April 25, 2024 • 40 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 1 (00:03):
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
(00:26):
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 Realer monastery, his heart was
(00:47):
not replaced inside his chest. You'll probably recall that the
king was kicked out of his Realer 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 Rana,
(01:08):
But after the queen and the royal children 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, his
(01:32):
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 to
meet up with him to talk about the Butterfly King's
(01:55):
mysterious death. He was addressing his message to EJ my.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Producer, thank you for having so.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
That voice belongs to a man called Dr Deutschenov. He's
well into his nineties and has Parkinson's. He remembers King
Boris's death. He was in his early teens when the
King died. But that's not really what he wants to
chat about.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
He's so fascinating for me.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
He's telling me he'd be fascinated to meet an English
journalist looking into the death of the king.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Thanks so yeah, and they hope to see you.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
And why are we so happy to receive this message?
Because Dr Deutschenev 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
(03:01):
doctor who examined that royal heart was doctor Deutschenoff from
Blanchard House and exactly right, media, this is the Butterfly King.
I'm Becky Milligan, chat to seven. The heart of the matter.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
We have lots of treat that shouldn't be here really,
because the dying Turie is spreading disease and kill more trees.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
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 4 (04:29):
And now you see there is a fallen tree on
the road. I will call now the gardens to to
cut it. It's dangerous. Secondly, it's ugly and it's spread diseases.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Sickness and disease seem to be the order of the day.
We're really in Sofia to meet pathologist Dr Deutschenoff, 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. But we speak to the doctor's daughter
(05:05):
in law on the phone. She tells us. Dr Jeutschenev
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 lovely distraction.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
It's a full of mushrooms in the garden. There is
animals as in the garden now they have yours, foxes, rabbits, elephants,
not anymore.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
Foxy.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Ferdinand Boris his father used to keep a small zoo
in the grounds of Rana, buffaloes, exotic birds and elephants.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
But after the accident with the elephant, they move it
in the center. What accidents and we are not sure,
but probably one of the people that take care about
the elephant beat him or something.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
The man beat the elephant, Yes, right, My hunch is
this doesn't end too well for the elephant keeper.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
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 (06:25):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
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 strokes
(06:49):
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, and
(07:10):
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, Dr Deutschenev passed away peacefully this morning.
He wanted to meet you so much. We're so sorry
(07:36):
for DoD 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 Dodr Deutchenov alive. But now, of
course we'll never know exactly what he was burning to
(07:56):
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
(08:17):
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,
(08:37):
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.
(09:04):
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
(09:25):
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 considerably. As the pathologist sits back
(09:49):
and begins to write up his notes, you can read
the name badge pinned to his lapel Dr Deutschen Deutschenoff.
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
(10:14):
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
Deutschenev concludes that King Boris the Third of Bulgaria died
(10:38):
a natural death. After all the decades of theories, speculation
and finger pointing, is it possible that this isn't a
case of murder?
Speaker 5 (10:54):
After all?
Speaker 1 (10:56):
We'll never know. If Dr Deutschenev had more specific in
he wanted to disclose to us. 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 Deutscheneff would have been looking for. So
(11:18):
I want to introduce you to someone you met briefly
in our very first chapter, Dr Stuart Hamilton. He's fascinated
by how the body works and how it goes wrong.
He's not quite so bothered about his bedside manner though.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
I am not particularly good with poorly people, which is
somewhat unfortunate. So my patients are very, very quiet.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
As quiet as the grave. In fact, Dr Hamilton has
been working with the dead for the past twenty years,
or should I say on the dead.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
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 1 (12:10):
I mean, if I'm honest, it sounds a bit gruesome.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
It is gruesome. It is examining and cutting into dead
human beings as a day job.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Gruesome for sure, but essentral so that the living get
answers and the dead can rest in peace. So let's
imagine King Boris had ended up on Dtor Hamilton's marble slab.
