The Poisoner's Handbook

by Deborah Blum

  Molineux remained in prison almost two years, writing a book about his experiences called The Room with the Little Door while his father fought to clear him. He was still writing it on October 15, 1901, when the New York State Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the references to Barnet’s death had been improper and reversed the conviction. A year later the district attorney insisted on trying Roland Molineux again, convinced of his guilt. But this time the general hired an array of handwriting experts to contradict the damaging evidence of the mailing label.

  Roland Molineux was acquitted in the second trial, which took place in 1902. His wife promptly divorced him. The verdict in New York drawing rooms was that the son was guilty of both cyanide poisonings but that the second jury had exonerated the father. After his acquittal, Roland Molineux remained obsessed with the life and plight of the unjustly convicted man. He wrote several more books and collaborated on a play about the criminal’s plight, then suffered a mental breakdown and was committed to the New York State Hospital for the Insane in 1913. He died in the asylum four years later, at the age of fifty-one.

  People who followed poison cases saw in Molineux’s the same lessons as in the Rice case, or even in Mors’s. Despite a clear motive and strong evidence that the victims had died of cyanide poisoning, Roland Molineux had escaped conviction. The lessons were hard to miss: poisoners were hard to catch and even harder to convict.

  MEANWHILE, more than a week after the bodies had been discovered, the Jackson case remained a complete mystery.

  The medical examiner’s office had ruled out food poisoning, due to the stiff and cold condition of the two bodies when found. In ptomaine cases, the bacterial infection tends to raise body temperature, enough that corpses retain heat longer than those killed by other means. The Jacksons’ bodies had been too cold too soon to be caused by ptomaine.

  Gettler had conducted a careful analysis of the couple’s brain tissue for alcohol and found traces in both of them. Perhaps, the police proposed, the Jacksons had sipped some disastrous wood alcohol cocktails with their dinner. But everyone who had known the victims dismissed the idea: the Jacksons were ardent churchgoers and Prohibition supporters, they said.

  The investigators greeted these denials with skepticism. Plenty of respectable people—including the mayor himself—were regulars at the speakeasies. So were many of the federal agents employed to enforce the law; dry agents were routinely hospitalized, most recently in San Francisco and Boston, after guzzling too much wood alcohol. These self-professed teetotalers had probably been sneaking a few Gin Fizzes on the side, like just about everyone else.

  It was a reasonable conclusion to a case with no answers, the detectives thought. Certainly there was enough lethal liquor out there to kill every resident of the Hotel Margaret, and more.

  IN AN INTERVIEW with New York newspapers, federal Prohibition officer Izzy Einstein—the city’s “champion hooch hunter,” as he called himself—warned that the speakeasies were serving “the vilest concoctions masquerading as liquors that I have ever seen. I do believe a good-sized drink of this stuff would knock out the average man, even a Prohibition agent.”

  Einstein, a former postal clerk, and his partner, a retired cigar-store owner named Moe Smith, had signed up as Prohibition agents in the first year of the new law and refined their techniques ever since. They relied on a simple method to collect evidence for a prosecution. They would order a drink and pour a sample of it into a funnel, hidden in a vest pocket, that emptied into a small bottle. After carefully stoppering the bottle, Einstein and Smith would whip out their badges and arrest everyone involved in serving them that drink.

  The duo were endlessly inventive in procuring illegal offerings. Smith had once jumped into icy water so that Einstein could rush him into a bar and beg a drink for a freezing man. They then busted the bar. They had posed as football players (when arresting an ice cream vendor who sold gin out of his cart), Texas Rangers, a Yiddish couple (Smith playing the wife), streetcar conductors, gravediggers, fishermen, and ice men. Einstein—who had a booming baritone—once introduced himself as an opera singer and gave a rousing performance in a speakeasy before closing it down.

