Poisoning the Pecks of Grand Rapids

by Tobin T. Buhk

  The Sun correspondent described the scene: “The court room…was still as death. Jurors, wearied by the long session, sat bolt upright or leaned forward to catch every word.”

  Deuel began by quizzing Arthur about his long history of stealing things.

  As far back as he could remember, Arthur said, he stole. When he worked as a paperboy for the Grand Rapids Herald, he took extra copies that he would sell and pocket the proceeds. As a student at Grand Rapids High School, he sneaked up the fire escape and swiped a German examination from a teacher’s desk. He never really studied in school, he said, instead spending his time playing baseball games.

  The thefts, Waite explained, continued throughout college and his five years in South Africa, where he pilfered from his employer, Wellman & Bridgeman. Among other things, Waite said he stole “fine gold, which we used in casting, and so forth, some of which I brought back home here.”

  “Did you have any other kind of trouble while you were in South Africa?” Deuel asked.

  Waite nervously repositioned himself in the chair. “One or two small matters.”

  “What were they?”

  “Slightly unprofessional conduct with some of my patients.”

  “The nature of the unprofessional conduct?”

  “Nothing more than flirtation.”

  “Did you have any trouble over a girl there?”

  “Then, yes.” Waite said some money exchanged hands to settle the affair “so that it would not be made public that I had done this.”

  Deuel turned to Waite’s courtship of Clara.

  Waite explained that he had returned to the United States in 1914. Upon a visit to Grand Rapids, Clara Louise Peck invited him to a reception. Enthralled with the Peck mansion, Waite became a frequent visitor after that.

  “Were you in love with her?”

  Waite shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  In the gallery, Clara watched, a veil covering the tears that began to run down her cheeks.

  “Can you state what the reason was for proposing marriage to her?”

  “Money, possibly.” Waite said he knew all about the Peck fortune, which was why he pursued Clara.

  Grand Rapids High School, circa 1915, where Arthur Warren Waite went to school. On one occasion, Waite used the fire escape to enter a classroom and steal a German examination. From the Detroit Publishing Company, Library of Congress.

  Deuel questioned Waite about his relationship with John Peck’s sister, Catherine. Waite explained that he had completely duped Catherine into trusting him months before he married Clara. He lunched with her every noon—attention the elderly woman craved. Grateful, she lavished Waite with offers of money and expensive gifts, including jewelry. The gullible woman even gave him control over thousands of dollars in securities. Waite, however, insisted he didn’t steal the money. “If I had spent the money,” he said, “it would be theft. I misrepresented to her, but the money is still there—was still there.”

  He did, however, steal other things from Catherine Peck. On one occasion, he said, he plucked two $1,000 bonds from her trunk but returned them when she became suspicious. On another occasion, when Catherine left her rings unattended, he pried loose one of the diamonds and pocketed it.

  As six thirty approached, Waite had spent two and a half hours on the stand. Exhausted, Deuel pleaded for an adjournment, but Shearn wanted to conclude the trial as quickly as possible, so he announced an evening session. Following a ninety-minute break, the court would reconvene to hear the remainder of Waite’s testimony. Women, Shearn said, would be excluded from the evening session.

  The Waite case became big news around the United States. This sketch, made by an unknown artist working for the Bismarck (ND) Daily Tribune, shows three key figures in the case: Arthur Warren Waite, Percy Peck and Clara Waite. This sketch also appeared in the Tacoma (WA) Times. From Chronicling America, Library of Congress.

  At 8:00 p.m., Waite returned to the stand, where he would play to a considerably smaller audience.

  Deuel resumed his questions about Waite’s relationship with Catherine Peck.

  She gave him many things, including diamonds, which Waite characterized as “outright gifts.” Catherine, Waite said, gave him a large diamond ring, which he later slipped onto Clara’s hand at the wedding under the pretense that he had purchased it with his life savings.

