Poisoning the Pecks of Grand Rapids

by Tobin T. Buhk

  Cunniff pried back the lid, reached inside the can and removed a small package wrapped with brown paper. He gently tugged at the paper, and it came away, revealing a roll of banknotes with a $500 bill on the outside. They had just unearthed a portion of the money Catherine Peck had entrusted to Waite and solid evidence of an attempted bribe. The other portion of the bribe—the uncashed $9,400 check—remained missing.

  With Young and Kane watching, Cunniff sat down and counted the money. The roll contained exactly $7,800—$1,200 shy of the bribe Kane said Waite paid him. Cunniff repeated the count three times, and each time he arrived at the same figure.

  Cunniff stared at Kane for a few seconds. “My man, you’re shy,” he said with a wry smile.

  Kane shrugged. “How do I know it’s shy? I told you and the judge [Swann] that I never counted the roll the doctor gave me. I was too nervous.”

  “Well,” Cunniff remarked sarcastically, “it’s gone anyhow. Maybe the man from Egypt came and took his rakeoff.”115

  Young chuckled; Kane wiped the beads of sweat from his forehead.

  While Kane led the treasure hunt on Long Island, Walter Deuel traveled to Grand Rapids, where he gathered information about history of insanity in the Waite family

  Deuel interviewed Waite’s family and friends and found evidence of insanity running throughout the Jackson branch of the Waite family tree. He discovered that Arthur’s grandfather Milo left home one day never to return, and two of his father’s cousins spent time in insane asylums.

  When he returned to his New York office, Deuel learned that the grand jury had reached a decision. They had returned an indictment against Waite for two counts: the first charged Waite with using arsenic to murder John Peck, and the second charged him with using “a certain deadly poison, to the said grand jury likewise unknown.”116 The second charge referred to the possibility that Waite had murdered Peck with a deadly bacteria or virus.

  Deuel carried the news to Bellevue, where he found Warren and Sarah Waite flanking their son’s bed. Arthur was unmoved by the indictment. “It’s just as I expected,” he said flatly.

  When Deuel said Waite would likely face the death penalty, Sarah Waite began to sob. “My son! My son!” she shrieked. “My poor son!”

  Warren threw his arms around his wife in a vain attempt to calm her and escorted her out of the room.

  Once Sarah Waite was out of earshot, Deuel suggested an insanity defense. Waite glared at his lawyer. “I am just as sane as you are. You can’t help me in that way,” he snapped. “I’m not afraid of the electric chair.”117

  By March 31, Catherine, Percy and Clara had all condemned Waite in a public statement. Even Waite’s mother declared he must not have been himself when he poisoned his father-in-law. Margaret Horton, however, stood by her other man when she spoke to a reporter.

  “I would stake my life on my conviction that he never planned to kill anybody,” Margaret told a shocked journalist. “It was not in him to do harm to anybody. He would not kill a fly.”

  “Do you believe that Waite has made the confessions attributed to him?”

  “I do not. Either those supposed confessions were made out of whole cloth, or Dr. Waite was drugged and did not know what he was saying.”

  “What would you say if Dr. Waite should tell you now that he had committed these crimes?”

  “I should believe he was drugged.”

  “What would you think if he should state under oath that he was guilty?”

  “Then I should believe he was insane, and I should devote all my resources to proving him insane.”118

  When the reporter left, Margaret took out a sheet of perfumed writing paper, dipped her fountain pen in the ink well and began: “Dear Doctor, I am oh, so sorry for you. I know you are absolutely innocent. Be brave and strong. I shall come to see you to-morrow.”119

  Tomorrow, however, would never come. Swann refused to allow Margaret Horton access to Waite. So “Mr. and Mrs. A.W. Walters” began penning each other letters.120

  Neither of them realized that these letters would later provide Swann with a damaging piece of evidence.

