WALTER AND Annie Creighton lay at rest in Newark’s Fairmont Cemetery, founded in 1855, 150 stately acres of gentle hills, leafy elm trees, beautifully trimmed firs, and elaborate marble mausoleums. Many of the city’s most influential citizens also lay there: Civil War heroes, U.S. congressmen, professional baseball players, Newark mayors, brewery owners, and the founder of the well-established Mennen Company.
The city ordered the couple’s bodies exhumed in May, turning the dignified burial grounds into a madhouse of journalistic competition. Police fought a near-military action at the gates, fending climbers with cameras off the walls. One photographer who eluded them and made his way almost to the gravesite was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.
In desperation, the pathologists decided not even to attempt to move the bodies to the morgue; they erected a rough tent over the gravesite and conducted their autopsies on gurneys. Behind the cloth flaps, using buckets of water to keep their saws and knives clean, they’d cut deep into the decaying bodies. They left unsure exactly what had killed the couple, but they were able to clear up one question: neither Creighton appeared to have died of the diseases listed on the death certificates.
Grimly, the doctors scooped the internal organs into glass jars, placed them into fiber bags, and marched their samples past the shouting reporters. The results were dramatically revealed several weeks later, during the Avery trial: the senior Creighton’s body appeared to be clean of poison, but in his wife’s body, crystals of white arsenic were discovered.
Just one day after being acquitted of her brother’s death, Mary Frances Creighton was rearrested and charged with killing her mother-in-law. The Newark prosecutor did not charge her husband this time—he’d come to suspect that she was the killer in the house. She looked like a lost Madonna, but he could promise any listener that she was nothing of the kind.
THAT WAS exactly what prosecutor Victor D’Aloia told the second jury, letting his voice carry through the packed courtroom, through the double wooden doors, into the hall, where the overflow crowd tipped forward, trying to hear. This woman sitting quietly in her black dress and jet-bead necklace was a liar and a murderer, he said.
A nurse who had cared for the elderly Mrs. Creighton testified that the woman had first become ill after her daughter-in-law fixed her a cup of cocoa. The invalid was just recovering when Frances offered to watch over her while the nurse went down to the kitchen for breakfast. When the nurse returned twenty minutes later, the elder Mrs. Creighton’s eyes were fixed on the open door, wide and terrified.
“What has happened?” the nurse had cried, hurrying to the bed. Her patient only looked at her, gurgled in her throat, and then vomited onto the floor. The nurse sent an urgent summons to the doctor, and they fought for an hour to save her, but Annie Creighton died late that December morning in 1920.
The physician admitted he hadn’t suspected arsenic. Because his patient had been unable to speak, he’d concluded that she’d suffered a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by the violent distress of some kind of food poisoning. Only after the earlier trial, and the carnage in the graveyard, had he realized that her symptoms were consistent with arsenic poisoning.
“I KNOW that Fanny is guiltless of killing my mother,” John Creighton told reporters. “If my mother died of unnatural causes I know in my innermost heart that my wife is innocent of responsibility for her death.”
Creighton sat behind his wife during the trial, the polished wooden railing between them, listening silently to the sharp discussion of what could be found in a disintegrating body and other debates over chemical detective work.
Prosecutors had called in two prominent pathologists, Otto Schultz of Columbia University (who had competed for Norris’s job in 1918) and Harrison Martland of Newark City Hospital (who had studied at Bellevue), considered one of the best forensic scientists on the East Coast. Both testified that they believed the woman had been killed with white arsenic.
Fanny Creighton’s lawyer countered with three New York experts, all from Bellevue and New York University, who methodically tore apart the prosecution case.
The first doctor said he still found the original ptomaine diagnosis most credible; there were too few lesions in the body, he said, to support arsenic poisoning. The second expert, a Bellevue pathologist, said the same thing. He testified that lethal doses would have created the classic internal damage, so visible in the Shelbourne Restaurant deaths, the bloody tracks so characteristic of the poison. In every other case of arsenic poisoning that he’d investigated, “there was always present some or more typical lesions or effects.” In this case, he saw none of that predictable damage.