What proof would he need to confirm that the monarch
had indeed died of a simple cardiac arrest.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
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,
(13:05):
it can kill the person. It essentially stops the heart working,
stops the pump working.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
So that's fairly clear. No pump, no pulse. But what
makes that heart muscle die?
Speaker 2 (13:18):
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 1 (13:34):
Hang on a second, tell me a little more about angina.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Angina is a warning sign for a heart attack.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
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 he was suffering from bad chest pain. Well,
here's Dr Hamilton's description of how someone would feel in
(14:07):
the early stages of a heart attack.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
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 1 (14:31):
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
(14:56):
that unsettles me, because if he was suffering from manjoina
but then pushed himself to his physical limits climbing mountains,
a heart attack seems less surprising, less suspicious. Plus the
time frameworks.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Some people may die straight away, some people may survive
a day or so. Some people may survive two or
three weeks.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
But hang on a sec Let's remember that Boris was
a bit of a health reak. 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 6 (15:37):
Right, that's sort of my point.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
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 6 (15:55):
But well, I have sudden cardiac death syndrome 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 1 (16:13):
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 a 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 know.
Speaker 6 (16:29):
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 1 (16:46):
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
(17:07):
at the time, Loads of.
Speaker 7 (17:09):
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 1 (17:23):
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 3 (17:34):
All the royal families at one point were intermarried, related
among themselves, which in a way it was still the
generation of my parents. It really was.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
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 3 (18:13):
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 improvement.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
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. No, they were making the
right call. Dr Stuart Hamilton are forensic pathologist.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
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 tissu. So again, for a true heart attack,
(19:08):
the findings are quite specific and quite clear.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
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 7 (19:26):
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
lived to the age of forty nine. It's not such
a devastatingly awful age to live to in the middle
of a wall.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Tessa's not the only cynic. Dr Stuart Hamilton thinks Boris
could have just been unlucky in the genetic lottery.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
As a pathologist, you can become very cynical, and you
deal with people who live to 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 rule out that it's just plain unlucky.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
But Simeon can't rule it in.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
All this is again it's just conjectures. I like facts.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
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 2 (20:47):
Stress is a very well recognized factor to precipitate a
heart attack.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
And that awful meeting with Hitler could have been the
straw that broke the camel back. We know he couldn't
get it off his mind.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Remembering a stressful situation that stresses you again, that can.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Do it right. 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 2 (21:21):
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
(21:44):
talking about geopolitics, which is essentially what we are here,
there is a why. It leaves the whole situation unresolved
for me.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
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,
(22:18):
and asking was there anyone else around who wanted that
body to fail, who maybe caused it to fail.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
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 1 (22:39):
I agree. I honestly don't think we can separate this
case from the background of war. There was just too
much of an agenda.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
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. No 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 1 (23:10):
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 (23:25):
You can induce a heart attack.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
You know, that's not.
Speaker 8 (23:31):
An answer in many ways of bringing somebody to a
heart attack.
Speaker 5 (23:35):
You know, so you still questioned it after that. It
wasn't the end of the story at that point.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
No, 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.
(24:04):
At least that was the plan until EJ flows me
with a confession about our visit to Varana Palace.
Speaker 5 (24:12):
Can I ask you a question about the royal toilet?
Speaker 4 (24:15):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (24:15):
Yeah, so we both went to the royal toilet. Did
you use the comb?
Speaker 2 (24:21):
No?
Speaker 5 (24:21):
What did you comb your hair with his comb?
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yes?
Speaker 5 (24:24):
What was it made out of? Gold stick.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Plastic?
Speaker 5 (24:29):
What color was it?
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Gray?
Speaker 5 (24:31):
You literally picked up his comb from the bait and
brushed your hair with it. I didn't really think that
it was his, so I just did it. Was there
with some pounder puffs, and I thought it was like you.
Did you use the powder puffs as well? I didn't
use the powder puffs?
Speaker 2 (24:44):
No.
Speaker 5 (24:44):
I just can't believe he used his comb. I just
I actually can't believe that.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Talk about making yourself at home in a royal palace I.
