by Bridget Heos
When they returned to the hotel, Mary Alice said, “I hope you didn’t eat any of it.”
“No, Ma,” Gracie said. 5
Then Mary Alice served dinner—more room service. Afterward, the girls took the baby to play in the park. They returned after dark, and Florence walked home.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Bliss had fallen violently ill. A family friend, Augustus Teubner, happened to drop by her apartment and immediately called for a doctor.
When Dr. William Bullman arrived, Mrs. Bliss told him, “I am going to die. I have been poisoned by my relatives, who are trying to get my money.” 6
She said the poison had been in the clam chowder. Her condition worsened, and at eleven p.m., she died. Bullman examined the pitcher that had contained the chowder and found white residue at the bottom. He saved the pitcher and some of the vomit for analysis and informed police of a possible poisoning. Had it not been for the friend’s visit, Mrs. Bliss would have died alone, and since autopsies weren’t routine, it probably would have been ruled a natural death.
Instead, poison was found in the body, as well as in the pitcher. Mary Alice stood her ground, insisting, “I am entirely innocent. My mother was the best friend I had.”7
Detectives didn’t buy it. They arrested Mary Alice after her mother’s funeral. Mary Alice quickly became front-page news. Reporters learned that although she went by Mary Alice Fleming, she’d never been married to a Fleming or anyone else. Instead, two men had promised marriage but backed out. Newspapers blamed Mary Alice for this, calling her a degenerate.
But by the time the trial began, the press had done an about-face. By now, Mary Alice had had her baby. Instead of painting her as the murderous daughter, the press began referring to her as a single mother whose children would be orphaned if she were sent to the electric chair. They described her every blush, smile, and whisper in court, as though she were the heroine in a romance novel. They even published the love letters she’d written to the father of her two youngest children, which were read in court. The prosecution hoped they would show that Mary Alice hated her mother—and they certainly did show anger toward her and her lover’s families for interfering in their romance, but they also showed a woman in love. The newspapers breathlessly reported all of this.
The prosecution put forth the theory that Mary Alice had poisoned the clam chowder and then sent it to her mother via her daughter. Their expert witness was Dr. Walter Scheele, a chemist who had tested Mrs. Bliss’s stomach, the sediment in the pitcher, and a tea tray and Japanese jar found with Mary Alice’s belongings in the apartment building (which she denied owning). He said that all of these contained arsenic. The state also called experts to say that Mrs. Bliss’s symptoms were characteristic of arsenic poisoning.
With the money Mary Alice had inherited after her mother’s death, she hired a crack defense attorney, Charles Brooke. He attacked Scheele on every front, calling character witnesses who said they wouldn’t believe a word Scheele said, and another witness who claimed Scheele said he would fix the evidence to prove Mary Alice guilty. Brooke further argued that if Mary Alice had poisoned the chowder, she wouldn’t have sent it with her daughter for fear that the daughter might eat it.
He offered an alternative theory for why Mrs. Bliss had arsenic in her system: she was an arsenic eater. This was known as the Styrian defense. Strange as it may seem, people in the Styrian Alps along the border of Austria and Hungary purposely ate arsenic. Though the practice was illegal, bootleggers sold arsenic oxide as a paste that people would spread on their bread like butter. Beginning in childhood, the Styrians built up a tolerance by taking half a grain (30 milligrams) two to three times a week and increasing the dosage until they reached five grains (300 milligrams) or even more—enough to kill most people. It wasn’t to defend themselves against the possibility of one day being poisoned (à la the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride). Rather, they believed arsenic enhanced health and beauty. In women, it caused a pleasant plumpness, and in men, vitality. It also caused goiters and birth defects (as arsenic interferes with iodine in the body) and probably cancer. In other words, eating poison wasn’t actually good for the Styrians.
