Mercury compounds were sold as bedbug killers. They came mixed into laxatives, antiseptics, and diuretics. In extreme cases, doctors prescribed them for chronic bacterial infections such as syphilis. At the time when Gertie Webb’s uncle was making his accusations, both the benefits and the murderous potential of mercury bichloride were well known. The poison’s risky attributes had been impressed on film fans everywhere, thanks to a Hollywood-fueled tabloid scandal of 1920.
IT WAS THE irresistibly tragic tale of a beautiful young actress, the adventure-loving heroine of one successful film after another:
Madcap Madge
,
The Flapper
, and—what would turn out to be her last picture—
Everybody’s Sweetheart
.
The actress, Olive Thomas, had the look of a charming child, with a shining bob of curly dark hair, big violet-blue eyes, and a pale, heart-shaped face. The look launched her career, starting in 1914 when she’d won a “Most Beautiful Girl in New York City” contest. She went on to become a featured Ziegfeld dancer at the New Amsterdam Theatre, a graceful waif, drifting in a zephyr of scarves. The pin-up artist Alberto Vargas painted her wearing only a red rose and a wisp of black satin. Within a few years she was making films for the Selznick studios.
In the way of people whose lives seem charmed, Thomas soon married a member of the Hollywood’s elite, Jack Pickford, younger brother of screen star Mary Pickford. The couple rapidly developed a reputation for wild behavior, intense partying, and intense quarreling, usually over his numerous affairs—he’d developed syphilis as a result of one of them. They separated, reunited, separated, and tried again, delighting the gossip magazines. “She and Jack were madly in love with one another but I always thought of them as a couple of children playing together,” Mary Pickford observed sadly in her autobiography many years later.
In early September 1920 the couple sailed to Paris, reportedly on a reconciliation holiday. They checked into the Hotel Ritz and whirled off to enjoy the Prohibition-free city, drinking and dancing at Left Bank bistros until the early morning. At the end of one particularly drunken spree, Pickford and Thomas staggered into their hotel room at nearly three in the morning. Jack, barely standing, fell into the bed. His wife, still energized by the adventure, puttered around the room, wrote a letter, and, finally tiring, went into the bathroom to get ready for sleep.
As Pickford told the police, he was floating in a whiskeyed haze when Olive began screaming, over and over, “Oh my god, my god.” He stumbled into the dimly lit bathroom, where she was leaning against the counter. Mistaking it for her sleeping medicine, she had picked up a bottle of the bichloride of mercury potion that he rubbed on his painful syphilis sores, poured a dose, and chugged it down. As the corrosive sublimate burned down her throat, she had a moment to realize her mistake. He caught her up and carried her back to the bed, grabbing the phone and calling for an ambulance. “Oh my god,” she repeated, “I’m poisoned.”
As the story broke, as Thomas lingered in the hospital for three more days, the newspapers repeated every rumor smoking around them: Pickford’s infidelities had driven her to suicide; he had wished to get rid of her and tricked her into taking the poison. As the days passed, he became more evil, she more saintly. So many people flocked to Thomas’s funeral in Paris that women fainted in the crush and the streets became carpeted with countless hats, knocked off and trampled.
The police launched an investigation, including an autopsy, and concluded that it was, as Pickford had said, just a terrible accident. In an interview with the
Los Angeles Examiner
after his return to California, Pickford dwelled on how much his wife had wanted to live: “The physicians held out hope for her until the last moment, until they found her kidneys paralyzed. Then they lost hope. But the doctors told me she had fought harder than any patient they ever had.”
Olive Thomas’s demise, for all the feverish attention it received, was actually a rather standard death from bichloride of mercury. In New York City the medical examiner’s office calculated that the compound caused about twenty deaths a year, mostly suicides and similarly unfortunate accidents. But Thomas had definitely given the poison a new star status, at least for the moment.