Speaker 5 (24:53):
Went to know, I didn't. I just went in and
out for me because it was a bit of a rush.
I hit you, wash your hands. I did, thank you.
Of course I did in COVID and everything couldn't otherwise.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Actually, 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 (25:34):
I hate surprises because you know, you don't know what's.
Speaker 5 (25:37):
Going to happen.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Oh well, let's not mention that to Yaville.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
The surprise is a cake with pinguins with a T
shirt of Bulgarian football team Lefscue. Because princess very much
like pinguin's and this football team Lesque, which is from
the period of King Boris time.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
She'll be so excited, won't she.
Speaker 4 (25:59):
I mean, also, I hope so.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
If I were a princess, I honestly couldn't imagine a
nicer ade than Yarvil. But how do royal families trust
their staff? I mean, how do they know that Javel
hasn't slipped a little poison in that penguin cake. Simeon's
rather horrified when I ask him, can you trust him?
Speaker 3 (26:29):
I hope you see, I can't possibly even visualize anything
like it, because if you don't trust someone you see
every day, finally you become insane.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
I'm only teasing, of course, Yavel'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
(27:03):
made well aware that walls have ears.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
What I remember is that my mother would tell us that, well,
we just should know how to keep our mouths shut.
But that was as far as we will go into
anything sort of weird or secret or what have you.
I think it was more for is anybody eavesdropping?
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Or I don't know, 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 3 (27:47):
It wasn't any spy phobia agent phobia. It's much later
that you realized that somebody might betray you or not.
Things happened like in any war, like in any royal
qulto or something. So he wasn't really specifically sinister or something.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
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
Deutschenef's testimony is unique. But I do still have to
(28:33):
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.
(28:58):
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 2 (29:17):
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 1 (29:37):
Are you saying King Boris may have been on cocaine.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
I'm not suggesting he was 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 1 (29:56):
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
(30:19):
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,
(30:40):
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 Deutschenef may have missed something,
(31:01):
not because he thinks Deutscheneff 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 2 (31:13):
I dealt with one person who ate u seeds oh
to end their life, which was an interesting one.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
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 you trees whose seeds he knew are deathly.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
If one of the crime scene investigators hadn't been a
keen gardener. I'm not sure I would have picked that up.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
So for all the certainty and expertise, there is an
element of luck.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
There is an element of luck I would have missed
because we don't routine test for the poison that is
in seeds from a U tree.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
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 6 (32:22):
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 1 (32:33):
Absolutely, And we know that the Soviets had established two
poison laboratories with the sole 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.
(32:54):
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 6 (33:09):
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 2 (33:20):
Now.
Speaker 6 (33:21):
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 1 (33:33):
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
(33:57):
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
(34:18):
be able to detect that The forensic pathologists of the
nineteen nineties simply couldn't.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Pickling is a good way to preserve tissue.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Dr Stewart Hamilton, a forensic pathologist.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
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 till they've done it.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
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 3 (35:13):
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 1 (35:25):
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 (35:36):
No one has to make one's peace with these things
that won't bring him back.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
And that's Dr Hamilton's feeling too. There's no point in
a further autopsy.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Digging up the heart would not give us a definitive.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Answer, because of course you just can't prove a negative.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
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
(36:20):
or the other.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
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
(36:45):
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 dr Hamilton.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
A rash or spots and breakdown of red blood cells
does not sound like a typical consequence of a cardiac event.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
That would set you off investigating, wouldn't it?
Speaker 2 (37:18):
That would set my concern levels tingling. I think there
may be something underhand gone on. I really do.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
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 9 (37:39):
The blotches do sound like a hypercentsitive reaction to me
to something they do, maybe a poison.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
And Mark's been doing a bit of thinking.
Speaker 9 (37:49):
Maybe you have a hypersensitive reaction if you'd eaten something
toxic like poisonous mushrooms. Maybe mushrooms, And there are plenty
of highly toxic mushrooms that toadstools that could have been
put into his food.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
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
(38:26):
in our mouths.
