This summer, a member of the Montreal mafia (who knew?) mysteriously died in a Canadian federal prison. Guiseppe De Vito went to sleep on July 7 as a healthy, 46-year-old convicted murderer. The next day, he was dead.

On Monday, Canadian authorities announced the result of the De Vito autopsy. They'd found a lethal dose of the poison cyanide in blood and tissue. So far, no one has explained how a famously homicidal poison was delivered to his cell. But, according to news reports, Surêté du Québec investigators suspect he was murdered as part of an ongoing gangster feud.

Curiously enough, cyanide was also the murder weapon of choice in a U.S. gangster killing this summer. A witness scheduled to testify against renowned Boston mobster James "Whitey" Bulger in a murder trial was given a cup of cyanide-laced coffee by one of Bulger's "associates" during a meeting in July. The poisoner confessed in October after an autopsy found the poison in the dead man's body. (The killing, by the way, did nothing to help Bulger who was found guilty for his role in 11 other murders and is now in Oklahomaawaiting further charges.)

For those, I believe, he relied on the ever-useful gun. Still, it's rather fascinating - or maybe a better word would be unnerving - to see cyanide appear as a gangster weapon of choice. And these are not the only high profile cyanide cases of the year. Let's not forget the Chicago lottery winner who died, just after receiving the check, of a still mysterious dose of cyanide. Or the murder charges now pendingagainst a University of Pittsburgh neuroscientist following the death of his physician wife by cyanide poisoning last April..

Still these North American murders are small time compared to those of the serial killer, Mohan Kumar - nicknamed "Cyanide Mohan"by the news media in India - who was recently convicted of poison murders of three young women and is suspected in another 17 deaths. Mohan, a 50-year-old former teacher, allegedly killed strictly for profit - he stripped the gold jewelry off the dead women and sold it.

And finally - because to me this also counts as murder - let us not forget the Zimbabwe poachers who this fall killed more than 300 elephantsby poisoning their water hole with cyanide (not to mention the other animals that visited there) in order to sell their ivory tusks on the Asian market.

The word "cyanide" is actually shorthand for compounds that contain a cyano group, an atom of carbon bonded to one of nitrogen with the chemical signature CN. Among the most notorious of these are hydrogen cyanide (HCN), the gas used by the Nazis in concentration camp chambers, and two cyanide salts - potassium cyanide (KCN), and sodium cyanide (NaCN) - which are the ones most preferred by murderers. Although we make these industrially - the elephant poachers stole corrosive cyanide salts from gold miners who used them to separate out the ore - the poison also occurs in a wide range of plants and arthropods, who store it as a defense weapon against predators and grazers. It's not that hard, for instance, to find scientific papers on cyanide-induced illness due to chewing on the inner seed or kernel of the apricot.

Which is another way of saying that these are very old poisons. There are actually references in Egyptian hieroglyphics to "death by peach" which scholars believe refer to a similar effect. As the Egyptians knew - and as we know today - cyanides are fast-acting poisons. They cripple the body's ability to make use of oxygen and they do so with dismaying speed - a high dose, they can kill in minutes. It's one reason that intelligence agents used to famously carry cyanide pills with them in case of capture - a fact, overdramatized in movies like this year's Bond thriller Skyfall but real enough.

Makers of thriller movies and writers of murder mysteries tend to like cyanide for its dramatic tendencies - the quick gasping finish, the shocking immediacy of the way it kills. It features in the 1937 tale of a vengeful candy poisoners, The Red Box, by Rex Stout, creator of the Nero Wolfe series; Agatha Christie made it a centerpiece of her 1945 book, Sparkling Cyanide. And in the futuristic detective novels of J.D. Robb (a pseudonym of romance writer Nora Roberts) people are still using it to kill in the year 2060. In one book in that series, Salvation in Death, a Catholic priest dies after drinking poison-laced wine during the sacrament. The poison in question is found to be that durable favorite, potassium cyanide.

And in this case, mass-market fiction may anticipate reality. I had imagined that an old, easily identified, messily visible poison like cyanide would fade away into our homicidal history. I'm using the word "imagined" because if 2013 is any measure, that's not particularly apparent. As the return of cyanide murder minds us, we don't so easily set aside our past. And we obviously - if unfortunately - hate to give up on a weapon with a history of working so well.

Image: Nineteenth century poison bottle/National Library of Medicine exhibit on the history of forensics.