Nonetheless, the practice of eating arsenic spread to America—sort of. The Styrian arsenic eaters were featured in both the popular press and in medical journals. Arsenic became a popular ingredient in cosmetic products, including face powder, hair powder, and even pills for improving the complexion. Dr. Campbell’s Safe Arsenic Complexion Wafers were sold over the counter under several different names. Though they contained little arsenic, there were newspaper reports of women dying after taking too many. Besides being a really bad idea for those who took them, these “safe” arsenic pills also provided a defense for those accused of murder: that the victim habitually ate arsenic for good health or the Styrian defense.
After twelve hours of deliberating, the jury found Mary Alice not guilty. Whether they questioned the honesty of the expert witness, accepted the Styrian defense, liked Mary Alice too much to believe that she could murder her own mother, or simply did not want to see a mother of four put to death is unknown.
Advertisement for Dr. Campbell’s Safe Arsenic Complexion Wafers
Juries at the time were indeed skeptical of scientific testimony. And it wasn’t just them. The courts were wary of it, too. In another prominent murder-by-poison case, a jury convicted the accused, but a state supreme court overturned the verdict, believing the forensic evidence to be weak. Thomas Swope (nicknamed Colonel Swope) had earned his fortune in real estate and owned more land than anyone in Kansas City, Missouri. A bachelor, he was close to his nieces and nephews, and several lived with him in his mansion in nearby Independence. They were set to inherit at least part of his $3.5-million estate (about $94 million today) upon their uncle’s death.
In the fall of 1909, Swope suffered a minor injury, and Dr. Bennett Clark Hyde came to the mansion to care for him. Hyde was married to Swope’s niece Frances, but he hadn’t exactly been accepted into the family with open arms. Though he was the president of the Jackson County Medical Society, Hyde also had a scandalous history of grave robbing and horribly mistreating a patient. As part of his treatment of Colonel Swope, Hyde prescribed a digestive capsule. Twenty minutes later, Swope suffered from convulsions. A nurse reported that he said, “Oh, my God, I wish I were dead. I wish I had not taken that medicine.”8 Several hours later, he died.
Exterior shot of Swope mansion in Independence, Missouri
Soon after, several members of the Swope household came down with typhoid fever, and Hyde again stayed at the house to play doctor. In early December, Colonel Swope’s nephew Chrisman Swope suffered from the same type of convulsions as his uncle and died. Hyde insisted on staying on to care for other family members, but his success rate left much to be desired. Several of the nurses gave Frances’s mother, Mrs. Logan Swope, an ultimatum: If Hyde continued to care for the family, they would leave. One nurse, Miss Houlehan, put it plainly: “People are being murdered in this house.” 9
Indeed, the family did ask Hyde to leave on December 18. They also had the bodies of Colonel and Chrisman exhumed and sent to Chicago for autopsies. Meanwhile, Hyde’s wife, Frances, hired a team of defense attorneys (which happens to have included my great-uncle R. R. Brewster, who passed away decades before I was born). The trial began April 16, 1910. Prosecutors theorized that Swope had planned to change his will so that his money went to charity, rather than to his nieces and nephews. When Hyde learned of this, he killed Swope to secure Frances’s share of the money.
Dr. Bennett Clark Hyde, the Swope family doctor and husband of Frances Swope
The state called many expert witnesses, who concurred that the evidence pointed to poisonings. For instance, the pathologists from Chicago, Dr. Walter Haines and Dr. Victor Vaughan, testified that they found strychnine in the liver, and a trace of cyanide. Other evidence was equally damning. Hyde had purchased cyanide capsules and digestive capsules. He explained tha
t the cyanide was purchased to kill cockroaches, to which the prosecutor replied, “Does a man kill cockroaches with poison capsules?”10
Prosecutors argued that, more likely, Hyde had opened both capsules and exchanged the cyanide in one with the digestive medicine in the other. Hyde had also purchased typhoid fever capsules, which he said were for experiments, but the fact that several family members contracted typhoid fever was suspicious, to say the least. On May 16, the jury found Hyde guilty.
