The Poisoner's Handbook (21 page)
Unfortunately for the murderer, the man’s lungs contained no water. And when Gettler ran the toxicology tests, evidence of carbon monoxide almost literally spilled out of the blood.
MOST CARBON MONOXIDE murders involved faking an accident. The standard approach was to blame the death on a leaky heater or poorly closed gas valve, setting it up as just another of the many sad fatalities in the city. Both police and medical examiners acknowledged that these crimes were often difficult to detect, and undoubtedly some murderers were never caught.
But law enforcement officials had exposed enough of these schemes to warn against homicidal overconfidence.
One such success, which would be cited by forensic scientists for years following, occurred in the fall of 1923. An out-of-work painter named Harry Freindlich took out a $1,000 life insurance policy on his twenty-eight-year-old wife Leah, smothered her while she lay sleeping, and then attempted to cover it up.
Freindlich was desperate for money at the time, desperate about everything: he was jobless and unable to pay the rent, much less provide food for his family. The family home was a bare cut above living on the street anyway, a battered tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The paint was peeling off the walls. The floors were splintered. They’d been patching the appliances together with cardboard, glue, solder, anything. It was one of these cracked appliances that gave him the idea—a gaslight in the bedroom with a troublesome broken fitting that he had soldered back together more than once.
On an early October morning Freindlich put a pillow over his wife’s face and pressed it tight until she quit breathing. He then tossed the pillow aside and wrenched apart the soldered light. When he heard the hiss of the gas, he hurriedly left the room, closing the door sharply behind him, leaving his dead wife lying beside the baby son she’d brought to bed with her. As the police pieced it together, he then walked out of the apartment, not trying to save the baby or any of the other children sleeping there.
But that tossed-aside pillow had dropped right on top of the sleeping infant. The little boy abruptly woke and began crying, struggling to get free. The Freindlichs’ oldest child, a ten-year-old boy, heard his baby brother wailing and ran in to see what was wrong. He tried to shake his mother awake. But she didn’t respond, no matter how hard he shook her. Now sobbing, he grabbed the baby and ran to the apartment next door. The neighbor grabbed a candle and hurried to check the darkened apartment. When she saw the dead woman in the bed, she ran to the grocer’s place downstairs to call the police.
At first it looked like just another accident, maybe a suicide. Leah had been a sweet woman, the neighbors told the police, but worn down, just tired out. But something about the neighbor’s story bothered the beat cops. If there was a lethal amount of illuminating gas in a room, it almost always ignited in the presence of fire, thanks to its explosive mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Apartments in the city blew up on a semiregular basis when someone unwittingly struck a match in a gas-filled room; Norris’s office kept a file full of pictures showing blackened walls and fragmented furniture.
If illuminating gas had poisoned Leah Freindlich, it would have built up in the apartment. The room should have flashed to fire when the Good Samaritan ran in with her candle.
Back at the Bellevue morgue, the pathologist found the scenario equally dubious. The dead woman was sheet pale, all wrong for carbon monoxide poisoning, which tended to flush the skin pink. Before beginning an autopsy, he drew blood samples from her body and asked for a quick analysis from Gettler’s laboratory. The lab results showed that the blood was loaded with carbon dioxide, the typical finding in suffocation, but there was no evidence of carbon monoxide. When the pathologist looked more closely at the body, hidden in the hair at the back of her neck he found a black bruising of fingerprints where someone had pressed fiercely against her skin.
Freindlich broke into sobs when he was arrested and begged the police to take him to the roof so that he could throw himself off. He couldn’t have killed his wife, he said—no one could have wished her harm. He couldn’t go to jail; what would happen to his children?
He wanted his old life back.
CARBON MONOXIDE can be considered as a kind of chemical thug. It suffocates its victims simply by muscling oxygen out of the way.
In humans and many other animals, oxygen is transported in the bloodstream by the protein hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is classed as a metalloprotein because it contains the metal iron. Its structure, known as a heme, resembles a bright cluster of protein balls around a darker iron core. The iron in hemoglobin stains red blood cells, giving them that deep crimson color even as the protein itself efficiently moves oxygen through the body.
