The Poisoner's Handbook

by Deborah Blum

  Mors disappeared so completely that the police suspected that he’d once again changed his name. He’d been born in Austria with the name Milnarik. He’d explained the change carefully in that first confession, as he watched the detectives through the haze of cigarette smoke. He’d picked the new name for its meaning in Latin. It meant Death.

  BY THE TIME Frederic Mors disappeared with the spring winds, the city and state governments had come to grim agreement. “It is clear,” Leonard Wallstein told the New York newspapers, “that the welfare of the city absolutely requires the immediate abolition of the elective coroner’s system . . .”

  The governor, embarrassed by all the attention being given to corruption in the state’s major city, demanded that Riordan step down from office. And the state legislature passed a bill that had been consistently defeated in earlier sessions, establishing a new medical examiner system for New York City. It required that the position be filled by a qualified doctor, one with pathology experience, who would need to pass stringent professional tests to get the job, and who would appoint a well-trained staff, the kind capable of building a case at least against a self-confessed murderer.

  The law had one catch, though. The clever politicians of Tammany Hall had built in a three-year delay—the medical examiner system wouldn’t become official until January 1918. The authors of the clause expected that by that time, the reformers would be out of office, and the new mayor—well, he would damn well do as he was told.

  TWO

  WOOD ALCOHOL (CH3OH) 1918—1919

  AS HE LIKED to boast—and did, as often as possible—John F. “Red Mike” Hylan was a self-made man.

  As a politician, he wangled an amendment to New York’s state constitution that created two new judgeships in Brooklyn. Hylan then took one for himself. After all, as he pointed out, he was a fully qualified lawyer. He had worked as a locomotive engineer for the Brooklyn Elevated while studying for his law degree—until he was fired, reportedly for reading textbooks while he drove the train. He did not think affectionately of his old employer. One of his loudly voiced beliefs was that the city needed a public transportation system, free of the greedy railroad bosses. And of course, controlled instead by the party machine.

  Tammany Hall considered Hylan a man with potential. People noticed him—big, pink-faced, copper-haired, with a showy mustache and a booming, blustering voice. He was gratifyingly unlike the pedantic reformists running the city, especially the annoyingly preachy Mayor Mitchel. In 1917 the party tapped Hylan to run against Mitchel. The new candidate confidently assured the voters that reformers were intellectual elitists, all talk, no action, filling the city offices with “lazy do-nothings, rolling around in city automobiles with cigars in their mouths and making themselves conspicuous at baseball games when they should be in their offices.”

  A majority of New York voters agreed. Hylan’s election was considered a stunning upset and, by many, a depressing defeat of good government. Even President Woodrow Wilson was startled into impolitic comment, “How is it possible for the greatest city in the world to place such a man in high office?” But Red Mike stepped into the job with triumphant assurance, standing on the white marble steps of City Hall, bare-headed, his hair glowing like a torch in the fall sunlight. “We have had all the reform that we want in this city for some time to come,” he announced.

  It wasn’t just talk. Hylan immediately began restoring the party faithful to office. One of the first was ex-coroner Patrick Riordan. And while he was mostly successful at restoring the fallen, the mayor would later concede that the Riordan appointment did not go exactly as he had hoped.

  THE TIRELESS Leonard Wallstein, now representing the newly formed Citizens’ Union, promptly threatened legal action. The New York Times pointedly recounted Riordan’s past in embarrassing detail, including the misconduct hearings where “witness after witness testified that Riordan was incompetent and was repeatedly intoxicated while on duty.”

  Angry civic groups reminded Hylan—and the public—that Riordan lacked even the most basic qualifications written into the law, which specified “a skilled microscopist and pathologist.” Riordan had not even pretended to abide by the new law, which required that he take a civil service examination for the position. Further, three well-trained doctors, all with backgrounds in pathology, had applied and passed the examination: Dr. Otto Schultz, a professor of medical jurisprudence at Columbia University; Dr. Douglas Symmers, a professor of pathology at New York University; and Dr. Charles Norris, chief of laboratories at Bellevue and Allied Hospitals.

  Hylan had not foreseen such energetic opposition. He’d already ordered new, gold-leaf letters put on the doors of every coroner’s office in the five boroughs, each reading “Dr. Patrick J. Riordan, Chief Medical Examiner.” The new mayor didn’t care for being pushed around by a bunch of outsiders. He decided to show his critics who was boss by punishing the overqualified applicants. The mayor’s office announced that by taking the required examination, all three of those applicants had engaged in criminal behavior.

  The reasoning went thus: the doctors had been required to perform autopsies as part of the examination. But state law specified that unclaimed bodies were to go to medical schools for teaching purposes. Since the job applicants had prevented that process, the mayor said, he was directing the civil service commission to file felony charges against them. The three doctors might have to do jail time, he warned, which would bar them from holding the city office.