Speaker 5 (38:27):
Some poisonous family they are known to have some bitter tastes,
but these ones that are really poisonous.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
They had tasteless and a fairy tale ending for Princess
Maria Louisa and King Simeon when they're finally allowed home
from exile.
Speaker 8 (38:44):
It was an unbelievable dream that came through because for
almost fifty years, you know, the idea of Bulgaria was like,
you know, the for the Jewish Jerusalem or something like that,
a dream that would never come true.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
The Butterfly King is a production of Blanchard House and
Exactly Right Media, hosted by me Becky Milligan. It's written
and produced by Emma Jane Kirby. Original music is by
Daniel Lloyd Evans, Louis nank Manell and Toby Mattamong. Sound
(39:37):
design and engineering by Toby Mattamong and Daniel Lloyd Evans.
Artwork by Vanessa Lilac. The Managing producer is a Mika
Schortino Nolan. The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pie.
The executive producer and head of content at Blanchard House
(39:58):
is Lawrence Grisell. For Exactly Right Media, the executive producers
are Karen Kilgarreth Georgia Hardstark and Daniel Kramer, with consulting
producer Kyle Ryan. The Butterfly King is inspired by the
book Hitler and the King by John hal Spencer
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
(00:26):
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 Realer monastery, his heart was
(00:47):
not replaced inside his chest. You'll probably recall that the
king was kicked out of his Realer 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 Rana,
(01:08):
But after the queen and the royal children 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, his
(01:32):
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 to
meet up with him to talk about the Butterfly King's
(01:55):
mysterious death. He was addressing his message to EJ my.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Producer, thank you for having so.
Speaker 1 (02:08):
That voice belongs to a man called Dr Deutschenov. He's
well into his nineties and has Parkinson's. He remembers King
Boris's death. He was in his early teens when the
King died. But that's not really what he wants to
chat about.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
He's so fascinating for me.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
He's telling me he'd be fascinated to meet an English
journalist looking into the death of the king.
Speaker 3 (02:37):
Thanks so yeah, and they hope to see you.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
And why are we so happy to receive this message?
Because Dr Deutschenev 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
(03:01):
doctor who examined that royal heart was doctor Deutschenoff from
Blanchard House and exactly right, media, this is the Butterfly King.
I'm Becky Milligan, chat to seven. The heart of the matter.
Speaker 4 (04:06):
We have lots of treat that shouldn't be here really,
because the dying Turie is spreading disease and kill more trees.
Speaker 1 (04:16):
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 4 (04:29):
And now you see there is a fallen tree on
the road. I will call now the gardens to to
cut it. It's dangerous. Secondly, it's ugly and it's spread diseases.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Sickness and disease seem to be the order of the day.
We're really in Sofia to meet pathologist Dr Deutschenoff, 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. But we speak to the doctor's daughter
(05:05):
in law on the phone. She tells us. Dr Jeutschenev
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 lovely distraction.
Speaker 4 (05:27):
It's a full of mushrooms in the garden. There is
animals as in the garden now they have yours, foxes, rabbits, elephants,
not anymore.
Speaker 5 (05:39):
Foxy.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Ferdinand Boris his father used to keep a small zoo
in the grounds of Rana, buffaloes, exotic birds and elephants.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
But after the accident with the elephant, they move it
in the center. What accidents and we are not sure,
but probably one of the people that take care about
the elephant beat him or something.
Speaker 1 (06:02):
The man beat the elephant, Yes, right, My hunch is
this doesn't end too well for the elephant keeper.
Speaker 4 (06:10):
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 (06:25):
Oh.
Speaker 1 (06:28):
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 strokes
(06:49):
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, and
(07:10):
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, Dr Deutschenev passed away peacefully this morning.
He wanted to meet you so much. We're so sorry
(07:36):
for DoD 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 Dodr Deutchenov alive. But now, of
course we'll never know exactly what he was burning to
(07:56):
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
(08:17):
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,
(08:37):
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.