  Walter Deuel slapped the Monday, April 3 edition of the Sun on his desk. He ran his finger across the page as he read the article “DR. WAITE INSISTS THAT HE IS SANE.” The article was a follow-up to the previous day’s front-page item. On Sunday, April 2, New Yorkers read all about a curious letter Waite sent, through Deuel, to an editor at the World. It contained Waite’s latest admission of guilt, this time without the “man from Egypt.” This was the fourth time—following the partial confession to Swann, the confession to Frank Waite and the “man from Egypt” tale—that Waite admitted to having a hand in the death of John Peck.

  I have been informed that I have been indicted for the crime of murder in the first degree.

  I know the punishment is death.

  The indictment is just and the penalty is one that I deserve, for I have killed. I killed John E. Peck and his wife.

  The World has always been a fair and impartial paper and one that has always tried to get the facts for the public, and I find that in my case you have searched for the facts and have given them to the public, and therefore in making this my only statement to the public, which I feel in duty bound to make, I address myself to you.

  I have thought and thought and thought while lying in my bed here in the hospital. I have gone over all the incidents of the last few months and my life and I have made my peace with my Creator. I now desire to make atonement for the wrong I have done.

  It is a terrible grief to me that I should have brought such obloquy and shame upon my wife and upon the name of my good parents and made my brothers suffer as they do.

  I am relieved to make this, my confession.

  Signed, Arthur Warren Waite121

  After signing the letter, Waite, apparently struggling with a guilty conscience, summoned Deuel to his bedside and made another statement. In a rambling narrative, Waite detailed his plot to poison the Pecks, including his intention to murder Clara, and explained that it emanated from his desire to obtain easy money. He explained that he didn’t include this aspect of his plot in his letter to the World because he wanted to limit his latest confession to the crimes he had actually committed. He said he didn’t fear death. In fact, he welcomed it and expressed his desire to go to the chair.

  He also addressed his sanity. “There is no use to try to make it appear that I am insane,” Waite said. “I’m perfectly sane. My mind is as clear as a bell, and I think in straight lines. That ‘bad man from Egypt’ story is sheer nonsense. It developed from my trying to joke with a most serious-minded assistant district attorney, Dooling. I don’t want an insanity defense offered. I shall state in court that I’m not crazy and never have been.”

  Waite asked Deuel to relay his statement to the press, which the lawyer did in a telephone call to the World. The next day—April 3—the confession, and Waite’s follow-up statement, hit the newsstands.

  Deuel’s lips curled up in a half smile as he reread Waite’s statement about sanity. He hoped that Waite’s frank admission of guilt would lead others to conclude that only an insane man would act that way.

  10

  A QUESTION OF MIND

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  Tuesday, April 4–Monday, May 15, 1916

  Arthur Warren Waite had, a Sun reporter wrote, left “fingerprints of indiscretion” all over the city.122

  Harry Mack Horton’s “dove among crows” analogy and Margaret’s countless reiterations of her platonic-only relationship with Waite could not explain why detectives found Arthur’s lavender pajamas—a gift from Clara—in their Plaza studio. Waite even decorated the love nest with art from the Coliseum apartment.

  On April 4, Clara filed for a divorce, citing Arthur’s “open and notorious adultery with one Mrs. Margaret Horton” and “persons unknown to the plaintiff” as one factor. The bill of complaint also alleged that Waite, after poisoning Clara’s parents, w
ould have made an attempt on her life. “From the result of investigation,” Clara stated in the complaint, “your oratrix verily believes it to be true that the defendant actually had in mind to poison various other members of her family and indeed had especially in mind to poison your oratrix.”123

  Walter Deuel realized that the only way to keep his client from the chair was an insanity defense, so the Waite case triggered a nationwide debate about insanity and criminal responsibility.

  Deuel hired Dr. Morris J. Karpas, who would, in the days leading up to the trial, probe the deepest recesses of Waite’s psyche. Meanwhile, Swann employed three alienists, or mental health professionals, to determine Waite’s ability to stand trial: Dr. William Mabon, Dr. Menas S. Gregory and Smith Ely Jelliffe. Dr. Gregory, the director of Bellevue’s “psychopathic ward,” had come to know Waite well over the previous week.