When a person inhales oxygen, the gas diffuses out of the lungs and into the bloodstream. Then because oxygen molecules are so attracted to iron, they bond to the hemoglobin. The result is called oxyhemoglobin, and in that neat package, the life-sustaining gas is delivered to cells throughout the body. It seems a beautifully designed system. But a chemical vulnerability is built into it, which becomes very apparent with exposure to a poison such as cyanide or carbon monoxide. Both poisons attach to hemoglobin far more effectively than oxygen.
Thus, these two chemical compounds are life-threatening because they are opportunistic, making deft use of the body’s essential metabolic systems. The attraction between hemoglobin and carbon monoxide is some two hundred times stronger than that between hemoglobin and oxygen. No wonder that CO—as an invading gas—can cram into the blood cells, its tighter grip allowing it to displace the looser oxygen bonds. Oxyhemoglobin disappears; the blood becomes saturated instead with carboxyhemoglobin, crowding oxygen from the blood, locking it out of cells. The result is a chemical suffocation.
The early symptoms of acute CO poisoning are drowsiness, headaches, dizziness, confusion, and occasional nausea. In the alcohol-hazed 1920 doctors tended to mistake CO poisoning for drunkenness, according to records kept by Norris’s office. Sometimes the physicians just dismissed signs of CO poisoning as the common mental illness seen among the city’s derelicts. That wasn’t necessarily surprising either. Exposure to carbon monoxide can also induce dementia, memory loss, irritability, a staggering loss of coordination, slurred speech, and even a deep feeling of depression.
Physicians so often got it wrong, at least in 1926, that a CO poisoning was often recognized just at the point when it was too late to save the victim. Or after the patient had been sent to the morgue.
THERE AT Bellevue, in that sanctum of the dead, it took only a few simple tests to reveal a carbon monoxide death—or the absence of one, in the case of Leah Freindlich.
As CO absorbs into cells, it turns arterial blood from its normal dark bluish-red into a bright cherry color. The bright blood pinkens the skin at the same time, flushing it a deep rose color, sometimes mottled with red spotting. That was why Leah Freindlich’s pallor alerted the pathologist on duty—he knew it contradicted the scene set by her husband.
On autopsy, following a carbon monoxide death, the muscle tissues gleam with crimson; so do the organs. The membranes of the throat and lungs are bright red, often covered by a weirdly frothy mucus layer. The brain can appear battered—swollen, dripping with bloody fluid. The cortex can be softened and blood-streaked. Some toxicologists argue that CO ultimately kills by damaging nervous system tissue until the lungs themselves are paralyzed.
In Alexander Gettler’s laboratory, one of the simplest ways to test for CO was to extract blood from the corpse, pour some of it into a porcelain dish, and stir in some lye. Lye (a compound of sodium, hydrogen, and oxygen also known as caustic soda) turns normal blood into a dark, gelatinous ooze that, when held to the light, shows murky layers of greenish brown. But blood saturated with carbon monoxide doesn’t darken that way; it stays an eerie, after-death crimson even as it jells, resembling glossy reddish aspic set into the white dish. In every chemical test, though, no matter what combination of materials is mixed into the blood, the dark/bright distinction persists. Blood containing oxyhemoglobin thickens to black, dark brown, or gray. Blood containing carboxyhemoglobin remains, as they say, blood red.
Chemists weren’t sure exactly what produced that contrast, but they suspected it had something to do with the relentless grip that carbon monoxide exerts on iron components in hemoglobin. The strength of that connection, scientists speculated, might prevent the hemoglobin from breaking down so quickly, thus enabling it to keep staining the blood cells iron-red. But the looser bonds with oxygen might, instead, allow a decomposition of the iron, essentially causing a kind of tarnishing effect, in the way of any oxidized metal, darkening the blood as it did so.
