HOW TO COMMIT THE OPPOSITE OF A PERFECT CRIME. Lovers of detective stories will appreciate the pains the killers of Alexander Litvenenko took to commit the opposite of a perfect crime. The poison they used—polonium 210—left a radioactive record everywhere it went. Consequently, every place the killers went with the polonium was memorialized. The radioactivity establishes an attempt a month earlier to kill Litvenenko which failed because Litvenenko failed to take a sip from his cup. The radioactive traces not only demonstrated a teapot was the “murder weapon”, but also the part of the teapot with the highest concentration of plutonium was the spout (see the drawings in the Daily Mail article.) The radioactive record also establishes that the remainder of the poison was poured down the sink in the hotel room of one of the killers.
If you wanted to advertise that you had committed a crime and could get away with it, you couldn’t do a better job.