The Poisoner's Handbook (12 page)
That September Norris caught a train to Washington, D.C., to meet with representatives from other cities—a coroner’s physician from Chicago, a pathologist from Johns Hopkins, a chemistry expert from Cornell Medical College, and the revered medical examiner from Boston, George McGrath, who had created one of the first professional programs in the country. They agreed to form a committee, pool their resources, and hire someone to investigate the state of forensic medicine through the country—“the training and qualifications of the men performing this important work in the various large cities”—so that they could start setting some national standards.
The Bradicich case wasn’t the first in which the defense won by personally attacking a forensic scientist. That was partly because disreputable coroners’ operations had tarnished the profession. Old and shoddy practices had to change, and the public had to be educated, the scientists agreed. Norris persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to provide a small grant for their program. As he wrote to the foundation, “The most effective way to bring this matter to the public would be to contrast the European system with this country: in the former where this work as a whole is performed only by trained investigators, whereas in this country it is performed mostly by those who have no technical or practical experience.”
He was proud that his office was trying to rectify that situation. But the general public perception of forensic experts undermined what he wanted to accomplish. And that, Norris wrote in a blast of anger, had gone on too long. If others didn’t want to spend time changing the situation, he would do it himself.
GETTLER ALSO responded to the Bradicich trial like a man with a mission. If he’d spent late nights in the laboratory before, well, now he made them later. If by extra time and pure furious drive he could make his science more credible, he was prepared to do that.
Over the next decade and more, he would pursue cyanide studies in his laboratory and create a meticulous series of reports analyzing cyanide deaths. A 1938 paper, “The Toxicology of Cyanide,” summarized his findings best and would be cited long after his death, referenced by toxicologists and government agencies into the twenty-first century.
The cyanide paper provided a chronicle of his obsession: tests with steam and with ice, chemical reactions producing brilliant yellows, sunset reds, the purplish-gray of storm clouds, the translucent green of tourmaline, kingly blues, and murky browns; bloody experiments with human organs put through a meat grinder; and grisly experiments with dogs. Every detail was carefully noted for future use.
Gettler learned that if he chilled his meat grinder in cracked ice before using it to mince the tissues, he lost less of the cyanide to heat effects. He learned that of eight standard tests for detecting cyanide in tissues, five were imprecise. He learned that steadily adding iron compounds and hydrochloric acid to his minced tissue was reliable, every time resulting in the giveaway blue of cyanide. He tried different tests, seeking the smallest trace of detectable cyanide. He ran eight additional tests trying, eventually successfully, to tease out one part per million. He used those tests to find out whether the human body naturally harbored a baseline level of cyanide. To do that, he analyzed hundreds of livers and brains, lungs and kidneys, from people who had died of other causes. In people who had never been exposed to the poison, he found no trace of natural cyanide, leading him to conclude, “either that no cyanide whatever is present in normal tissue distillates, or that the minute quantity of cyanide that may be present lies below the sensitivity of the test.”
He spent time figuring out the precise routes that cyanide took in the body, at one point using four dogs to compare the effects of inhaling the poison versus ingesting it. No one would describe these experiments as pretty, but he justified them as pure necessity. Two dogs received measured doses of potassium cyanide through a stomach tube; the others were forced to inhale hydrogen cyanide. The latter two animals were strapped to an operating table with their jaws taped shut. A cone-shaped mask would be placed over a dog’s nose and mouth, taped in place, and sealed with Vaseline to make it airtight. Once the mask was fixed, hydrogen cyanide gas would be piped into the cone until the dog died.
The results provided some of the first measured evidence of how quickly cyanide kills, dispelling the myth that victims neatly drop dead on the spot. When Gettler gave a dog 50 milligrams of cyanide (a little less than 2 drops), the animal died in 21 minutes. When he cut the dose to 20 milligrams, the dog lived for 2 hours and 35 minutes. When inhaled, less of the poison was needed to kill, and it worked more quickly, but again not instantly. One gassed dog, for instance, breathed in about 10 milligrams of cyanide; he was dead in 15 minutes.
The animal studies—later confirmed in analyses of human cyanide victims—showed that the poison is absorbed differently depending on how it is taken. When it is inhaled, it blows through the body, concentrates in the lungs, and swims through the bloodstream into the brain, the heart, and the liver. When swallowed, the poison is absorbed much more slowly. Necropsies (or animal autopsies) of the two dogs that were fed cyanide found that much of the poison, between 38 and 83 percent, was still in the stomach when they died, which helped explain why they died more slowly than the dogs that had breathed in the poison.
Remembering the Jackson case, Gettler made a point of exploring what happened to cyanide in a decaying body. He took slices of livers and brains and lungs from the bodies of cyanide victims, noting the poison content of each. He placed those pieces of tissue into containers and then left them to rot on a shelf in his laboratory. He checked the results at one week, two weeks, three weeks, and four, looking far beyond the time that Fremont Jackson had been buried so that he could be absolutely sure of the conclusion.
“During this time putrefaction developed to a high degree,” he wrote with serious understatement concerning those month-old organ slices. He analyzed the decaying tissues for cyanide and compared the amount to the levels he’d measured when they were still fresh. He found that decomposition altered the poison readings by the barest amount. Even after four weeks, 90 percent of the original poison content could still be detected, once again validating his testimony in the 1922 case.
Gettler investigated another contention made in the Bradicich case, that even if cyanide was present in the old man’s body, it was meaningless. The defense experts had insisted that the body naturally produced its own cyanide as apart of decomposition. He was determined to set that straight as well. So he took samples from eight different organs, all taken from bodies of people who had died natural deaths, and sealed them in glass flasks. Every week for the following two months, he removed one for analysis.