(09:04):
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
(09:25):
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 considerably. As the pathologist sits back
(09:49):
and begins to write up his notes, you can read
the name badge pinned to his lapel Dr Deutschen Deutschenoff.
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
(10:14):
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
Deutschenev concludes that King Boris the Third of Bulgaria died
(10:38):
a natural death. After all the decades of theories, speculation
and finger pointing, is it possible that this isn't a
case of murder?
Speaker 5 (10:54):
After all?
Speaker 1 (10:56):
We'll never know. If Dr Deutschenev had more specific in
he wanted to disclose to us. 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 Deutscheneff would have been looking for. So
(11:18):
I want to introduce you to someone you met briefly
in our very first chapter, Dr Stuart Hamilton. He's fascinated
by how the body works and how it goes wrong.
He's not quite so bothered about his bedside manner though.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
I am not particularly good with poorly people, which is
somewhat unfortunate. So my patients are very, very quiet.
Speaker 1 (11:46):
As quiet as the grave. In fact, Dr Hamilton has
been working with the dead for the past twenty years,
or should I say on the dead.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
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 1 (12:10):
I mean, if I'm honest, it sounds a bit gruesome.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
It is gruesome. It is examining and cutting into dead
human beings as a day job.
Speaker 1 (12:21):
Gruesome for sure, but essentral so that the living get
answers and the dead can rest in peace. So let's
imagine King Boris had ended up on Dtor Hamilton's marble slab.
What proof would he need to confirm that the monarch
had indeed died of a simple cardiac arrest.
Speaker 2 (12:43):
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,
(13:05):
it can kill the person. It essentially stops the heart working,
stops the pump working.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
So that's fairly clear. No pump, no pulse. But what
makes that heart muscle die?
Speaker 2 (13:18):
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 1 (13:34):
Hang on a second, tell me a little more about angina.
Speaker 2 (13:38):
Angina is a warning sign for a heart attack.
Speaker 1 (13:45):
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 he was suffering from bad chest pain. Well,
here's Dr Hamilton's description of how someone would feel in
(14:07):
the early stages of a heart attack.
Speaker 2 (14:10):
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 1 (14:31):
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
(14:56):
that unsettles me, because if he was suffering from manjoina
but then pushed himself to his physical limits climbing mountains,
a heart attack seems less surprising, less suspicious. Plus the
time frameworks.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
Some people may die straight away, some people may survive
a day or so. Some people may survive two or
three weeks.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
But hang on a sec Let's remember that Boris was
a bit of a health reak. 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 6 (15:37):
Right, that's sort of my point.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
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 6 (15:55):
But well, I have sudden cardiac death syndrome 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 1 (16:13):
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 a 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 know.
Speaker 6 (16:29):
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 1 (16:46):
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
(17:07):
at the time, Loads of.
Speaker 7 (17:09):
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 1 (17:23):
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 3 (17:34):
All the royal families at one point were intermarried, related
among themselves, which in a way it was still the
generation of my parents. It really was.
Speaker 1 (17:47):
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 3 (18:13):
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 improvement.
Speaker 1 (18:25):
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. No, they were making the
right call. Dr Stuart Hamilton are forensic pathologist.
Speaker 2 (18:44):
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 tissu. So again, for a true heart attack,
(19:08):
the findings are quite specific and quite clear.
Speaker 1 (19:14):
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 7 (19:26):
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
lived to the age of forty nine. It's not such
a devastatingly awful age to live to in the middle
of a wall.
Speaker 1 (19:43):
Tessa's not the only cynic. Dr Stuart Hamilton thinks Boris
could have just been unlucky in the genetic lottery.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
As a pathologist, you can become very cynical, and you
deal with people who live to 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 rule out that it's just plain unlucky.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
But Simeon can't rule it in.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
All this is again it's just conjectures. I like facts.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
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 2 (20:47):
Stress is a very well recognized factor to precipitate a
heart attack.
