The Poisoner's Handbook

by Deborah Blum

  The papers also offered a memorable image of the coroner that night. Eight hours after the accident, as the hands of the clock were just slipping past two a.m., Riordan finally ambled into the police station where the bodies lay. An assistant was holding him upright, officers reported, and he was a big enough man that his weight pulled both of them sideways. Riordan looked down at the dead men. When told their names—Joseph Collins, 52, Gottlieb Minnick, 27—he snapped, slurring the words but saying clearly enough: “It’s a shame that two such names should pull us out on a night like this.” All this according to the notes of journalists covering the accident, who helped trigger a formal investigation of Riordan’s work.

  Naturally it would be then, in January 1915, in the month of the drunken coroner, of snow fighters in the streets and cholera in the sick wards, that a self-proclaimed serial killer would walk into the district attorney’s office, offering up his impossible tale of poison and murder.

  FREDERIC MORS was a small man, short, thin, nervous. He had narrow blue eyes, slightly shaggy dark hair, and a beard dusted with cigarette ash. He smoked constantly, those aromatic Egyptian cigarettes, and he paced, paced, paced as he told his story. He was a recent immigrant from Vienna, and his English was slow, stumbling enough, that the police brought in an interpreter. “Oh, I wish I spoke English better,” he exclaimed during the initial police interview, but the officers were able to piece together the story anyway.

  He’d come over from Austria in early 1914, wanting to work in medicine. He’d found a job as an orderly at the German Odd Fellows home in Yonkers. The home, a refuge for 250 foundlings and one hundred elderly pensioners, paid only a little—$18 a month plus room and board—but allowed Mors to practice his medical interests. He was soon “made practically a nurse because the men over me realized that I knew something about nursing and was better educated than most orderlies.” Shortly later, he said, the superintendent asked him to take on another job, to help with the “removal” of some of the sickliest, and costliest, residents.

  In the interview room, Mors shrugged, lit another cigarette, and continued. The superintendent was a bully, he’d realized, and it was best to do what the man wanted. But this assignment, he explained carefully, didn’t particularly bother him. “It was really a kind-hearted thing to do. They were all in great pain that could not be relieved. There was no chance for them. Also they were not pleasant physically or mentally to themselves or anyone else.” The only challenge was deciding how to carry out the assignment. After reviewing the possibilities, he decided that poison was the obvious answer. In a place where people were old and unwell, it would be easy enough to make it look as if their time had simply come.

  The home’s nursing dispensary held a witch’s closet of poisons, watched over by one of the young orphans, earning her keep. There were bottles filled with sugar of lead, those silvery crystals used to treat skin rashes; painkillers such as codeine, morphine, and powdered opium; atropine, an extract from the nightshade plant, for speeding up a slowing heart; sweet-scented chloroform for anesthesia; white, powdery arsenic, for curing everything from syphilis to psoriasis; strychnine for energy tonics; and mercury for infections. The only question was which would best suit his purpose.

  Mors first tried arsenic, but the elderly man selected for the experiment did not die in an orderly fashion. He was messily sick, then developed a kind of creeping paralysis, living on for several miserable days. Mors found himself on constant, exhausting nursing duty. It was horrible, he said, both for the victim and for himself. They buried the man—whatever his name was, he didn’t remember—with great relief.

  He went back to the dispensary. It was, maybe, the smell that decided him, that sweet chemical sting in the air, that sugary, seductive promise. He smiled at the detectives and told them why he’d been so pleased with his next choice: “When you give an old person chloroform, it’s like putting a child to sleep.”

  THERE WASN’T a cop in the room who thought of chloroform in terms of a lullaby.