  In late January the accused applicants, a trio in dark suits and stony expressions, stood in a city courtroom. There they had an unobstructed view of the Hylan-appointed civil service commission consulting with Patrick Riordan, who could be seen nodding his white head during a whispered discussion. According to published accounts of the meeting, the head of the civil service commission then leaned forward and addressed each physician: “Doctor, you are accused of a felony in that you performed an autopsy illegally and you are asked to show cause why your name should not be stricken from the civil service list. Have you anything to say?” The applicants refused to cooperate. All three replied that they first wanted the charges set out in writing. They had been given no explanation of why they were facing criminal charges for taking a city-required test. The civil service commission’s allegation that they were guilty of “infamously disgraceful conduct” did not constitute a legal complaint, according to their attorneys, who stood beside them.

  Fine, then. The commission postponed the hearing, announcing that all would return once the formal charges were drafted. But before the hearing could be rescheduled, even before the week was out, Wallstein led a blast of renewed protests that pushed the state government to intervene. Republican Governor Charles S. Whitman, a former Manhattan district attorney, informed Hylan that his actions were in violation of the law, which did indeed require a qualified forensic scientist for the position, and that his tactics were an embarrassment to the state and “an offense against public decency.” Whitman informed the mayor that he wanted to see a professional medical examiner in New York City—immediately.

  On January 31, 1918, Hylan appointed Bellevue’s Charles Norris as the new medical examiner. He had warm feelings, he insisted, for his new agency head. All he had ever wanted was “a high-class man for this post.” In reality, the choice of Norris was a small but bitter act of rebellion. Norris had been ranked second in the examination results, behind the professor from Columbia. Hylan couldn’t justify dropping to the third choice, but he refused to be pushed all the way. To emphasize that point, he announced that Norris should consider himself on probation for the next three months.

  But Norris took a six-month leave from his job in the Bellevue laboratory anyway. He knew he was in.

  IT WOULD be imprecise to say that Dr. Charles Norris loved the job of chief medical examiner. He lived it and breathed it. He spent his own money on it. He gave it power and prominence and wore himself into exhaustion and illness over it. Under his direction
, the New York City medical examiner’s office would become a department that set forensic standards for the rest of the country. And Norris himself would become something of a celebrity, described by Time magazine as the “famed, sardonic, goat-bearded, public spirited” medical examiner who “battled for pure food laws, fought against quack doctors, Prohibition, unsanitary restaurants, pronounced on many a suicide and murder that perplexed police, made his name and detective work known in medico-legal circles the world over.”

  The key term in that exuberant, lengthy description, the reason Norris accepted one of the most spectacularly reluctant job offers in the city’s history, could be found in those two words “public spirited.” Journalists tended to emphasize the public side of Norris’s personality—the outsize former-college-football-player build, the buoyant laugh and quick wit, the dramatic face with its intense dark eyes and lowering eyebrows—and gloss over the intense sense of purpose that really defined the man.

  Everyone knew that Norris didn’t have to work for the money. His father, Joseph Parker Norris, was a descendant of the merchant banker family that had founded Norristown, Pennsylvania; his mother, Frances Stevens Norris, was a daughter of the first president of the Bank of Commerce in New York City. Born on December 4, 1867, in Hoboken, New Jersey, Norris began his schooling at Cutler’s Private School, a tony little Manhattan institution founded by the Harvard-educated tutor of Theodore Roosevelt. He then went to Yale University, where he earned a bachelor of philosophy with an emphasis on science; from there he went to Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, where he received his doctorate in medicine in 1892. He then studied abroad, first at a series of medical schools in Germany, then in Vienna, where he decided to specialize in pathology and bacteriology. He returned to New York in 1896 and took a job as a pathology lecturer at Columbia. In 1904 he left to become director of the main laboratory at Bellevue and Allied Hospitals.

  People would forget, as Norris assumed the mantle of public crime fighter, how much he enjoyed basic medical research. While at Columbia and Bellevue, he published paper after paper on infectious disease: “The Bactericidal Action of Lymph Taken from the Thoracic Duct of the Dog,” “Spirochetal Infection of White Rats,” “Influence of Fasting on the Bactericidal Action of the Blood,” “Anterior Poliomyelitis,” “Detection of Typhoid Carriers,” and even “Red Leg in Frogs,” an analysis of an extremely nasty bacterial infection that broke blood vessels apart, staining once-green limbs red.

  As fascinating as the research could be, it barely tapped Norris’s reservoir of energy or his capacity for public service. He’d been brought up in the tradition: his childhood had steeped him in stories of his ancestors’ contributions to their country. Eighteenth-century Norris family members fought in the Revolutionary War, even stripped the lead gutters and rain spouts from their Philadelphia home to make bullets for the Continental Army. His banker grandfather, John Austin Stevens, had negotiated the first loan of $100 million to allow the federal government to finance the Civil War.

  In an essay on forensic medicine, Norris would muse on the need for doctors and scientists to lend their talents to criminal investigation, even if it meant less lucrative employment: “A much neglected field of medical endeavor is open to those of us who pursue this widely important branch.” What would happen if researchers didn’t contribute to the field? he asked, and answered: “Grave injustice to the relatives of the deceased . . . justice [would be] flaunted and innocent people bear the brunt due to a system which fosters ignorance, prejudice and graft.”

