ON SEPTEMBER 15, 1927, a young woman named Ruby Gonzales came into Manhattan for a doctor’s appointment. She was a waitress in Asbury Park, New Jersey, the hardworking single mother of a five-year-old girl. Gonzales brought her small daughter to the appointment as well as her boyfriend, an adding machine salesman who worked in the city.
The appointment was for an abortion, wholly illegal, wholly secret, and twenty-seven-year-old Gonzales was nervous enough to want her boyfriend for support. And really, she had no choice but to bring her daughter. All of her friends worked—they couldn’t watch the child during the day. Her boyfriend had promised to get them to a hotel afterward, or somewhere she could rest and recover a little.
The two doctors running the clinic assured them all that the procedure was routine and safe. But half an hour after she arrived at the office, Ruby Gonzales was dead on the clinic table. The little girl was sobbing hysterically and the boyfriend was shouting loud enough for the neighbors to hear, such that the doctors were forced to summon the police. None of them wanted to give away that she had been there for an abortion. When the police arrived, their story was that she had started bleeding while the threesome was walking on West 10th Street, where the doctors practiced. Her boyfriend had brought her into the clinic, but she’d died before they could save her, despite all their best efforts.
BACK AT THE MORGUE, the pathologists found this story, let’s say, unbelievable.
They’d seen plenty of bungled abortions; this body had all the signs of a woman mangled by a hurried or incompetent doctor. She’d bled to death in the doctor’s brownstone office—and no wonder. She had been shredded internally. When confronted with evidence of the abortion, both doctors shrugged the accusation away. Maybe she’d had an operation before she walked into their office, they said. She must have received the chloroform during a surgery elsewhere. They had only tried to save her. That was the substance of their statement. They saw no reason to change it.
Whether one agreed with the anti-abortion laws or not—and in those days most did—the medical examiners were tired of doctors getting away with butchering patients. Both of these physicians had been prosecuted for botched abortions before. Judge and jury had exonerated them, apparently preferring to side with the professional man over the woman in trouble. This new death—same doctors, new victim—added to the frustration.
Gettler ran a standard toxicology analysis on the tissue from Ruby Gonzales’s brain. It was loaded with chloroform; about 156 milligrams of the drug saturated every thousand grams of tissue. That was more than three times as much chloroform as had been found in the brain of Albert Snyder. Would it have killed her? It was hard to say; she’d bled to death so quickly that in one sense the anesthesia factor might be considered irrelevant.
But, while pondering the Gonzales case, Gettler realized that the chloroform results might actually be useful. They raised some interesting questions, anyway. For instance, how long did it take for chloroform to leave a brain? At what point was a patient clear-headed enough to walk down the street? If Gonzales had received the drug elsewhere, that knowledge would let them estimate how much earlier the dose had been delivered. And if the doctors had lied—as pretty much everyone in the office suspected—he might be able to prove it.
The challenge was to find those answers while the case was still active. Moving quickly, Gettler decided to run a series of animal experiments. Dogs were known to be a reliable model for studying chloroform. They responded to the drug at very similar concentrations to human beings. They also metabolized chloroform in a similar way, meaning that it cleared from their systems at about the same rate. With that knowledge, Gettler designed a straightforward test to look at response to chloroform, one that he could perform quickly enough to get some answers as to how Ruby Gonzales had died.
The department wanted the results to be inarguable, so Gettler used ten dogs, enough to check and recheck whatever he found. Each dog was tied down and a gauze mask placed over its nose and mouth. The masks were saturated with chloroform and kept in place for varying times—five minutes, half an hour, up to an hour—before being removed. The dogs were then allowed different recovery times before being killed. Some were put down while still unconscious. Others were just starting to stir, sitting up, staggering to their feet, walking in a stumble, or fully awake. At each stage the animal’s brain was analyzed to see how much chloroform it retained.
One dog had died while under anesthesia, killed by the chloroform. Its brain contained 270 milligrams of chloroform per thousand grams of tissue. The still-unconscious animals had levels between 120 and 182 milligrams—directly comparable to Ruby Gonzales’s brain. A dog just getting to its feet measured at 51.3 milligrams. And those that were up and walking around normally, which always took a full fifteen to thirty minutes after the chloroform mask was removed, had no more than a 30-milligram concentration of chloroform in their brains.
There was, Gettler concluded, positively no way that Ruby Gonzales could have been walking around lower Manhattan with 150-plus milligrams of chloroform in her brain. She would have been out on the table, and she would have been unconscious when she died there.
The district attorney called the two doctors back into his office and laid out the chloroform data. The doctor who ran the clinic was visibly shocked: he then admitted to the bungled abortion, and that Gonzales had been completely under when she died. The operating physician was convicted for manslaughter and sent to Sing Sing, which, as the New York newspapers noted, didn’t happen to doctors all that often.
ON JANUARY 12, 1928, having lost every legal appeal, Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray went to the electric chair.
The scene around the high walls of Sing Sing prison bordered on a carnival of the macabre. Crowds of curiosity seekers arrived from as far as Chicago so as not to miss the execution of the year. Motorcars lined the street in front of the prison. Mothers stood with babies at their hips. Affectionate couples cuddled just out of the glare. Ruth Snyder’s fans—she’d received 164 marriage proposals while in prison—shouted curses and pleas at the gates. Reporters jockeyed for position; one
Daily News
reporter rented an abandoned hot dog stand near the front gate and installed his own wire hookup so that he could be first to relay the news.
The prison authorities, after much vicious wrangling, provided passes for twenty journalists to view the electrocutions. Like the other witnesses, they were instructed to walk single file to the big white room that prisoners called the Death House.