  As Einstein assured the reporters, he and his partner were far too savvy to drink the toxic liquorlike substances currently circulating. Their work, he asserted, had led them to develop “a highly developed sense of smell as regards the aroma of anything intoxicating . . . Of course, these bootleggers are getting cleverer every day and occasionally we run across a concoction that is almost odorless. Then we barely moisten our tongues to determine whether or not it has a kick. Such a test is easy to the trained hooch hunter.”

  Even if city agents did occasionally “enjoy a little nip now and then,” he added, they indulged only in the really good liquor they’d confiscated, the “choice article.” But Einstein wasn’t sure that he trusted even that. For himself, he left the evidence in the stoppered bottle: “I’d rather save my stomach.”

  But in the Jackson case, the city’s ready supply of poisonous liquor turned out not to be culpable. The deaths at the Hotel Margaret continued to drive the medical examiner and police crazy.

  Gettler ran tests on the contents of every bottle, box, and container in the apartment. One of them—a sleeping tonic—had included a legal amount of ethyl alcohol. It was easily enough to account for the trace alcohol in the brain tissue but was definitely not enough to kill a person. And ethyl alcohol wasn’t that poisonous anyway, Gettler noted, compared to (methyl) alcohol. He found nothing to indicate fatal alcohol poisoning.

  Exasperated, one tenacious Brooklyn detective went back to the Hotel Margaret and reinterviewed every staff member he could bully into talking. This time a frightened maidservant told him something new. On the day of the Jacksons’ death the basement rooms under their apartment had been sealed with paper pasted over the doors and windows. This was standard procedure when fumigators were at work. Armed with that information he soon discovered that the hotel management had been hiding the fact that the basement had been fumigated at the time when the couple had died.

  Had the fumigator used hydrogen cyanide, a fairly routine procedure, for the disinfection? Water and steam pipes connected the basement to the Jacksons’ rooms; could the gas have traveled up the pipes? Hydrogen cyanide was notoriously lethal, even in ridiculously small measures. If it was distilled into a liquid, a mere drop, a raindrop-sized dose (about 50 milligrams), could be fatal. During the previous summer U.S. public health workers had accidentally killed four sailors, on two different foreign vessels, by fumigating against possible plague-carrying rats. In the second case, the steamer Mincio, docked at Brooklyn’s Italian-American pier, had been aired out for a day before seamen returned. Still, unexpected pockets of hydrogen cyanide lingered and killed three of the crew.

  Now finally the police had a real theory, one that seemed to work: the Jacksons had been overcome by cyanide gas, seeping up from the basement. Mrs. Jackson had collapsed first, falling as she staggered into the bathroom. Her husband, coming to help her, had died in the bathroom doorway. It was a good theory—except for the lack of evidence of cyanide in the bodies.

  So the detectives went back to Gettler, who told them that the analysis of the stomach was useless if cyanide gas had been inhaled. He would need to take a look at the lungs to find out what they needed to know. It was a point that Gettler would emphasize when he trained young chemists. To solve a cyanide killing, they had to be very clear on how the poison was administered: “In cases of poisoning by inhalation, usually none, or only the faintest trace [of cyanide] is found in the stomach contents. This is of tremendous importance from the medico-legal aspect.”

  Served with that information, the district attorney persuaded the family to let his men dig up Fremont Jackson from his burial site in Springfield, New Jersey. They removed the lungs, then reburied the corpse. The jars of grayish, somewhat slimy tissue—it had been more than two weeks since Jackson died—were hurried
over to Gettler’s Bellevue laboratory.

  When the lungs were cut open, the telltale signs of cyanide poisoning paraded before them. The lining, the mucous membranes, were swollen and splattered with bloody bursts of hemorrhages, explosions of dying blood cells. And when the neat tissue slices were put through the same chemical tests that Gettler had tried with the stomach, they glowed with the eerie, evening-sky light of Prussian blue.

  “IN RECENT YEARS, suicidal, accidental and industrial cyanide poisonings have occurred with increasing frequency,” Gettler wrote in the American Journal of Clinical Pathology. Suicides and accidental deaths by cyanide fumigation accounted for the worst of them. By the year of the Jackson case, he’d investigated almost eighty cyanide deaths in New York City.