And Gettler, who was the third defense witness, offered a chemist’s explanation of why a small amount of arsenic had been found in the body. The New Jersey pathologists had sent samples from the organs to Gettler’s lab. They contained a grayish-white powder, Gettler said, which resembled arsenic but was actually the remnant of another element called bismuth. Scattered through the bismuth powder were a few white crystals of arsenic. He was surprised, Gettler told the jury, at how slight was the amount of arsenic found. In the liver, where poisons tended to concentrate, the levels were “infinitesimal.”
Gettler had used Reinsch’s test, among others, and picked his way through the chemical layers of the analysis to calculate the precise ratios of arsenic and the bismuth in the samples he’d used. As the journalists gloomily reported, these few hours in the courtroom were a long drone of scientific terminology. The chalkboard used to illustrate the conclusions, one reporter said, took on the appearance of an impenetrable spiderweb.
Like arsenic, bismuth was a metallic element used in medicines. In particular, it was a key ingredient in antinausea and antidiarrhea formulas. One of the most popular brands, Bismosal, had been developed in 1901 by a pediatrician seeking to alleviate infant cholera. The solution, wintergreen in taste and colored pink, was renamed Pepto-Bismol in 1919. Annie Creighton’s doctor had not suggested that she take Pepto-Bismol, but he had prescribed another, very similar bismuth formula.
The problem with such formulas, Gettler explained, was that bismuth ore often contained other heavy metals, such as arsenic and lead. Not all processors were able to remove the contaminants; traces of both metals were frequently found in bismuth-based medications. When he ran Reinsch’s test, Gettler recognized the characteristic proportions in Annie Creighton’s body—large amounts of bismuth and slight traces of arsenic and lead. His conclusion was that the evidence of arsenic poisoning cited by the prosecution was really just evidence of contamination in the medicine prescribed.
For the second time in three weeks, a Newark jury found Fanny Creighton not guilty of murder. She walked out of the courthouse a free woman on July 13, pausing on the steps, smiling at the sound of a hurdy-gurdy playing nearby. She told reporters that she wanted only to be reunited with her children: “I bear no malice toward anyone,” she said. “I realize the prosecutor did his duty. I have no plans for the future and I don’t know what I shall do. I am too happy with my family just now to think of anything else. But I shall never forget Friday the 13th.”
AND NEITHER would Alexander Gettler. But it would be twelve years and another arsenic murder trial later before the New York press would start referring to Mary Fanny Creighton as America’s Lucretia Borgia. Only then would Gettler—and everyone else—wonder how she’d fooled so many people in the summer of 1923. What Alexander Gettler didn’t know then was that July 13, 1923, would haunt him as well.
FIVE
MERCURY
(Hg)
1923—1925
C
HARLES WEBB courted Gertrude Gorman for eight years. He wished to marry her; he had from the beginning. But his chosen sweetheart was the only child of a widowed mother—and her mother couldn’t stand him. Gertie’s friends dismissed him with contempt: “One of those soft-spoken men you find on the arms of rich women,” they said. Her family mocked him; he was doglike in the way he followed her, an uncle pronounced.
Webb
was
a soft-spoken man, quiet for a New York City estate broker. He was Princeton educated, well read, thoughtful, and as determined as he was gentle-mannered. He shrugged off the hostility and continued his courtship. He was almost fifty—a slight man in shades of gray, with pale eyes and silvering hair—when her mother died in 1920. Gertie was nearly forty then, still the devoted daughter, and the sheltered, bejeweled, fur-draped child of a wealthy and possessive parent. It took Webb two years yet to persuade her to marry him, but they wed at the close of 1922, and he happily moved into her family home on Madison Avenue.