That explanation was mostly educated guesswork, but of this one thing Gettler and his fellow toxicologists were certain: carbon monoxide did not like to let go of hemoglobin. Left for weeks during time tests, residing in stoppered bottles on the wooden counters of Gettler’s lab, solutions containing carboxyhemoglobin would glow like the crimson hourglass on the abdomen of a black widow spider, like the clear carmine red of warning lights signaling danger to those who got too close.
WHEN Charles Norris started as medical examiner, he’d decided to track every accidental illuminating gas death that occurred on his watch. During his first month in office—January 1918—there were sixty-five such fatalities, an average of two a day.
The details of those deaths made it obvious that carbon monoxide does not discriminate in its victims. In the right circumstances, it will kill anyone. A newly married couple in an elegant brownstone just off Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side were killed by gas escaping from a defective rubber hose; a woman living in midtown Manhattan was killed by gas escaping from tubing leading to a stove; a man on the Lower East Side was poisoned by gas escaping from a radiator; a man on the Upper West Side fell into bed drunk and failed to notice that the flame had blown out on two gas jets that fed the lamps in his room; a city inspector was killed by illuminating gas while inspecting the water meter in a basement; a man on Morningside Avenue, on the Upper West Side, was killed by gas escaping from a small gas heater in the bathroom.
In 1925 the details were of the same order, but the number of fatalities had gone up.
That January fifteen people were killed by gas in one terrible day. Among them—a man in Yonkers, killed by gas escaping from an unlighted burner on a stove; a baby, dead when his mother placed him by a poorly fitted stove for warmth; a Long Island man, killed by a leaky furnace; a Bronx man, his wife, and a guest staying in their apartment, dead due to another unlighted stove burner; a young mother and her baby, killed in Brooklyn by a faulty gas heater.
The U.S. Bureau of Mines, which had been investigating carbon monoxide risks in coal mines, released a report in the summer of 1926 Stating that “the public generally does not appreciate the danger from gas leaks.” The government was also weary of people reporting that a trained killer had set off a bomb when in actuality someone had merely left a gas jet open and then lit a cigarette. The bureau wanted to reassure the country’s citizens that not every residential explosion was the work of the Black Hand Society.
It was usually the result of common carelessness.
THE BLACK HAND—
La Mana Nera
in Italian—was an extortion syndicate organized by immigrants in New York and elsewhere (Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans) that used a simple and successful formula to acquire money. A letter was sent to a given target (often another Italian-American) threatening murder, arson, or kidnapping, sometimes all three, unless the society was paid off. The syndicate thrived by making good on its threats. It also believed in theatrical demonstrations, such as blowing up a car or apartment, shredding both property and victim into pieces. As its reputation for terror grew, the letters needed only the most basic signature—a hand printed in black ink.
La Mana Nera
in Italian—was an extortion syndicate organized by immigrants in New York and elsewhere (Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans) that used a simple and successful formula to acquire money. A letter was sent to a given target (often another Italian-American) threatening murder, arson, or kidnapping, sometimes all three, unless the society was paid off. The syndicate thrived by making good on its threats. It also believed in theatrical demonstrations, such as blowing up a car or apartment, shredding both property and victim into pieces. As its reputation for terror grew, the letters needed only the most basic signature—a hand printed in black ink.
In New York the Black Handers were mostly former Sicilians, headquartered in the neighborhood of Little Italy. One of the society’s leaders, nicknamed Lupo (the Wolf), was so feared by other immigrants that they routinely crossed themselves at the mention of his name. The Wolf’s favorite way to kill was to strangle a victim and then set the body on fire, preferably in a park for public viewing. Lupo and his colleagues did their best work in the early twentieth century, killing even police officers who interfered with their work. In 1909 the syndicate murdered a Manhattan police lieutenant in charge of the city’s Italian Squad, which had been created as a response to organized crime. The lieutenant’s funeral drew 250,000 mourners, a testament not only to how much he was admired but to how much the society was hated.
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