GERTIE WEBB’S uncle had publicly hinted that the same poison that ended the life of Olive Thomas killed his niece. His accusation seemed, at first, a purely spiteful act, but the authorities were becoming curious. “There is doubt as to whether or not she died a natural death,” the Westchester County coroner admitted to reporters clustered in Rye that September 1923. Her physician had refused to sign a death certificate. In response, the coroner had ordered an autopsy and asked that her viscera be removed and sent to Alexander Gettler in New York City, citing the growing reputation of the toxicology work there.
In late August Charles and Gertie Webb had come to vacation at the Westchester Country Club, bearing a letter of introduction from a club member. The resort catered specifically to their social set. The building was designed in the style of one of Britain’s great houses, located on almost six hundred acres of land owned by the Commodore and Biltmore Hotel Company. It offered ponds for fishing, an eighteen-hole golf course, turquoise-tiled pools, tennis courts, card games in the parlors, tea dances, and a private beach club a short distance away.
Gertie’s mother had enjoyed the luxury hotel life as well, taking her daughter every summer to old-money resorts in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Webb had persuaded his new wife to try a different place; the old ones, with all their memories, made her melancholy. In August they’d arrived in Rye, planning to do nothing much but play tennis in the day, dance in the evening, and play cards at night. But within a week Gertie was complaining of pain in her side and shortness of breath. Webb summoned a highly recommended doctor staying nearby, William Meyer, who diagnosed a case of mild pneumonia.
Meyer served an exclusive wealthy clientele, maintaining offices in nearby White Plains and in an elegant suite on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. He also had a favorite hobby: medical detective work. As an amateur criminologist, he regularly gave lectures in Manhattan high schools on the science of crime, especially on discovering concealed murders. To the trained eye, as he told the district attorney, Gertie Webb’s illness seemed peculiar from the outset.
A slight case of pneumonia wasn’t so alarming in itself, but his patient seemed oddly sicker than she should have been. Meyer hadn’t liked the waxy yellow tone to her skin, the breathy weakness of her voice, and the inexplicable way her health worsened under treatment.
Nothing he did seemed to help. Finally, he decided that her illness just couldn’t be caused by a natural disease. And in that case he knew whom to blame. He abruptly barred Webb from the sickroom. She died a few days later, but the doctor gave himself credit anyway: “If I hadn’t, she wouldn’t have lived as long as she did.”
IN GETTLER’S LABORATORY, mercury bichloride was an unhappily familiar substance.
He’d published his first paper on mercuric chloride poisoning in 1917, before he’d become city toxicologist, while he was holding down only one job, as chemist for Bellevue’s pathology department.
It wasn’t a particularly difficult poison to detect in a body. But Gettler had been experimenting with it in smaller and smaller amounts, pushing the limits of Reinsch’s test, following those careful steps of heating, distilling, and condensing it until the pure poison separated out. He tried to improve the sensitivity until he could detect a mere trace.
The final steps in Reinsch’s test involved placing a clean strip of copper in a slurry of suspect tissue and acid, waiting to see if mercury formed a glossy film over the probe. Gettler recognized that the longer he waited, the more mercury might build up on that copper probe. If the slurry was high in mercury, the copper strip glossed over quickly. But if he left the strip to stew overnight before proceeding to the next stage—removing the probe and heating it in a clean glass tube—the test was more sensitive. Even if he couldn’t see mercury on the copper, he discovered, this final heating could cause that invisible trace to vaporize and condense inside the tube, coating it with a fine, just detectable quicksilver sheen. In fact, the process was so sensitive that Gettler could detect even the minimal evidence left by one measured spoonful of prescription medicine.
He worked with other procedures as well, seeking confirmation. If a poisoned slurry of tissue was exposed to hydrogen sulfide (the noxious gas that gives rotting eggs their smell), the solution would color and discolor in precise order—yellowish-white, then dark yellow, orange, brown, and black. Mercury would also form a glittering layer over gold foil, if the gold was wrapped around zinc and placed in that poisonous brew for several hours. But Reinsch’s test was the one that Gettler came to believe most reliable, especially as he continued to refine it. If the copper wire was left overnight, if he curved the glass tubes so that not a drop could escape, the test proved sensitive enough to produce the shimmer of mercury from as little as 1/500,000 of a grain of mercury salts.