Speaker 1 (20:56):
And that awful meeting with Hitler could have been the
straw that broke the camel back. We know he couldn't
get it off his mind.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Remembering a stressful situation that stresses you again, that can.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Do it right. 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 2 (21:21):
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
(21:44):
talking about geopolitics, which is essentially what we are here,
there is a why. It leaves the whole situation unresolved
for me.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
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,
(22:18):
and asking was there anyone else around who wanted that
body to fail, who maybe caused it to fail.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
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 1 (22:39):
I agree. I honestly don't think we can separate this
case from the background of war. There was just too
much of an agenda.
Speaker 2 (22:48):
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. No 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 1 (23:10):
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 (23:25):
You can induce a heart attack.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
You know, that's not.
Speaker 8 (23:31):
An answer in many ways of bringing somebody to a
heart attack.
Speaker 5 (23:35):
You know, so you still questioned it after that. It
wasn't the end of the story at that point.
Speaker 1 (23:44):
No, 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.
(24:04):
At least that was the plan until EJ flows me
with a confession about our visit to Varana Palace.
Speaker 5 (24:12):
Can I ask you a question about the royal toilet?
Speaker 4 (24:15):
Oh?
Speaker 5 (24:15):
Yeah, so we both went to the royal toilet. Did
you use the comb?
Speaker 2 (24:21):
No?
Speaker 5 (24:21):
What did you comb your hair with his comb?
Speaker 2 (24:24):
Yes?
Speaker 5 (24:24):
What was it made out of? Gold stick.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Plastic?
Speaker 5 (24:29):
What color was it?
Speaker 2 (24:30):
Gray?
Speaker 5 (24:31):
You literally picked up his comb from the bait and
brushed your hair with it. I didn't really think that
it was his, so I just did it. Was there
with some pounder puffs, and I thought it was like you.
Did you use the powder puffs as well? I didn't
use the powder puffs?
Speaker 2 (24:44):
No.
Speaker 5 (24:44):
I just can't believe he used his comb. I just
I actually can't believe that.
Speaker 1 (24:49):
Talk about making yourself at home in a royal palace I.
Speaker 5 (24:53):
Went to know, I didn't. I just went in and
out for me because it was a bit of a rush.
I hit you, wash your hands. I did, thank you.
Of course I did in COVID and everything couldn't otherwise.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Actually, 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 (25:34):
I hate surprises because you know, you don't know what's.
Speaker 5 (25:37):
Going to happen.
Speaker 1 (25:37):
Oh well, let's not mention that to Yaville.
Speaker 4 (25:42):
The surprise is a cake with pinguins with a T
shirt of Bulgarian football team Lefscue. Because princess very much
like pinguin's and this football team Lesque, which is from
the period of King Boris time.
Speaker 5 (25:57):
She'll be so excited, won't she.
Speaker 4 (25:59):
I mean, also, I hope so.
Speaker 1 (26:03):
If I were a princess, I honestly couldn't imagine a
nicer ade than Yarvil. But how do royal families trust
their staff? I mean, how do they know that Javel
hasn't slipped a little poison in that penguin cake. Simeon's
rather horrified when I ask him, can you trust him?
Speaker 3 (26:29):
I hope you see, I can't possibly even visualize anything
like it, because if you don't trust someone you see
every day, finally you become insane.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
I'm only teasing, of course, Yavel'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
(27:03):
made well aware that walls have ears.
Speaker 3 (27:07):
What I remember is that my mother would tell us that, well,
we just should know how to keep our mouths shut.
But that was as far as we will go into
anything sort of weird or secret or what have you.
I think it was more for is anybody eavesdropping?
Speaker 1 (27:28):
Or I don't know, 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 3 (27:47):
It wasn't any spy phobia agent phobia. It's much later
that you realized that somebody might betray you or not.
Things happened like in any war, like in any royal
qulto or something. So he wasn't really specifically sinister or something.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
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
Deutschenef's testimony is unique. But I do still have to
(28:33):
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.