  IT HELPED that Charles Norris, however high-minded he could sound, also possessed a lively sense of the ridiculous. “We call this the Country Club,” he would tell visitors gravely, gesturing them into his departmental offices, furnished with items from the motley collection left him by Patrick Riordan.

  Norris had saved, with some enjoyment, the old coroner’s original inventory, which had listed, in bitterly meticulous detail: three (dented, according to Riordan’s notes) brass cuspidors, one curio closet (glass front intact), one safe (large), two telephone booths, four rugs, thirty-one chairs (two broken, one destroyed), eleven rolltop desks (one in bad shape), three wooden file cabinets, two clocks, one fan, one costumer (or coat rack), and four wooden wardrobes (one in several pieces). The rugs (filthy), they’d thrown away. One slightly blood-spattered carpet from a murder investigation was eventually salvaged to cover the floor of the Country Club lounge.

  Norris at least had a new home for his department’s offices and laboratories: in Bellevue’s recently completed pathology building. Standing a stately six stories, solid with granite, dressed up by long arched windows, the building had been designed with the intention of coordinating the city’s forensic services. Here the city morgue was located, as well as the laboratories and autopsy rooms used by pathologists to study the dead. There was plenty of room for the medical examiner’s offices and, to Norris’s delight, some spare space on the third floor for a forensic chemistry laboratory, something which he was determined to establish.

  As he wrote to Mayor Hylan, the location benefited them all. Riordan may have handed over all his battered furnishings, but he had left behind not a scrap of laboratory equipment. It made sense that “the place for the laboratory force of the medical examiner’s office should be where its seat of greatest activity resided.” Further, as Norris reminded the mayor, Bellevue offered the doctors working for him free access to the glassware, instruments, and chemicals of the pathology department.

  The resentful mayor had cut the medical examiner’s budget by some $65,000 from what he had offered Riordan. Norris responded by constantly needling the mayor for more money—and by paying for needed supplies himself. He’d inherited a comfortable income, and throughout his tenure he used it to make sure his department was adequately equipped. His first purchase, out of personal funds, was laboratory equipment needed to test for bacterial infections.

  He’d assembled a capable staff in his Manhattan office, which would handle major lab work for all the boroughs. He kept a couple of physicians on and brought in some new pathologists, notably a fiercely intelligent Harlem doctor named Thomas Gonzales. He worried, though, about the staff he’d inherited in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The doctors there seemed lazy to him. Norris warned the mayor that he might have to replace a certain amount of “useless timber.” But first he’d see how they responded to new standards. It surprised no one who knew Charles Norris that he had plans, lots of them. He would develop new rules for handling bodies. He would hire someone to run the chemistry lab, clerks to answer the phones, and stenographers to take and type notes on all bodies processed by the laboratory. He would create files on each case and insist that medical examiner employees, when testifying in court, refer to the recorded information rather than “memory,” as in the past.

  “This work, which I may term ‘organization,’ ” has apparently not been tried before, Norris wrote to Hylan, displaying his contempt for the previous system. The relaxed environment of the old coroner’s office, he promised the mayor, was now a thing of the past.

  BY APRIL, Norris was happily harassing other city departments. He complained to the district attorney’s office that his men were kept standing about in the courtroom halls for hours, waiting to be called for testimony. He complained to the police department that the stations weren’t stocked with soap and towels for the medical examiners to use before and after handling bodies.

  “I wish to call to your attention the delay of the police precincts in their notification of homicides to the office of the Chief Medical Examiner,” he wrote to the police commissioner. For example, he’d been notified of a shooting on the Upper West Side some two hours after the police had reached the crime scene. It was the second time this had happened since Norris had taken office. In this case no real harm had been done, but “in many cases, I can conceive very well that non-attendance on the part of the Chief Medical Examiner or his assistants might be
detrimental to the criminal investigation of a case.” He asked that desk lieutenants in police precincts be instructed to automatically call his office whenever a homicide or suspicious death occurred.

  He wrote to the Bronx district attorney, reporting that certain police officers seemed to be taking bribes to conceal murders. In one case, they’d asked him to declare a suicide; when he’d refused, they’d tried to get an independent doctor to issue the death certificate. “It is entirely out of the question, in my opinion, to even consider the possibility of a suicide on account of the number and situation of the bullet wounds. There were four bullet wounds sprayed across the corpse.” How, Norris asked, could the man have accomplished shooting himself in the heart, the shoulder, the leg, and the arm? That might have been the old way of issuing death certificates, but those times were over, and he wanted everyone to know it.

  He wrote to hospitals asking them to be quicker in getting bodies to the morgue for examination—one woman’s body arrived eight hours after she died. Norris called that completely unacceptable. He insisted that hospitals fill out forms issued by his office for every suspicious death, every detail according to his careful direction. “Your peremptory order,” began one response from a ruffled hospital director.

  He was even tougher, though, on assistant medical examiners who failed to follow his instructions. He wanted key organs removed at autopsy for chemical analysis—the stomach, for instance, in a suspected poison case—had to be put in a sterile glass jar, labeled, dated, and placed in a sanitary fiber bag. All such evidence would go directly to the chemistry laboratory at Bellevue’s pathology building.