His lawyers appealed the case to the Supreme Court of Missouri, where the case was remanded. Hyde would get a new trial. The appeal was granted largely because of what the justices saw as weak expert testimony. They said that a lethal dose of strychnine should have killed a healthy man within a couple of hours, and cyanide in less time, but that Colonel Swope, who was in his eighties and in poor health, had survived for ten hours after taking the pill. The justices objected to the state’s theory that when mixed, the two poisons counteracted each other. After all, the prosecution’s own experts knew of no cases in which this had happened, and it was counterintuitive. Furthermore, the justices said that whereas Hyde was shown to have purchased cyanide, only a trace of that poison was found in Colonel Swope. There was no evidence showing that Hyde had purchased strychnine, the poison that was found in a greater quantity. (In Chrisman, only a trace of strychnine and no cyanide were found.)
As for the autopsies, the judges objected to the fact that the pathologist didn’t have a witness with him during parts of the autopsy and that the defendant was never allowed to have his own experts examine the organs. The justices could have overturned the verdict without allowing a second trial, but they gave the prosecutors a second chance. As it turned out, they would need more than that.
The second trial ended in a mistrial. The jurors were sequestered in a hotel when one juror went AWOL, hopping a train and wandering the countryside for two days before going home to his wife. She brought him back to the courthouse, where he explained that he had needed some fresh air—and freedom from the staring eyes of the courthouse. He claimed not to have discussed the trial while away, but the judge couldn’t be sure of that. He was pretty sure that the juror was suffering from a mental illness. Considering all this, the judge declared a mistrial.
The third trial resulted in a hung jury. Before the fourth trial, Hyde’s attorneys pointed out that a person can’t be tried more than three times for the same criminal charge. Hyde went free. Frances Swope stood by Hyde throughout the court ordeal, prompting him to say, “I have learned that a man can stand anything with a wife like mine believing in him and sustaining him.”11 Not to mention paying for his attorneys.
By the early twentieth century, reliable poison tests were available. But these cases show that forensic evidence wasn’t enough to get a conviction—it had to be strong enough to withstand the scrutiny of judge and jury. The dots had to be connected from the manner of death to the poison found in the victim’s body to the poison being acquired by the suspect. Even then, unscientific factors came into play: a persuasive attorney, a questioned reputation, a likeable suspect, the gut feelings of a jury, a well-crafted appeal. That’s still true today.
What has changed is that all unexplained deaths are now investigated by medical examiners, so that foul play isn’t detected only when somebody gets suspicious—or, in the case of Evelina Bliss, by the chance visit of a friend. Once established, the medical examiner’s office also hired the best toxicologists, so that expert testimony became more accurate and not as easily questioned by the defense. The rise of the medical examiner—and the fall of those who would have gotten away with murder—is the subject of the next chapter.
L’AFFAIRE DES POISONS
Having no test for poison didn’t just allow murderers to go free. It also led to false convictions. Nowhere was that more true than during the French scandal known as L’Affaire des Poisons (the Affair of the Poisons). It began in 1672, when Marie Madeleine D’Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers, was accused of poisoning her father and two brothers to gain inheritance money.
A married woman, she’d been having an affair with a man named Gaudin de Sainte-Croix. To discourage the affair, her father had Gaudin sentenced to the Bastille for six weeks. There, the unscrupulous Gaudin met an Italian poisoner known only as Exili. Upon his release from prison, Gaudin set up his own poison lab and supplied Marie with poison to kill her father in 1666 and her brothers in 1670. Then one day, Gaudin dropped dead in his lab, possibly after experimenting on himself. Police discovered letters in the lab from Marie offering to pay for the poison she’d used to kill her family members. She initially fled the country but later confessed to the murders. In her defense, she argued, “Out of so many guilty people must I be the only one to be put to death? . . . Half the people in town are involved in this sort of thing, and I could ruin them if I were to talk.”12
The “but everybody else is poisoning their families” argument didn’t gain Marie any sympathy—she was beheaded in 1676—but it was an alarming allegation, and French officials took notice. Soon after Marie’s death, King Louis XIV appointed the lieutenant general of the Paris Police, Nicolas de la Reynie, to investigate possible poisoners operating in Paris. In alchemist labs across the city, Reynie found poisons such as arsenic, nitric acid, and mercury, and things that were equally incriminating because of their role in black magic and the possibility that they had been acquired by violent means: nail clippings, drops of human blood, and what was supposedly the fat of a hanged man, to name a few.