  During the first week of April, the four men spent hours interviewing Waite. Reporters dogged them at every turn, doing their best to pry information from the alienists, but the experts remained tight-lipped.

  One New York Times correspondent managed to corner Dr. Gregory on the steps of Bellevue, but his responses only deepened the mysteries about Waite’s psyche. Dr. Gregory characterized Waite as “a very sick man,” but when pressed about the details, he changed the subject. “It’s a beautiful day,” he mused.

  Undaunted, the Times reporter asked, “But did you find any signs of insanity in him?”

  The alienist smiled, looked around and cryptically responded, “Everywhere I look I see signs of insanity.”124

  Waite sat up in bed and waited for the reporters to arrive. He had kept his distance from the press, but on Thursday, April 6, he agreed to grant a brief interview. Still weak from his overdose, Waite remained in bed when the parade of journalists flooded into his room in the alcoholics’ ward of Bellevue Hospital.

  The reporters, curious about the man who single-handedly pushed headlines about the Great War to the margins, formed a hollow circle around Waite’s bed.

  He appeared lucid, sullen and contrite. “I don’t want to say anything that will in any way lessen the penalty I must pay or would in any way enable me to escape the fullest punishment. Society expects me to pay the price.”

  Waite gazed out the window.

  “Are you insane?” one of the reporters asked.

  “I suppose I am sane,” he said, still staring out the window. “Of course I am sane. I am as sane as anybody on this earth.”

  Another reporter asked him about “the man from Egypt.”

  “I don’t want to say anything about that,” Waite answered flatly.

  They asked him about his experimentation with germ cultures and his confession, but Waite would give nothing away. He answered with vague, evasive responses.

  Eventually, a reporter asked about Margaret. “Did Mrs. Horton figure in your plans for the future?”

  Waite refused to answer the question. He stared at the reporters for a few seconds. “I was absolutely alone in what I did,” he said.

  “You have confessed to poisoning two people and to planning to do away with a third. Did you plan to include Miss Catherine Peck in your list?”

  Waite laughed. “You fellows have a great imagination.”

  One of the journalists asked Waite if he was bigamist. “I never have been married to but one woman.”

  “Then who is the woman who signs herself ‘Your African Mother?’”

  “I have some property in British East Africa. It is managed by a man named Steyn. His sixty-six-year-old mother is very fond of me, and I am very fond of her. She often signs her letters that way.”

  A few questions later, the twenty-five-minute interview ended. Waite shook the hand of each reporter as one by one they shuffled past his cot.

  Even in his weakened state, Waite was impressive. “In each of his answers,” wrote a New York Tribune reporter, “there shone the brilliancy of his egotism. His manner was that of a man who has accomplished something infinitely greater than the men who questioned him. He had experienced the great adventure; they had not.”125

  By the second week of April, Clara was still under the weather. Throughout the winter, she had felt drained of energy, which she attributed to nothing more than a mild cold that just refused to go away. Her malaise, however, had gone from bad to worse, undoubtedly caused by the stress of her ordeal.

  But with all the headlines about Arthur’s attempt to infect her parents and the news stories about Arthur’s alleged admission of plotting to murder her, Clara began to wonder if Waite might have given her something, too. If he wanted to inherit her fortune, then, logically, she would have been next. Yet Arthur wasn’t the most attentive husband. She didn’t remember him ever serving her a cup of tea.

  Nonetheless, she decided to err on the side of caution and asked Dr. Schurtz to make a house call and run some blood tests.

  On April 18, Clara received a peculiar letter from Waite. The letter read like an obituary.

  “The Bad, Little Black Man from Egypt is dead,” Waite declared. “He died last Tuesday, and I honestly died with him. I suppose you would have been glad if I had.”

  After declaring his undying love, Waite complained about his headaches. “My brain aches so up in front,” he said. “Things get dark.”

  “Do not try to forgive me—it would be impossible. My brain is purged at last. I am ready to meet my Maker if that should come, and if not, I shall do by silent thought and in whatever way I can conceive to make a little amends to the poor crushed soul of what was my Clara.”126

  Clara folded the note, shoved it into an envelope and addressed it to Mancuso. Then, she picked up the telephone and dialed Mancuso’s number.