During the first week, decay produced trace amounts of cyanide—about 0.03 milligrams per 100 grams of tissue—but after that the poison seemed to disintegrate. By the end of two months, cyanide could not be detected at all. At its strongest, though, it was a mere whisper, a fading breath in the test tube, nothing close to the levels he’d found in Fremont Jackson. “Putrefaction therefore should in no way interfere with deciding a cyanide poisoning case,” he concluded.
It had taken him years in a laboratory, silent with the emptiness of night hours, to get his answer to the Jackson case. If Gettler could have carried his findings back in time to that courtroom, he would have done so and perhaps changed the outcome. He found satisfaction instead in building a better science out of an unhappy episode. Next time, he promised himself, such legal sabotage would not succeed.
Still, it might not have particularly bothered Gettler that decades later, in 1980, the Hotel Margaret, long abandoned, would undergo renovations during which it accidentally burned to the ground. No one in Charles Norris’s office held fond memories of that shining ornament of a building. Those coppery roofs and elegant balconies, those devious employees and that seeping poisonous gas; all of it reminded them only of mistakes that they intended not to make again.
FOUR
ARSENIC
(As)
1922—1923
(As)
1922—1923
T
HE WEATHER in that summer of 1922 held steady at what the newspapers like to call “fair,” the skies a gas-flame blue, the temperatures hovering near 80 degrees. On the last day of July, as Lillian Goetz’s mother would forever recall, the morning was another warm one. She offered to make seventeen-year-old Lillian a box lunch, but the girl refused. It was too hot to eat much; she’d just grab a quick sandwich at a lunch counter, she said.
HE WEATHER in that summer of 1922 held steady at what the newspapers like to call “fair,” the skies a gas-flame blue, the temperatures hovering near 80 degrees. On the last day of July, as Lillian Goetz’s mother would forever recall, the morning was another warm one. She offered to make seventeen-year-old Lillian a box lunch, but the girl refused. It was too hot to eat much; she’d just grab a quick sandwich at a lunch counter, she said.
Lillian worked as a stenographer in a dress goods firm occupying a small set of offices in the Townsend Building, at the bustling corner of 25th and Broadway. There were plenty of quick eateries nearby, tucked among the offices and shops and small hotels. Lillian, like many of her co-workers, often stepped over to the Shelbourne Restaurant and Bakery, just half a block south on Broadway.
The Shelbourne catered to the office trade, opening in the morning, closing in the early afternoon. Stenographers and secretaries in their bright summer hats and stylish short skirts, businessmen and office managers in their dark tailored suits, crowded daily along its wooden counters and small square tables, hurrying through a meal of hot soup with fresh-baked rolls, a sandwich, coffee, and a slice of the bakery’s renowned peach cake or berry pie.
According to police reports, on July 31 Lillian ordered a tongue sandwich, coffee, and a slice of huckleberry pie. It was the pie that killed her.
BY EARLY AFTERNOON sixty people had been rushed to nearby hospitals after eating lunch at the Shelbourne, and by the end of the day, six of them, including Lillian Goetz, were dead. The scream of ambulances on lower Broadway was so constant that a number of people called the police in a panic, fearing that the whole city had caught fire.
The Townsend Building, where Goetz worked, was an 1896 neoclassical structure that normally conveyed a stately limestone sense of calm. Now it served as backdrop to a scene of hysteria. Office workers collapsed on every one of the twelve floors, convulsing, vomiting, gasping in misery. Doctors armed with stomach pumps—at least ten pumps were put to use throughout the building—hurried from floor to floor, crisis to crisis. In the excited words of the city newspapers, “Panic prevailed on some floors in the Townsend building as one employee after another turned pale, and then blue and began to complain of intense pain.”
Gradually the doctors began comparing symptoms, notes, and stories. It led them to realize two things: that every victim had lunched at the Shelbourne Restaurant, and that almost all had eaten either blackberry or huckleberry pie for dessert. The physicians called the health department and the medical examiner’s office to report their suspicions.
The following day Charles Norris and Frank Monaghan, the acting health commissioner, made a joint announcement. Arsenic had been found in the piecrusts and rolls served at the Shelbourne. Additional tests showed that none of the ingredients—flour, butter, salt—stored at the restaurant contained any poison. Therefore the investigators suspected that the arsenic had been added to the dough after it was mixed, perhaps into the covered dough bowl stored in the kitchen refrigerator.
In other words, Norris and Monaghan agreed, this was not a matter of a kitchen accident, a baker using flour from grain tainted by an arsenic pesticide. Someone had planned this: “the food had been poisoned with malicious intent.”
Knowing the poison is never the same as knowing the killer. The police wished it were. They had no answer as to who might have done this. No answer as to why anyone would wish to harm a seventeen-year-old stenographer, working to help out her family, whose mother repeatedly told police that she only, only wished she had made that box lunch.
THE PREVIOUS October, in an unnervingly similar incident, two lunch patrons had been killed by arsenic at a restaurant down in the financial district. At that little eatery, near the old Liberty Street post office, health inspectors had at first suspected food poisoning. But then Alexander Gettler had isolated lethal amounts of poison in both men’s bodies.
The police had not identified a suspect in the killings at the Postal Lunch eatery, had never even come close. Maybe that was why people quit going to the eatery, which was now closed down. One of the first fears expressed by the police department was that the same poisoner had now moved up to Broadway; that this killer just enjoyed causing death, someone—detectives speculated—like the still-infamous Jean Crones.
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