Nineteenth-century engraving of the beheading of Marie Madeleine D’Aubray
Suspects were arrested and tortured until they talked. To stop the torture, prisoners would confess to crimes they hadn’t committed and accuse those who were innocent. In all, 442 people were charged and 319 ordered arrested. Of course, none of the accusations could be verified scientifically. At the time, the only so-called “poison test” was to feed an animal the last meal of a victim and see if it died. Any such food evidence was long gone. But trials were held nonetheless, in a secret courtroom called the burning chamber (so named because the windows were blackened to avoid prying eyes, and the room was lit by flaming torches). Here, thirty-six people were sentenced to death and many more banished or imprisoned.
Then it all came to a screeching halt. Catherine Deshayes, known as La Voisin (the neighbor), was an accused poisoner with clients in high places. She refused to share information about them, but when police arrested her lover, Le Sage, they convinced him to talk. Le Sage claimed that Louis XIV’s beloved mistress, Madame de Montespan, was a client of La Voisin’s. La Voisin’s daughter (who had also been arrested) accused Montespan of purchasing love potions and offering human sacrifices so that the king would love her more.
Montespan had reason to be jealous. Though she had had seven children with the king and had been his favorite mistress for years (many referred to her as “the real queen of France”), she wasn’t the only woman in his life. In addition to his wife, Queen Maria-Thérèse, Louis XIV had a string of mistresses. In fact, he had recently fallen in love with both his children’s nanny, Madame de Maintenon, and a noblewoman named Marie Angélique de Scorailles. Marie Angélique became pregnant by him, but sadly lost the child, became ill, and died soon after.
Portrait of Madame de Montespan (1640–1707)
La Voisin’s daughter offered a treacherous explanation. She said that when the love potions hadn’t worked, Montespan had poisoned Marie Angélique—and had tried to poison the king, too. But it appeared to be another case of the accused saying anything to avoid being tortured. An autopsy was performed, and while poison tests on organs were unavailable at the time, evidence pointed to lung infection—not poison—having killed Marie Angélique. At any rate, Louis XIV didn’t believe the accusations, and wasn’t about to have his mistress—favorite or not—raked over the coals. Rather than allow the matter to be made public, he dissolved the burning court. After all, it’s one thing to hear unfounded
accusations about hundreds of people, but another entirely to hear them against a loved one.
2
Bodies of Evidence: Autopsies and the Rise of Medical Examiners
In the American West, shootings were commonplace. Drunken arguments in saloons and quarrels over property were deadly affairs. But the Wild West wasn’t lawless. After a shooting, the body would be handed over to the coroner, who would handle the investigation (as opposed to a detective). The coroner was an elected official who would summon a jury of male citizens for an inquest. He wasn’t usually a doctor, though he might choose a doctor to be a jury member. The coroner and jury would view the body, and if a doctor was present, he might examine the body or even conduct an autopsy. The jury would also listen to witness testimony. If there were witnesses, their word was as good as gold. Whoever they saw draw first was guilty, whereas the second to draw was acting in self-defense. If there was a question of guilt, the case went to trial.
The death of Charles Davis in Eli Signor’s bar, as described by a Wyoming coroner in the late 1800s, shows how this worked. According to witnesses, Charles entered the bar at ten a.m. and ordered several rounds of drinks. He stepped away from the bar to eat lunch (many saloons offered free lunch with the purchase of a drink—or in Charles’s case, several). When he returned, the owner, Eli Signor, wasn’t behind the bar. Charles called for the “Dam son of a bitch”1 to get him a drink, and when Signor didn’t immediately appear, Charles fired his gun at Signor’s cat, threw the barroom chairs into a pile, jumped up on the billiard table, dragged his feet across it, and threw billiard balls across the room.