  Their experience was otherwise. They knew it purely as a poison, one used by criminals, especially by thieves, who found it useful in robbing occupied homes. Since the turn of the twentieth century, this practice had been increasingly popular. Robbers would knock on an apartment door, force a chloroform-soaked rag over the face of whoever answered, and take what they wanted while their victim remained unconscious. “Burglar uses Chloroform: Attacks a Woman in a Flat, Robs Her and Cuts off her Hair,” read one New York Times headline in March 1900. Beautiful hair for wigs was as valuable as some jewelry, the newspaper pointed out. And there were the burglars who “put an entire family under anesthetic” in 1907 before emptying their house; the train robbers who drugged a Pullman car full of passengers and emptied pockets and purses; the party host who put chloroform into his guests’ drinks, then went through their wallets and disappeared with $3,000; and the robbers who chloroformed an attorney on a busy Manhattan street in 1910, yanked off his heavy gold and diamond ring, and disappeared into the crowd. Occasionally chloroform played a role in real tragedy; a Long Island father, in 1911, killed his son and two daughters with chloroform and then, leaving a suicide note, walked away into the gray Atlantic.

  Mors liked chloroform for its efficiency. He’d used it to kill seven more residents with no problem at all. It was a wonderful poison, really, he said, perhaps a little cloying in its oversweet smell—but perfectly, reliably lethal.

  THE STORY WENT that the doctor who pioneered chloroform as an anesthetic had recognized its potential after it knocked him out cold. James Young Simpson, an Edinburgh physician, had been searching for something better than ether to relieve pain during surgery and childbirth. Ether could be frustratingly slow to act. Also it smelled awful, irritated the lungs, and was prone to ignite, which posed a definite risk at a time when surgeons often worked by candlelight.

  Simpson and his two lab assistants decided to experiment on themselves until they found something that worked. They had already tried and dismissed compounds including acetone and benzene when, on the evening of November 4, 1847, they poured out tumblers of chloroform and dipped their faces into the vapor rising from the glass. Within two minutes all three were lying unconscious under the table, “in a trice under the mahogany,” as Simpson later wrote. They awoke perhaps half an hour later, lightheaded and dizzy but cheerfully unharmed. “This will change the world,” he thought.

  For the next five decades chloroform gained steadily in popularity. Every drugstore stocked it; most doctors, barring a few wary holdouts, prescribed it in abundance. It was mixed into cough syrups and liniments; it was dispensed as a sedative, a sleep aid, a painkiller, a treatment for alcoholic DTs, for hiccupping, seasickness, colic, vomiting, and diarrhea. No one was exactly sure how it worked, just that it appeared to slow the body down and sedate the brain, sliding a patient into a much-desired stupor.

  The more physicians used chloroform, though, the more they realized that it was a capricious kind of anesthesia. There were reports of patients who inexplicably, unexpectedly died on the operating table before the surgeon even lifted his knife. An invalid would slide away into chloroform-induced unconsciousness and just keep sliding. The breathing would sputter to bare gasps; the heartbeats would decrease in an ever-slowing rhythm. Alarmed doctors began tallying the deaths. On average, it seemed, chloroform anesthesia killed at least one in every three thousand patients.

  And no one knew how to fix that because no one was sure why it happened.

  Chloroform was a simple enough compound, an uncomplicated arrangement of carbon, hydrogen, and chlorine. Yet somehow that tidy mixture formed a chemical loose cannon, killing without warning or apparent reason. Doctors weren’t really even sure what a safe dose was. One patient died after receiving one-third of an ounce; another man, a known chloroform addict, succumbed only after going through a quart of the drug. Chloroform, not surprisingly, was riskiest for children, the elderly, and alcoholics, but it also, unpredictably, ki
lled healthy adults.

  At the turn of the twentieth century, the British Medical Association called chloroform the most dangerous anesthetic known, and the American Medical Association urged that hospitals stop using it entirely. But it would be several more decades before chloroform disappeared from the pharmacy shelves. At the time Frederic Mors lifted the bottle off the dispensary shelf, chloroform was still widely used, still known for being miraculous rather than murderous.

