and a fairy tale ending for Princess
Maria Louisa and King Simeon when there finally allowed home
from exile.
Speaker 8 (44:03):
It was an unbelievable dream that came through because for
almost fifty years, you know, the idea of Bulgaria was like,
you know, for the for the Jewis Jerusalem or something
like that, the dream that would never come true.
Speaker 5 (44:37):
The Butterfly King is a production of Blanchard House and
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and produced by Emma Jane Kirby. Original music is by
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design and engineering by Toby Mattamo and Daniel Lloyd Evans,
artwork by Vanessa Lilac. The managing producer is Amka Schortino Nolan.
The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pie. The
executive producer and head of Content at Blanchard House is
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Karen Kilgareth Georgia Hardstark, and Daniel Kramer, with consulting producer
Kyle Ryan. The Butterfly King is inspired by the book
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