Ten months later his new wife was dead, collapsing in their luxury suite at the Westchester Biltmore Country Club in Rye. And one day after that, on September 28, 1923, her uncle summoned journalists to his country estate in the exclusive enclave of Devon, Pennsylvania. He met them outside, naturally, not wanting newshounds inside his house. Standing in one of the beautifully maintained side gardens, William T. Hunter basked in the floral blaze around him, the dahlias he bred and cultivated as a hobby, the golden petals of a prize-winning bloom that he’d named “Gertie Gorman” for his niece.
The family had been “very much surprised when they heard she intended to marry Webb,” he said. They’d thought that she planned to devote her life to her close relatives and friends—she’d always been such a family girl, a “sensible girl.” He regretted saying it, but they’d been sadly unsurprised when the marriage killed her. They’d always suspected that Webb had been attracted to more than her sweet ways. What he really loved, her family believed, was the Gorman money. Webb was not a wealthy man, her uncle reminded the gathered journalists; his wife “had all the money.” And who wouldn’t love a fortune of $2 million (the equivalent of about $25 million today)?
Colonel Hunter didn’t directly accuse Webb, not by name anyway, of murder. But there was no missing his intent. “Gertie was given bichloride of mercury to cause her death. That’s a bold statement, but there’s little doubt in my mind that it’s true.”
BICHLORIDE OF mercury—also known by the unpleasant name of corrosive sublimate—is a poisonous salt of the metallic element mercury. The salt has an uncomplicated chemical structure: one atom of mercury bound tightly to two atoms of chlorine (HgCl
2
).
In chemistry, though, simplicity doesn’t necessarily mean safety. Mercury is a famously risky material. And its neatly arranged salts have proven to be exceptionally poisonous, sometimes even more so than their metallic parent.
Elemental mercury is a slippery substance. In the Earth’s crust it anchors itself by bonding with other elements, creating materials such as the rough coppery rock cinnabar, a crystalline combination of mercury and sulfur. Once cinnabar is mined and crushed, mercury can be easily separated from its mineral companions. The warmer aboveground temperatures and the decrease in pressure allow pure mercury to take the form of a very odd liquidlike metal. But unlike a drop of water, a drop of mercury touched by a finger does not wet the skin. Instead, it breaks into smaller drops, tiny glittering balls that skitter away, breaking into ever-smaller balls if touched again. That brilliant scatter effect prompted alchemists to nickname the metal “quicksilver” and to formally name it Mercury, for the fleet-footed Roman messenger god.
The same silver-sphere formation also explains why mercury is less acutely dangerous in its purest form. High surface tension keeps the fluid metal balled up, preventing it from puddling outward, as a traditional liquid would, or from readily soaking into its environment. That same self-containing tension also keeps pure mercury from being easily absorbed by the body.
A few people, mostly in the mid-nineteenth century, had actually swallowed a gleaming cupful, believing it would cure constipation. But the element mostly slipped right through. The mercury drinkers showed no signs of acute sickness, although many complained of developing extremely sore mouths. Neither does elemental mercury absorb easily through skin. Those spherical droplets tend to just jitter over the surface ridges on fingers rather than soak into the tissue. No one has ever called elemental mercury harmless, though. The mercury drinkers of the ninteenth century didn’t necessarily become sick immediately, but many later developed cancers, referred to as “mercurial tumors” in the medical textbooks of the time.
Mercury salts work faster and cause more immediate injury, largely because living tissues tend to soak up salty liquids. And mercury bichloride is basically just another chlorine-based salt, a mean-tempered cousin of the familiar sodium chloride (NaCl) that we use as table salt. It’s the absorption factor that makes mercury salts so famously dangerous. These quicksilvered compounds dissolve readily in water or alcohol and spread rapidly through living tissues. As medical accounts of the 1920s noted, mercury bichloride was so corrosive, so irritating, that it could destroy tissue to the point that teeth loosened in the mouth, and the stomach eroded into a mass of bleeding ulcers. Physicians knew that because mercury salts, despite the risks, were available in an astonishing variety of commercial products.