  Aunt Catherine also gave him a ten-carat rock “as a keepsake,” and “against her instructions,” Waite took it to a jeweler, who cleaved the gemstone into pieces. He had one three-carat stone set into a ring and wore it about town before giving it to Margaret Horton when he said goodbye.

  Deuel next questioned Waite about his attempts to murder his benefactor.

  “Now in reference to Miss Catherine Peck, did you ever put ground glass in a can of marmalade?”

  “I did, yes.” Waite also admitted that during the summer of 1915—before his marriage to Clara—he spiked a can of fish with germ cultures obtained from human feces and gave it to Catherine Peck.

  “And did you give her any other germs at any other time?”

  “I gave her these others that I got from the laboratory.” Waite said he mixed typhoid as well as other germs into Catherine’s food. He explained that he obtained cultures of several very dangerous bacteria, including typhoid, diphtheria, pneumonia, influenza and streptococcus.

  “Why did you want to grow bacteria and get them?” Deuel asked.

  “Why?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because I wanted to give them to these people.”

  “To what people?”

  “To Miss [Catherine] Peck and Mrs. Peck and Mr. Peck.”

  Deuel wanted to drive home the idea of his client’s depravity, so he asked Waite about a bizarre attempt to procure poison to put into Catherine Peck’s tea. “Was there any arsenical fly paper in her room?”

  “Oh, yes; I forgot about that. I had read somewhere about someone using fly paper which had some arsenic on it—the fly paper, it said, always did, and they soaked it and got the solution and then they would put it in the person’s coffee. I read that in the paper a year ago or so; and so I got some fly paper and soaked it and then I took that and dried that, and I left some of the papers in her room so they would be found. But I guess I did not get enough, because it did not do anything.”171

  His attempts to murder Aunt Catherine, Waite explained, ended when Hannah Peck came to visit in January. He immediately seized the opportunity to begin poisoning her with diphtheria, typhoid and influenza germs he had acquired though William Webber. “And they acted on her immediately,” Waite noted with a smile.

  “Did you give her anything else besides germs?”

  “I did, yes, sir. You see, she got sick and she got worse, but then she did not seem to get much worse; and so then I got some veronal.” Just before midnight on January 29, he gave her the drugs. “I think I had a dozen tablets. And that was that night, you see—that Saturday night, maybe about eleven or twelve o’clock.”

  Waite paused and looked around the room. “And then I went to bed.” The next morning, Clara discovered that her mother had died sometime that night.

  “These dozens of germs that you gave Mrs. Peck, can you state whether there were millions or billions of these germs?”

  Waite smiled. “Oh, well,” he said nonchalantly, “billions—that is, there is no counting them, there would be so many.”

  The shocked jurors stared at Deuel, the Sun correspondent wrote, but then they fully realized the defense strategy. In the gallery sat “the alienists of the defense, Dr. Diefendorf and Dr. Karpas, industriously taking notes or making suggestions about questions.”

  At Deuel’s prompting, Waite went on to detail his murder of John Peck.

  “And when Mr. Peck came, did you administer any [germs] to him?”

  “Yes, I gave him better doses, but they did not affect him at all. And I kept giving him more bigger—very large doses, but they did not affect him.” Waite
said he gave John Peck the same “pathogenic” germs he gave Hannah Peck, including typhoid and diphtheria. “I got some tubercular sputum and put it in a syringe, a spray; and then I had him spray with that, when we would go out riding. He used the spray a good deal. And then I put this in instead of his regular spray. And then also later I put in the regular diphtheria and pneumonia organisms—into the spray.”

  This, Waite noted, did not work as intended. John Peck remained upright. He added, in a matter-of-fact tone, “and then I tried all the time to make them stronger—bigger doses and stronger, more virulent. But I could not get them strong enough; and so then I tried to make him weak and sick, and I got big doses of calomel—calomel tablets, you know, in the bottles—one grain and a half grain; and I would give him maybe half of a bottle at a time.”

