Packs of cards have always been very bad for your health. In tenth century China, two men were beheaded after admitting they were using wood blocks to create duplicate aces up their sleeves so to speak. Playing cards first arrived in England in 1417 and one unlucky guy, a veteran from the battle of Agincourt, was hanged after the sheriff thought he was conspiring with the devil.
Poker players have always been at a high risk from murderous robbers. In 2014 a London-based professional gambler was killed for his winnings after being lured by a charming lady into a honey trap. A serial killer in 1960s Madrid, Alfredo Galan, always left a playing card at the scene of his terminal knife attacks. Machine Gun Kelly in 1920s America never sat at the poker table in a disarmed state.
Respectable bridge has a surprising history of violence. In 1929 Arkansas, Myrtle Adkins Bennett murdered her husband and bridge partner but was acquitted on the grounds of insanity and self-defence. She later became a bridge tutor on cruise ships. In 2010 Lancashire, Stephen Green killed his partner wife with 100 knife wounds after claiming to have experienced a sudden criminal flush.
In many countries prison departments have created packs of playing cards with ID photos showing cold case or missing persons in order to create a lead. They are known in US prisons as snitch cards as inmates can be rewarded for their info. Separately, they were used by the US army in the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to identify government ministers of Saddam Hussein such as Chemical Ali.
Murderous card playing is often depicted in fiction. Agatha Christie in her novel Cards on the Table showed Poirot meticulously analyzing the actual card hands to find clues. A murder victim in the TV miniseries The Thursday Murder Club is specified as a bridge player. A German TV program earlier this year claimed that Heinrich Himmler played bridge with SS colleagues on a visit to the Auschwitz extermination camp, although there is no real evidence for this.
Perhaps the most famous bridge-related arrest in history occurred in Pattaya in 2016 when 32 elderly bridge players spent 10 hours locked up for alleged gambling before being released after timely intervention by the Contract Bridge League of Thailand. Of course, the arrests had nothing to do with enforced death. However, two Pattaya bridge club members did escape after hiding in the toilet during the raid. One said later, “Hiding in that smelly toilet for hours was absolute murder”. So to speak.