In the wall opposite from where they entered was a large wooden door. The door was made of plain oak and above it hung a single sign reading: “Silence.” Through that door the prisoners would enter from their quarters, an area of holding cells called the Dance House.
A few yards to the right of the oak door sat the chair itself, black metal, resting on a black metal mat. In that dark contraption a prisoner would be seated and secured in place. Straps would be buckled around the wrists, the upper arms, the chest, the waist and the ankles. Electrodes, attached to long wires and wrapped in saltwater sponges to further conduct current, would be fitted to the ankles and the head. The executioner had invented the Sing Sing headgear himself: a regulation leather football helmet, lined with rubber to hold the sponge-wrapped electrodes against the head. He’d also created a mask of black leather with slits for the nose and mouth, so that no one could watch the face of a dying prisoner.
The witnesses were put in four church pews, stationed to face the chair. They sat, obeying the order for silence, waiting for the door to open.
RUTH SNYDER came first, wearing a black cotton skirt and a plain brown smock. She carried a crucifix, mumbling to herself over and over, “Jesus, have mercy on me,” even after the mask was put over her face. The executioner pulled the switch on the control panel, releasing a current of 2,000 volts through the wires, sending her body lurching forward against the restraints. He threw the switch twice more, just to be sure. Her hair caught fire. Her skin could be seen charring around the edges of the mask. The wardens untangled her from the chair, put her body on a gurney, and wheeled her out of the room.
Gray came next, meticulously groomed in a pinstripe suit. He waited quietly until the mask was in place and then began to recite the Twentythird Psalm. “The Lord is my Shepherd,” he murmured, “I shall not want.” The executioner hit the switch. Gray’s right sock began smouldering. Plumes of smoke uncoiled from under the helmet. The executioner pulled the switch again, sending another 2,000 volts. The wardens again stepped forward with their gurney. Both bodies were put into gray hearses and shuttled away for burial.
To the outrage of state officials, from the Sing Sing director to the governor, the front page of the next day’s
New York Daily News
was filled by a single photo: Ruth Snyder at the moment a surge of electricity ripped through her body.
The paper had imported a famously devious photographer from Chicago’s
Tribune
and sent him into the Death House posing as a writer. The photographer had a camera strapped around one leg, attached to a cable that ran up his trouser leg and into a pocket. He could squeeze a bulb in his pocket to take one picture which would be unnoticed in the glare of sparks and the horror generated by the chair.
The photographer had muscled his way into the first pew and caught an unobstructed view of Ruth Snyder’s body rattling with electricity. The
Daily News
placed a single word over the photo: “Dead!” The picture was maybe a little grainy, but that only made it more exciting. The paper sold more than 1.5 million extras of that edition. Fearing that its prized photographer, Tom Howard, might be arrested, the Chicago paper sent him straight from New York to an assignment in Cuba. As he related later, a group of Marines there recognized his name—he’d become temporarily nearly as infamous as the subject of his photograph.
Howard’s first thought was that the Marines had come to take him to jail. But it turned out the troops merely wanted to celebrate his Marine-worthy daring. They carted him off to a bar, where the group spent an evening cheering his success with good Havana rum. It was completely legal, after all, and the genuine article, and it tasted wonderful.
EIGHT
RADIUM (Ra)
1928—1929
I
N EARLY 1928 NORRIS received an unusual request for help from a fellow graduate of Columbia University’s medical school, a New Jersey medical examiner named Harrison Stanford Martland.
Despite their age difference—Martland was sixteen years younger than Norris—the two men were friends as well as professional colleagues. They dined together when Martland had business in the city and sometimes went to the theater together with their wives. They bonded over a shared belief in the importance of forensics and a similar regard for their work. Like Norris, Harrison Martland was a born crusader.
Martland’s medical career began in 1909, when he was named the first full-time pathologist at New York City Hospital. After the Great War started, he’d left that job to volunteer with the Bellevue Hospital unit. As a battlefield doctor, he’d proved so tireless, so determined at scraping together medical care from almost nothing, that he’d risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel and been given the job of managing a hospital in Vichy, France. When the war ended, General John Pershing himself pinned a medal on Martland, citing him for “exceptionally meritorious and conspicuous service.”
After the war, Martland, the son of a Newark family practitioner, returned to his hometown and took a job as city pathologist. In 1925 he was offered the job of Essex County Physician, overseeing forensic investigations of death and illness. He accepted, only to learn that the position was in name only; the elected county coroner held all the power. If they could have worked together, Martland might have accepted that, but the coroner system turned out to be embarrassingly corrupt, much like its previous incarnation in New York City.
To the dismay of those running the political machinery in Essex County, Martland demanded real authority. In fact, he demanded that the coroner’s office be replaced by a medical examiner system, along the model of Norris’s office. When county executives refused, he carried his fight to the state legislature. It took two years, but in 1927 Martland was named the first chief medical examiner for Essex County.
The industrial landscape of New Jersey provided Martland with a profusion of workplace safety issues to investigate. His research helped prove that workers in explosives factories were poisoned by nitroglycerine; he wrote the first paper showing that exposure to beryllium—a flexible metallic element used in the emerging electronics industry—could lead to fatal lung diseases. Due in part to his own relentless pressure (he was a man who liked to see his research put to use), those findings would eventually result in regulatory reform.
In 1928 he was pursuing yet another industrial health hazard, one that would challenge the standard definition of a poisonous material. It was this puzzling investigation that prompted Martland to contact the New York City office. He had some aging bones in his possession, belonging to a former New Jersey factory worker. He wanted to know whether the better-equipped laboratories at Bellevue could answer this: were the bones radioactive?