  THE POLICE DETECTIVES in their dark wool suits became a familiar sight at the Odd Fellows Home, thumping down the wooden halls, opening closets, looking under beds, asking questions, checking out Mors’s story. The more investigators looked and asked, the more they suspected the crazy little man might be telling the truth.

  They found, for instance, a German poison manual hidden in the back of his closet. They gathered witnesses who confirmed some of his story, starting with the embalmer who worked at the funeral chapel serving the Odd Fellows home. Mors had told police that he’d put too much chloroform on the rag used to kill one elderly man. The caustic liquid left raw red marks around the man’s mouth. The embalmer alarmed him by asking about the marks of injury. From then on, according to Mors’s confession, he’d spread Vaseline around the patients’ mouths before applying chloroform.

  The embalmer promptly corroborated Mors’s statement. He remembered being startled by that uneven red scoring of the skin. He’d seen chloroform burns on the faces of patients who’d died during surgery. Mors had told him a cloth used to tie the man’s mouth shut after death had rubbed the face raw. That had puzzled the embalmer. The home had never done that before. The marks didn’t really seem to match with a cloth burn. But after all, it was just another old man dead. And the next body showed no such signs of damage, so he’d let it go.

  That led to another witness—an orderly who’d seen Mors rubbing Vaseline over an old man’s face two hours before the patient was found dead. Mors had explained to him that the Vaseline would make it easier for the undertaker to shave the corpse. The orderly had been surprised—after all, the man was still breathing. Following that awkward encounter, Mors told the police, he’d switched to another method, pushing chloroform-soaked cotton wool into the noses of his chosen victims. When they searched Mors’s room, officers found cotton and tweezers in the pocket of one of his coats.

  The embalmer hadn’t liked Mors. He found him competent but cold, “indifferent to the suffering and deaths of those in the home.” The elderly residents hadn’t liked him either. He had a reputation for threatening inmates who complained too much, who insisted on extra attention. The fourteen-year-old girl in charge of the medical dispensary told the police that Mors had commented to her about the uselessness of the residents, adding that it “would be a good thing” to get rid of a few of them. “If you don’t stop making so much trouble, I’ll send you to where there is more heat than you want,” he had snapped at one ninety-one-year-old man.

  The elderly residents at the home told police they believed Mors had methodically been removing those who annoyed him. They recalled him warning one woman who kept ringing her bell, requesting assistance, that she would be sorry if she summoned him again. She’d continued calling him. The next day she was dead.

  But another orderly told police that he believed Mors had followed orders. Once the orderly had been summoned to help remove a dead patient from a room. When he reached the man’s quarters, Mors and Superintendent Adam Banger were standing by the bed together, talking. There was a corpse in the bed, and the room had a sharp, sweet chemical sting to it. “What is it?” he remembered asking, choking slightly. In answer, Mors went to the window and threw it open. The superintendent lit a cigar, filling the air with the acrid burn of tobacco, erasing all trace of anything else.

  The district attorney agreed that such interviews were suggestive. But from where he stood, they weren’t proof. Now that Mors was in jail and the superintendent was locked up as a hostile and uncooperative witness, the mood at the Odd Fellows home had reached a predictable level of hysteria. Some of these statements were undoubtedly true, but others might be mere dramatics. To prove that these elderly residents had been poisoned, they needed some solid evidence.

  No one, not even those who disliked him, claimed to have witnessed Mors killing a patient with chloroform. Rumors, suspicions, and anecdotes, a confession by a suspect who might just be crazy, weren’t enough to charge a man with murder.

  “WHY DID YOU shift from arsenic to chloroform?” the sheriff asked Mors.

  “I did it because patients had become more troublesome after they had been given arsenic than before,” Mors answered, during a hearing. “No person was ever killed unless he was going to die. I did it to end their suffering.”

  Investigators had thought at first that they could build their case on the arsenic murder. Arsenic is a tough, durable, metallic element. Traces of it could be found in corpses years after death. Their first plan was to dig up Mors’s arsenic victim from the Bronx cemetery and run tests on whatever remained. But to their dismay, they discovered that the home was in the habit of dosing patients with an arsenic tonic, meaning that even if they did find the poison in tissue, it wouldn’t necessarily provide evidence of murder.