  In 1922, including the Jacksons, cyanide fatalities totaled four accidental deaths and ten suicides. (Starting in 1929, the suicide numbers would be higher, due to the financial catastrophes of the Depression: in 1929, 22 Self-terminations by cyanide; in 1930, 34 Such deaths. In 1933, according to Gettler’s records, there were 49 suicides by cyanide.) But by the end of the decade fumigation deaths would virtually disappear. That was largely because the Jackson case would push Norris and Gettler to relentlessly crusade against the use of that superpoison in routine home and business fumigations. Within a few years the two of them had argued, lobbied, and embarrassed city regulators into putting an end to cyanide fumigation.

  They had many reasons—aside from the obvious wish to prevent other such deaths—to avoid a repeat of the Hotel Margaret scenario.

  ONCE GETTLER FOUND evidence of cyanide poisoning in Fremont Jackson’s lungs, the medical examiner’s office decided to further test the new theory of the deaths. They wanted to be sure that the cyanide could have come from fumes seeping up from the basement. Half a dozen white rats were let loose in the Jacksons’ rooms, and cyanide gas was released in the basement below. In less than three hours, all the rats were dead. “The couple probably succumbed before they realized what had happened to them,” Norris’s office reported.

  Norris and John Ruston, the district attorney in Brooklyn, were furious at the deception. They called a meeting to share their sense of outrage. The hotel manager had lied—denying any fumigation—and had simply shrugged, when reinterviewed, saying the fumigation had slipped his mind. The fumigator, for his part, had hidden in cowardly invisibility and was still not returning phone calls.

  These culprits had covered up the real cause of death and sent law enforcement officials into almost two weeks of embarrassing and costly attempts to figure out what had killed a well-liked couple. If the manager and fumigator had been honest, Ruston said, he would have treated the deaths as a terrible mistake—certainly he wouldn’t have brought charges. But now he wanted them punished. Ruston decided to charge them both—the fumigator, Albert Bradicich, and the manager, Eli Dupuy—with manslaughter.

  If the case had justified more severe charges, he would have brought those as well.

  THE RESULTING TRIAL was another painful lesson in the realities of poison prosecutions. The lawyers hired by Bradicich and Dupuy didn’t bother to deny that the building had been fumigated on the day of the Jacksons’ deaths. They didn’t deny either that their clients might not have cooperated fully with the police, as they put it. The defense argument focused elsewhere: the science was no good; the Jacksons’ deaths were still a mystery; the medical examiner’s office had failed to prove that cyanide was responsible. Their paid experts assured them that Dr. Gettler had gotten the whole thing wrong.

  The defense position was that cyanide could not be detected in a decaying body; the poison simply broke down too quickly. So the results from Jackson’s lung were in error. Gettler argued back that they were misstating the medical facts. Yes, cyanide broke down, but it was not as transient as they said. The defense lawyers merely laughed—the city chemist was just trying to cover his mistakes. Bradicich’s attorney based his case on the notion that Alexander Gettler was a thoroughly incompetent scientist who had missed the answer in the first analysis and faked it in the second.

  To Norris’s dismay, the assistant district attorney who prosecuted the case allowed his good chemist to be filleted in public. It was hard to believe, Norris raged to the prosecutor’s office, that the defendants’ lawyer “should have made such inexcusable statements against the character of Dr. Gettler. It is really almost unbelievable that such a thing could be done in open court without protest.”

  Further, Norris added, Bradicich’s so-called experts had flat-out lied in court. One defense witness had claimed to have conducted a cyanide analysis on body parts obtained from the city morgue. He hadn’t, and Norris could prove it: “We have been looking up at the morgue in Manhattan for the disappearance of a lung or lungs which one of the experts said he obtained for his experiments . . . No one knows anything about it and we are extremely careful about giving organs to people we do not know. I would like to see some of these medical experts punished for their nefarious testimony.”