WELL BEFORE Gertie Webb’s organs arrived at Bellevue—stomach, kidneys, liver, intestines, all in clean glass containers—Gettler had been analyzing mercury bichloride. He’d learned from every case, from the accidental overdoses and the deliberate ones: the Italian seamstress who swallowed thirty mercury bichloride tablets, the woman who left a note explaining that she was weary of summer heat, the despairing wife who had quarreled once too often with her husband.
None of them had died quickly: as Olive Thomas’s case had emphasized, bichloride of mercury did not offer a fast or easy way out. The seamstress, even after swallowing her bottle of pills, had taken two weeks to die. Most of the suicides reviewed by the medical examiner’s office lived five to twelve days. Evidence from autopsies suggested that the poison steadily eroded them internally. The organs looked chewed, spattered with bloody lesions, especially the kidneys, which received an excruciatingly high amount of the mercury salts as they struggled to clear the blood.
And so the kidneys were the first place Gettler looked when checking for chemical evidence of mercury poisoning. And in his preliminary analysis of Gertie Webb’s kidneys, he found the faint, glistening signature of mercury in the tissue.
CHARLES WEBB—Carl to his friends—was having a lousy month.
He’d lost his wife less than a year into their long-awaited marriage. He’d been publicly accused of murdering her, first through sly hints by her relatives, then more directly by her friends: “Girlhood Friend Charges Murder,” ran the
New York Times
headline on October 2, over a story based on yet another cozy press conference, this one held in the living room of a White Plains vacation cottage. The accuser, a woman who had attended private schools in Manhattan with Gertie Webb, told reporters that Carl Webb was a devious man. “Until a short time ago, poor innocent Gertie did not know that she was taking poison, as I and other dear friends believe.”
While she was still single, Gertie Gorman had signed a will dividing her considerable property among family, friends, and servants. She possessed plenty to divide: the house on Madison Avenue, a country home in Fairfield, Connecticut, three apartment buildings in Manhattan, several acres of land near the city’s northwest border at 189th Street, stock in the Bankers Trust Company and Brooklyn City Railway Company, partnership in a real estate and development company, three automobiles, a fine collection of jewelry, a ruby and diamond lorgnette for use at the opera, a solid gold mesh evening bag, silver, artwork, clothing, and furs of silver fox and sealskin, as well as several hundred thousand dollars in bank accounts.
But after Gertie Webb became ill in Rye, she had signed a far briefer will, only twenty lines long, that left everything to her husband. This, her angry friends and relatives insisted, had been his design. He had forced this will on a dying woman, which they believed was the sole purpose of the marriage. “There will be trouble by the others when it is filed,” Webb reportedly told his lawyer, and he was right.
THE DAY AFTER his wife’s old friend gave her incendiary press conference, the day he learned that the Westchester County grand jury had been called into session concerning his wife’s death, Carl Webb tried, in his quiet manner, to defend himself. He did not call reporters over to visit him at the country club, where he was sheltering. Instead, through his attorney, he released a written statement that began: “I have been naturally reluctant to discuss in the public press the tragedy which has recently befallen me.”
He’d wanted time to grieve in private, Webb said, more time than he’d been allowed. “So much publicity, however, has been given to the matter and so many insinuations have been made by persons apparently hostile that my friends have urged me to make a public statement.”
Regarding the will—yes, he had filed it for probate. But he also filed a more complex version, unsigned, as a proposed amendment. Gertie had insisted on drafting the short will after she realized how sick she was, he insisted; she’d wanted him to be her beneficiary. He had thought at the time that it gave him too much, so he had asked their attorney to draw up another document that included many of the earlier bequests. But he was unable to get his wife to sign the revised version; for one thing, the doctor had ordered him out of the sickroom.