Was Pablo Neruda murdered? It’s an enduring mystery with chapters that have yet to be written. And a McMaster research associate believes the truth may lie with the bodies of two prisoners who were allegedly murdered by agents of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.

Debi Poinar of the McMaster Ancient DNA laboratory has been examining the suspected poisoning of Neruda since 2015.

Neruda was suffering from prostate cancer and died at age 69 on Sept. 23, 1973, 12 days after the coup that toppled his close friend, President Salvador Allende.

Neruda, also a Communist Party politician, had been vocal in his criticism of the Pinochet regime and had been planning to leave the country to avoid reprisals, but was admitted to a clinic to treat his cancer when he died.

In 2011, Neruda’s driver came forward with allegations that the Nobel Prize-winning-poet was injected with deadly poison by agents of Pinochet.

Poinar and her husband, Hendrik Poinar, director of the McMaster lab that is well known for retrieving bacteria from ancient remains, began work on the case even though they don’t typically get involved with forensics, “least of all a murder case,” she said.

By 2017 they had determined that Clostridium botulinum, which produces a deadly toxin, was in his body, but they couldn’t confirm if it was in his body before or after he died.

And in February the panel made up of experts across the globe released their latest finding: Clostridium botulinum was present in his body when he died.

The finding made headlines recently, attracting attention worldwide.

But the mystery is not yet solved.

“We can certainly say that it’s present, which it is, but it would be difficult to determine if it actually killed him,” Poinar said of the toxin.

“It’s not natural for him to have it in his body — that’s for sure. It’s not something that we just have swimming around and when we die it becomes a part of it,” Poinar further explained.

It was used as biological agent in World War II as it could be easily cultured in a lab and then injected to hurt or kill someone.

The bacteria produces a toxin which can also cause food poisoning.

So is it possible for the experts to determine if Neruda was injected with Clostridium botulinum?

It’s a bit complicated — Poinar said the team could try to retrieve more DNA from Neruda’s remains and use additional testing to reconstruct the genome of the crushed Clostridium botulinium.

“It would be good to know that all the toxin genes were present,” Poinar explained what makes Clostridium botulinum toxic is a cluster of 10 genes that produce and manufacture the deadly toxin.

But — another way to solve this mystery is by comparing the Clostridium botulinium found in Neruda to the Clostridium botulinium found in prisoners, allegedly poisoned by agents of Pinochet.

“If we were able to retrieve any of that Clostridium, especially from those two people that passed away, in their remains and compare the two bacteria, and if they were similar, then I’d pretty much say this was something that definitely killed him,” Poinar explained.

On why she thinks people are so enamoured with finding out what happened to this famous poet: “I think Neruda’s case has become emblematic of the whole situation in just needing to have justice,” Poinar said. “I think that’s become a very pressing, pressing concern.”

A combination of social, health and natural science meeting “hardcore” science with a little bit of murder mystery is why people are so fascinated with this case, said another expert trying to find out what happened to Neruda, Marie-Louise Kampmann, special consultant at University of Copenhagen.

“Was he actually killed or was he not killed?”

Poinar has no personal connections to Chile, but said living in Canada it’s hard to imagine what it would be like living under a dictatorship and she thinks the case means something for people of Chile who lost family and friends.

“They want to know if he was murdered like all the other people that were there that went missing or were executed or found in mass burials,” Poinar said.

The group of experts will have to wait to find out from a Chilean judge if they’ll be looking into this mystery any further.

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