  The defense lawyer had also mocked the prosecution for overreaching, trying to “build up a case by inference and make a Roman holiday of it.” He’d urged the jury to acquit on the basis of reasonable doubt of guilt and total doubt of the evidence. The tactic worked. Both defendants were acquitted on all charges.

  The assistant district attorney, Joe Gallagher, explained to Gettler and Norris that toxicology was such a new science, it was awfully hard to educate and convince a jury simultaneously. He thought Gettler had done an outstanding job in the circumstances, he wrote, and thanked him for his cooperation and help. But he hoped that they understood why the case had been lost.

  “I understand the situation as you describe it perfectly,” Norris wrote back. “Dr. Gettler never thought the case could be put across, largely for the reasons you give in your letter. I, however, had a rather optimistic view before the end of the trial. However, I was wrong.”

  He sounded resigned, but in truth he wasn’t. Neither was Gettler. Not at all.

  IN THEIR different ways, both Norris and Gettler took the Bradicich trial personally. A few months later, Norris started a crusade to “improve the medico-legal situation,” not only in New York but across the country. He was determined that the profession would gain the credibility and respect it deserved—in court and out of it.

  That September Norris caught a train to Washington, D.C., to meet with representatives from other cities—a coroner’s physician from Chicago, a pathologist from Johns Hopkins, a chemistry expert from Cornell Medical College, and the revered medical examiner from Boston, George McGrath, who had created one of the first professional programs in the country. They agreed to form a committee, pool their resources, and hire someone to investigate the state of forensic medicine through the country—“the training and qualifications of the men performing this important work in the various large cities”—so that they could start setting some national standards.

  The Bradicich case wasn’t the first in which the defense won by personally attacking a forensic scientist. That was partly because disreputable coroners’ operations had tarnished the profession. Old and shoddy practices had to change, and the public had to be educated, the scientists agreed. Norris persuaded the Rockefeller Foundation to provide a small grant for their program. As he wrote to the foundation, “The most effective way to bring this matter to the public would be to contrast the European system with this country: in the former where this work as a whole is performed only by trained investigators, whereas in this country it is performed mostly by those who have no technical or practical experience.”

  He was proud that his office was trying to rectify that situation. But the general public perception of forensic experts undermined what he wanted to accomplish. And that, Norris wrote in a blast of anger, had gone on too long. If others didn’t want to spend time changing the situation, he would do it himself.

  GETTLER ALSO responded to the Bradicich trial like a man with a mission. If he�
�d spent late nights in the laboratory before, well, now he made them later. If by extra time and pure furious drive he could make his science more credible, he was prepared to do that.

  Over the next decade and more, he would pursue cyanide studies in his laboratory and create a meticulous series of reports analyzing cyanide deaths. A 1938 paper, “The Toxicology of Cyanide,” summarized his findings best and would be cited long after his death, referenced by toxicologists and government agencies into the twenty-first century.

  The cyanide paper provided a chronicle of his obsession: tests with steam and with ice, chemical reactions producing brilliant yellows, sunset reds, the purplish-gray of storm clouds, the translucent green of tourmaline, kingly blues, and murky browns; bloody experiments with human organs put through a meat grinder; and grisly experiments with dogs. Every detail was carefully noted for future use.

  Gettler learned that if he chilled his meat grinder in cracked ice before using it to mince the tissues, he lost less of the cyanide to heat effects. He learned that of eight standard tests for detecting cyanide in tissues, five were imprecise. He learned that steadily adding iron compounds and hydrochloric acid to his minced tissue was reliable, every time resulting in the giveaway blue of cyanide. He tried different tests, seeking the smallest trace of detectable cyanide. He ran eight additional tests trying, eventually successfully, to tease out one part per million. He used those tests to find out whether the human body naturally harbored a baseline level of cyanide. To do that, he analyzed hundreds of livers and brains, lungs and kidneys, from people who had died of other causes. In people who had never been exposed to the poison, he found no trace of natural cyanide, leading him to conclude, “either that no cyanide whatever is present in normal tissue distillates, or that the minute quantity of cyanide that may be present lies below the sensitivity of the test.”