  “How would you give it to him?”

  “That I could put in any food, because I got these sweetened tablets, and you could put it on just where you could put sugar—it was white and powdered enough—it was white and rather sweet powder—so that it was not noticeable in the taste. And these would give the diarrhea that he had so severely.”

  Waite grinned in a way that made the Sun reporter cringe. “The man actually grinned,” he wrote.172

  Equally disgusted, the New York Herald reporter described Waite as acting like a comedian attempting to amuse the spectators. “Smirking whenever he related an especially repugnant or suggestive incident,” he wrote, “he [Waite] grinned and glowed with seeming self-satisfaction.”173

  Deuel continued his questioning. “What other things did you try?”

  Waite smiled. “Well, I was hoping to make the pneumococcus work, by giving him a cold; I would take him out riding in the automobile and leave the windows of the car all open on a cold night and drive all around; and then I would put water too on the sheets in his bed to make him catch cold.”

  Waite began to speak faster and in a slightly elevated tone as he progressed through his various attempts to murder John Peck.

  “Did he catch cold?”

  “No, he did not. And then I tried chlorine gas. I had read that the soldiers had got pneumonia after they had inhaled this gas—it makes the throat raw. And so I got some chlorine solution and put it in, but it did not work, it was too weak.” Waite said that during a span of two weeks, he tried several other methods to murder John Peck, including feeding him large doses of calomel to weaken his system.

  The calomel and the resultant diarrhea made Peck weak, Waite said, but not weak enough. He even seemed to improve slightly, and he planned to travel south to recuperate. Waite realized that he needed to work fast, so he purchased ninety grains of arsenic and began giving it to Peck on the Thursday or Friday before he died. He gave Peck a minute dose the first day, but he didn’t become sick, so he gave him increasingly larger doses. By Saturday, March 11, Peck had ingested the entire ninety grains. He put the poison “in the food always—at some meal always.”

  Deuel asked Waite about the night John Peck died. “Describe in detail what you did after you went into his room that night.”

  “Well,” Waite began, “he was quite in pain, and then it occurred to me—the doctor had said, I think, that hot soda was good to stop his pain and also aromatic spirits of ammonia; and we did not have any ammonia, but we had a little bottle of chloroform that Miss Catherine Peck had given to me quite a long time before for cleaning purposes.” Waite said he went into the room and administered the chloroform until John Peck was unconscious. “And then finally I went into the hall and got a green pillow off the couch, because there was not, I thought, enough of the chloroform, and then I held the pillow tightly over his face.”

  Swann smiled. Waite had just confessed to smothering Peck, just as he theorized in his opening statement, even though his medical experts testified that the cause of death was arsenic poisoning.

  The key point in Waite’s testimony, as reporters pointed out in their day-after-trial coverage, came at about 10:00 p.m.

  “What,” Deuel asked, “was your purpose in administering germs to all these people?”

  In a matter-of-fact tone, Waite described his reasons for obtaining virulent bacteria. “Well,” he said, “because I wanted them to take sick and die.”

  “Why did you want them to die?”

  “Because I wanted their money.”

  He wanted Catherine Peck to die first, he said, because her fortune would pass to John Peck. Then, when he dispatched John Peck, the sum total of the Peck fortune would pass in equal parts to Percy and Clara.

  After prompting this stunning admission from Waite, Deuel had finished his questions, so Shearn decided to adjourn until the following morning.

  The trial’s fifth day—Friday, May 26, 1916—began with Waite back on the stand. Before Deuel handed him over to Brothers for what would surely be a grueling cross-examination, he asked one final sequence of questions.

  “Dr. Waite, will you state whether or not you made any attempt to kill your wife?”

  “I did not.”

  “Did you have the idea in your mind as to whether or not you would kill your wife?”

  “I did have the idea for a time, but I am not sure whether I would have done so, and I made no attempt.”