  Mancuso chuckled after listening to Clara read the note aloud. To the assistant district attorney, the letter was another lame stratagem by a man desperate to prove insanity where none existed. Waite, it appeared, was still trying to use Clara.127

  He stopped laughing when Clara explained that she had remembered a pertinent detail she wanted to share with the prosecutor—a detail she felt proved Waite tried to infect her, her father and her mother with dangerous bacteria. Waite kept two atomizers in their New York apartment: one that he kept in the refrigerator and another that he kept on a windowsill outside their bedroom.

  When the Pecks came to town, Clara said, he took the elderly couple on long drives in his car. Once under full speed, he put down the windshield. The bitter, cold draft left them shivering.128

  Then, when they returned to the Coliseum, Waite suggested they should do something to keep from catching colds. He said he had some sprays that would prevent such an illness. As a well-known, highly educated dental surgeon, they reasoned, Waite had access to the latest in medical technology. Without question, they followed his direction. Using the atomizers, he sprayed their nostrils and throats every night.

  Clara told Mancuso that Waite also gave a tablet a day to her mother, and in the two days before Hannah Peck’s death, he gave her a tablet every hour.

  Mancuso relayed the conversation to Swann. Although the DA suspected Arthur had murdered Hannah Peck, he couldn’t move on the case without concrete evidence to contradict her official cause of death. Besides, she had been cremated, so any physical evidence of murder would have gone up in smoke.

  To his horror, Dr. Schurtz discovered the presence of both typhus and anthrax in Clara’s blood. He arranged for Clara to go to a sanatorium in Fraser, Indiana, and then addressed the media. He explained why Waite’s plan to poison Clara had failed.

  “Mrs. Waite’s physical condition was very good, and that fact alone kept the number of Waite’s murders down. Also, the conditions at the Coliseum apartment were not ideal for the keeping of cultures, and many of the germs in the atomizers were dead when injected. If the cultures had been virulent, there is no question in my mind that Clara would have died about the same time that her father did, and arsenic would never have been necessary in taking Peck’
s life.”129

  Meanwhile, the revelations continued to flood into Swann’s office. Mancuso uncovered evidence that Waite had fooled around with five other women while courting Clara. Each of the women came from the economic elite, prompting Mancuso to label Waite a “love pirate.” When not busy bedding debutantes in New York, Mancuso discovered, Waite cavorted with at least six more women in other cities. Waite, however, appeared more interested in their bank accounts than their beds. He primarily played with economically well-fixed women.130

  The negative publicity didn’t hurt Margaret Horton’s career. She turned her attention to vaudeville and was offered a spot in a show at Loew’s American Music Hall. On Friday, May 5, crowds overwhelmed the theater to watch her debut performance.

  A throng rushed under the music hall marquee, which advertised “the beautiful and accomplished Mrs. Margaret Horton of the Waite case.”

  Mrs. Horton sang a few songs and left the stage but returned following a rousing ovation. She did not, however, impress the New York Dramatic Mirror theater critic, who panned the headliner’s performance. He characterized it as “without expression, in a strong but uncertain voice.”

  He also hated the obvious fact that she, and the theater, banked on her notoriety.

  “We have no patience with commentators who declare that Mrs. Horton was booked on merit,” the critic wrote. “We take decided exception to the way she was advertised and billed. Moreover, the booking of anyone upon unsavory newspaper notoriety does a positive injury to vaudeville. Indeed, the varieties took a step backward with Mrs. Horton’s appearance.”131

  By mid-May, Clara had recovered fully and made the trip to New York, where she waited for the beginning of what she knew would become a trial circus. For two months, the case had been yesterday’s news; now, it would once again become front-page fodder. And once again, she would become a major figure in the public eye and be forced to rehash her fairy tale romance for all to hear. It had become a twisted fairy tale, like some cautionary story conjured by the Brothers Grimm to warn young, gullible trust-fund princesses about their Prince Charming suitors.