(28:58):
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 2 (29:17):
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 1 (29:37):
Are you saying King Boris may have been on cocaine.
Speaker 2 (29:39):
I'm not suggesting he was 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 1 (29:56):
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
(30:19):
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,
(30:40):
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 Deutschenef may have missed something,
(31:01):
not because he thinks Deutscheneff 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 2 (31:13):
I dealt with one person who ate u seeds oh
to end their life, which was an interesting one.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
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 you trees whose seeds he knew are deathly.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
If one of the crime scene investigators hadn't been a
keen gardener. I'm not sure I would have picked that up.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
So for all the certainty and expertise, there is an
element of luck.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
There is an element of luck I would have missed
because we don't routine test for the poison that is
in seeds from a U tree.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
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 6 (32:22):
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 1 (32:33):
Absolutely, And we know that the Soviets had established two
poison laboratories with the sole 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.
(32:54):
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 6 (33:09):
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 2 (33:20):
Now.
Speaker 6 (33:21):
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 1 (33:33):
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
(33:57):
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
(34:18):
be able to detect that The forensic pathologists of the
nineteen nineties simply couldn't.
Speaker 2 (34:24):
Pickling is a good way to preserve tissue.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Dr Stewart Hamilton, a forensic pathologist.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
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 till they've done it.
Speaker 1 (34:51):
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 3 (35:13):
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 1 (35:25):
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 (35:36):
No one has to make one's peace with these things
that won't bring him back.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
And that's Dr Hamilton's feeling too. There's no point in
a further autopsy.
Speaker 2 (35:49):
Digging up the heart would not give us a definitive.
Speaker 1 (35:51):
Answer, because of course you just can't prove a negative.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
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
(36:20):
or the other.
Speaker 1 (36:21):
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
(36:45):
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 dr Hamilton.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
A rash or spots and breakdown of red blood cells
does not sound like a typical consequence of a cardiac event.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
That would set you off investigating, wouldn't it?
Speaker 2 (37:18):
That would set my concern levels tingling. I think there
may be something underhand gone on. I really do.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
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 9 (37:39):
The blotches do sound like a hypercentsitive reaction to me
to something they do, maybe a poison.
Speaker 1 (37:46):
And Mark's been doing a bit of thinking.
Speaker 9 (37:49):
Maybe you have a hypersensitive reaction if you'd eaten something
toxic like poisonous mushrooms. Maybe mushrooms, And there are plenty
of highly toxic mushrooms that toadstools that could have been
put into his food.
Speaker 1 (38:04):
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
(38:26):
in our mouths.
Speaker 5 (38:27):
Some poisonous family they are known to have some bitter tastes,
but these ones that are really poisonous.
Speaker 1 (38:34):
They had tasteless and a fairy tale ending for Princess
Maria Louisa and King Simeon when they're finally allowed home
from exile.
Speaker 8 (38:44):
It was an unbelievable dream that came through because for
almost fifty years, you know, the idea of Bulgaria was like,
you know, the for the Jewish Jerusalem or something like that,
a dream that would never come true.
Speaker 1 (39:17):
The Butterfly King is a production of Blanchard House and
Exactly Right Media, hosted by me Becky Milligan. It's written
and produced by Emma Jane Kirby. Original music is by
Daniel Lloyd Evans, Louis nank Manell and Toby Mattamong. Sound
(39:37):
design and engineering by Toby Mattamong and Daniel Lloyd Evans.
Artwork by Vanessa Lilac. The Managing producer is a Mika
Schortino Nolan. The creative director of Blanchard House is Rosie Pie.
The executive producer and head of content at Blanchard House
(39:58):
is Lawrence Grisell. For Exactly Right Media, the executive producers
are Karen Kilgarreth Georgia Hardstark and Daniel Kramer, with consulting
producer Kyle Ryan. The Butterfly King is inspired by the
book Hitler and the King by John hal Spencer
Hosts And Creators
Emma Jane Kirby
Becky Milligan
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