  As for chloroform, the coroner had sadly assured them all that there was no way, no way at all, to find evidence of it in a corpse. An autopsy, he said, was therefore a complete waste of time: “We might do this in some cases, but Mors has said that he chloroformed the persons he killed in Westchester, and the fact that a person has been chloroformed cannot be proven by an autopsy.

  “Therefore we can establish nothing by exhuming the bodies. Mors may have given each of his victims a quart of chloroform but we couldn’t prove it by an autopsy.”

  THE WORST-CASE example concerning the failure of an autopsy after a chloroform death came out of New York City’s criminal justice history. It was the case of Texas multimillionaire William Rice, who might—or might not—have been killed with chloroform as he lay sleeping in his Manhattan apartment.

  Rice died in the fall of 1900. The motive for his possible murder began with his decision, some years earlier, to found an educational institute in Houston. His fortune would eventually endow Rice University. But family members considered that his plans meant throwing their inheritance away. In fact, his wife, who died a few years before him, secretly made a will leaving her share of the estate to her relatives. As Texas was a community property state, her relatives then demanded half of Rice’s own money.

  Rice was eighty-four years old, an ailing and cantankerous recluse, burrowed into luxurious retirement. But he wanted to be remembered, he wanted his millions to endow his educational dream, and he had no intention of further subsidizing his wife’s grasping relatives. Through his lawyers, he stated that he hadn’t been a resident of Texas for years—he lived in New York, which was not a community property state. And his greedy relatives by marriage? Well, they could whistle for his money.

  His wife’s family, equally determined, countered by hiring a New York lawyer named Albert Patrick, who had a reputation for playing dirty. With his clients living halfway across the country, Patrick decided to siphon off some of Rice’s money for himself. He developed an alliance with Rice’s valet, Charles Jones, and they collaborated on a forged will that divided the old man’s assets among the eager heirs, Jones, and of course, the attorney himself. The schemers then collaborated on getting rid of Rice.

  Or so Jones claimed, once he was in jail, charged with chloroforming the old man at Patrick’s bidding. The valet said he’d first tried mercury pills as a poison, but Rice seemed to thrive on them. So hearing that chloroform rapidly dissipated and left no evidence behind, he “borrowed” some from his brother, whose doctor had prescribed it as a sleep aid. According to his confession, Jones then put a chloroform-soaked sponge over his sleeping employer’s face, anchored it with a heavy towel, and waited. Rice had died without a struggle, he claimed, and he burned the spon
ge and other equipment. Patrick arranged to have the body rushed to a crematorium.

  From that point on, apparently, everything went wrong for the conspirators. The undertaker embalmed the body instead of incinerating it. The bank challenged the forged will that Patrick had provided and contacted the police. The suspicious coroner demanded an autopsy. The city decided to prosecute. Police had the faked documents, and a very dead millionaire. They then got Jones’s confession. It seemed an easy path to conviction. They charged both Patrick and Jones with murder. As for Rice’s body, city attorneys sent it to medical experts for what they expected to be a simple analysis.

  But the Rice case proved cursed to all associated with it. Rumors spread that the valet had blamed Patrick in order to save himself, that he was unstable, seeing plots where there were none. The will was plainly forged, but many began to wonder whether Jones had built an attention-grabbing fantasy around Rice’s natural death. When questioned, the valet became hysterical and staged a hunger strike in his jail cell, spicing up all those rumors of his mental instability.

  Meanwhile the autopsy result turned out to be a catalog of contradictions. The body had started to rot. The doctors couldn’t agree on how decomposition affected chloroform chemistry in the body. They couldn’t agree on how embalming had changed the chemistry either. By the time the trial was over, more than $30,000 had been spent on experts who agreed on, well, nothing.