Friday, August 23, 2024
Luci Zahray, a retired pharmacist with a master’s degree in toxicology from Texas A&M, has earned the reputation as “The Poison Lady” and seems to enjoy her title.
Zahray, who was born in San Antonio, moved to Gatesville with her parents when she was in fifth grade and spent the rest of her childhood in the community until graduating from Gatesville High School in 1974.
She said she didn’t know what she wanted to do after graduation from high school. She went to Baylor University to start off and soon came home after her freshman year and told her parents she wanted to study genetics. According to Zahray, her parents told her that no one had heard of genetics, and she would never be able to get a job. “They desperately wanted me to go to pharmacy school, because you could always get a job – there was an extreme shortage [of pharmacists] when I graduated.”
She continued, “They really wanted that for me, because my mother grew up in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s when women could only be a schoolteacher, nurse, or secretary, so she wanted that for me.”
“When I was in pharmaceutical school, there were only three women – the school was still very dominated as a male profession,” she said.
Zahray graduated from the University of Houston with a degree in Pharmacy and later received her master’s degree in toxicology from Texas A&M. “I enjoyed my years at A&M,” she said. “I had a blast.”
She would use her degree wisely and worked as a licensed pharmacist for 40 years until her retirement.
Her interest in poisons and mystery stories began when she was about seven years of age when her grandmother gave her a book about Sherlock Holmes. “It was a complete Sherlock Holmes, and I read it through pretty fast. It was a Christmas present.
Zahray continued, “I loved to read, and my grandmother knew I read above my grade level, and she thought that would be just the ticket. We lived here in Gatesville, and I had ready everything at the library and I was inspired to go to bookstores and find books on more topics.”
“My mother thought I was strange. About the time I was graduating from high school, Sherlock Holmes became somewhat of a big national thing, and, eventually, my mother looked at me and said, ‘I guess you weren’t as weird as I thought you were.’”
Years later, she began speaking at mystery authors’ conventions about poisons. At one such convention, the lady in charge couldn’t remember Zahray’s name and started referring to her as “The Poison Lady,” and the name stuck. “Then everybody started calling me that, and it spread rapidly. That became so much my name that I answered to it,” she said.
Zahray receives emails, phone calls, and text messages from mystery authors from all across the United States and abroad to tap into her knowledge about poisons and murder methods that can be used in their books. She has also been consulted by researchers in Hollywood.
These days, she heads up the Mystery Book Club at the Gatesville Public Library. The club meets on the first Tuesday of each month to discuss mystery books and to have Zoom meetings with mystery authors across the United States.
Recently, Zahray had to erect a tombstone for her departed mother. While completing that task, she decided to have a tombstone installed for herself. “On mine it says ‘The Poison Lady.’ A hundred years from now, people are going to be looking at it and saying, ‘there’s got to be a story there.’”