  “No further questions, Your Honor.” Deuel slumped into his chair. He was still exhausted from the marathon court session the night before.174

  Brothers stood and took a deep breath. He needed to smash Waite’s feeble attempt at a half-baked insanity defense. In addition to the twelve men in the jury box, he had to convince the alienists in the audience. He found himself in an unfamiliar position. As a prosecutor, he usually tried to underscore a defendant’s depravity for the jury, but since Deuel’s strategy was to prove Waite’s behavior was so depraved that no sane man would act that way, Brothers would have to create the impression that Waite wasn’t as wicked as he appeared to be.

  Brothers began by grilling Waite about various statements he had made to Swann, Cunniff and others. Waite, however, had developed amnesia about these points. He didn’t remember telling Detective Cunniff that he had purchased arsenic at John Peck’s request. He didn’t remember trying to finger Percy for the murder when he first met with Swann, and he didn’t remember blaming “the man from Egypt.” Brothers asked him twice more about “the man from Egypt,” but both times, Waite denied ever mentioning the entity.

  After a few more questions and a few more denials from the witness stand, Brothers turned to Waite’s alleged depravity. “Haven’t you been advised that if you went on this witness stand and made yourself out a notorious criminal that there would be at least one juror in this box who would think you were crazy?”

  “I have not,” Waite replied as if offended by the notion.

  “And isn’t that your hope?”

  “That isn’t my hope.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I think not.”

  “And you wrote and signed a confession in Bellevue in which you stated you knew you deserved the penalty of death and were prepared to pay that penalty?” Brothers asked, referring to Waite’s letter to the World.

  “I am prepared.”

  Next, Brothers questioned the extent of Waite’s plot.

  “Isn’t it a fact that you never took one single step towards taking the life of Catherine Peck?”

  “It is not a fact that I never took one single step toward it.”

  “Yes,” Brothers said.

  “That is not a fact,” Waite insisted.

  “And that you never had in your hands any living bacteria of any time before you were married?”

  Once again, Waite denied it. “That is not a fact.”

  Brothers quizzed Waite on his plot to murder Peck to obtain his fortune. Waite admitted to planning the murder as early as the summer of 1915.

  “And when you succeeded in getting your hands upon the Peck money, you were going to leave the country?”

  “That I cannot say.”

 
; “You and Margaret Horton were going away together?”

  “We were not,” Waite insisted.

  After a few more questions, Brothers ended his cross with the clincher: “And there cannot be now, nor at any time, any doubt in any man’s mind that you are guilty of this crime?”

  “Not the slightest.”

  Brothers stared at Waite for a few seconds before returning to his chair.175

  Deuel needed to do a little damage control, so he reexamined Waite, focusing on his lapses of memory. Again, Waite denied remembering, among other things, the man from Egypt. After this line of questions, Waite was excused. He stepped down and trudged back to his chair. The spring in his step was gone.176

  Catherine A. Peck, whom the press described as “a pleasant-faced woman,” took the stand after the man who had tried to murder her. Since Brothers tried to establish that Waite’s attempted murder of Catherine Peck was a work of fiction, Deuel wanted to corroborate statements Waite made on the witness stand, particularly the “marmalade incident.”

  “I bought this jar of orange marmalade,” Catherine Peck explained, “the Dundee brand, and I took it home and ate part of it, and it appeared to be—that is, to my mind, full of sand.” She also described the can of fish that Waite said he contaminated with feces. “It was not edible at all,” she said.177

  “Dr. Morris J. Karpas,” William Penney bellowed.

  Deuel hoped that Dr. Karpas would be one of two experts whose testimony would convince the jurors that Waite was mentally ill. An expert in “nervous and mental diseases,” Dr. Karpas had interviewed Waite several times after his arrest. He found Waite tight-lipped until authorities transferred him to the Tombs; then Waite opened up about his crimes. According to Dr. Karpas, Waite admitted plotting the murders of Hannah and John Peck before his marriage to Clara. He also planned on killing Clara.178