by Deborah Blum
The other complication for the would-be poisoner was that, responding to arsenic’s long history of criminal use, scientists had found numerous ways to test for it in human tissue and recognize it in an autopsy. Tests to extract arsenic from a corpse had been available for almost one hundred years and had steadily improved in the intervening period. More chemical procedures, better developed tests, and more detailed autopsy information were available for detecting arsenic than any other poison. For those studying the dead, arsenic was so easy to find that one might almost imagine it glowing in the dark, flashing its message of murder.
CHARLES NORRIS liked to get his hands bloody in the morgue on a regular basis.
A good medical examiner, he believed, kept his autopsy tools sharp and his pathology skills honed. Plus, truthfully, he was bored by a job that consisted of little besides paperwork, meeting with other government officials, and harassing the mayor. The mass murders at the Shelbourne needed to be handled by an authority figure, Norris decided.
He would do the autopsies himself.
THE BELLEVUE autopsy room was quiet and cool, with high ceilings and white plastered walls. Lights hung brightly over each long marble dissecting table; at every table’s foot was a deep rectangular copper basin with hot running water, to keep hands and instruments clean. As the standard manual reminded pathologists, blood and fluids that dried on the fingers could be “unpleasant” and dull the sensitivity needed for the operation.
The instruments lay in bristling rows. There was the section knife, with its short thick blade and heavy handle, used for making long incisions, and slim scalpels ready to make the finer cuts. At Bellevue they always laid out three instruments for probing the brain: a deep cutter, with a six-inch handle and six-inch blade “so strong it does not bend or feather too easily” to slice through the dura, the tough membrane protecting the brain; a thin, twosided blade with a rounded tip used for incisions; and a pick, used to free the brain from the spinal cord so that it could be removed from the body.
There were delicate tissue-cutting scissors and powerful bone scissors used to crunch through cartilage and thinner bones; dissecting forceps; at least one good butcher’s saw for the bigger bones; smaller saws for tasks like removing the spinal cord; brass and wooden foot-rules (twelve-inch rulers); tape measures, measuring glasses and calipers; large scales to weigh the whole body and small scales to weigh the pieces; glass-stopped jars to hold the organs for poison analysis; and the usual assortment of sponges, pails, vessels, plates, and bottles that collected in all postmortem rooms.
Before the first cut, a pathologist like Norris would need to take detailed notes on a cadaver’s outward appearance. Victims of acute arsenic poisoning tended to become so violently sick that their bodies had the slightly shrunken, emaciated look of severe dehydration. Often their hands and feet looked slightly blue due to lack of circulating oxygen. If, on the other hand, the poison had been administered gradually, the victims’ skin tended to turn yellow, even occasionally a kind of parchment brown, and scaly patches appeared on the hands and feet.
When it was time to begin an autopsy, the corpse was laid on its back, with its head dangling just over the edge of the table so that the neck was pushed forward. The first cut into the trunk of the body was a Y-cut with the section knife, two deep slices inward from a few inches below each shoulder to a point under the breastbone and then straight down through the abdominal muscles. (Undertakers had demanded that technique, rather than a slash straight down the center from the throat, so that clothing would easily cover the incisions during an open casket ceremony.)
Once the flaps of skin were peeled back, the sternum and a triangular section of ribs could be removed and the protective muscles sliced open, yielding access to the organs below. Like other pathologists, Norris followed a set routine. He inspected each organ and described its condition in detail. Since poison was suspected, he removed the organs, placed them in sealed glass jars, and sent them upstairs to Gettler’s laboratory.
In the case of arsenic, this was indeed bloody work. The entire body had to be sliced apart. Since the early nineteenth century, scientists had known that the poison accumulated everywhere. They’d found it in the liver, spleen, kidneys, heart, lungs, brain, stomach, intestines, and even the muscle walls themselves.
White arsenic (the compound isolated from the Shelbourne’s pastry) wrecked the stomach, leaving it smudged with bloody lesions; the mucous membrane lining would be swollen, yellowish, and patched with scarlet. Under a microscope, the membrane would sparkle with tiny arsenic crystals—the same ones that caused the gritty sensation in food. The poison tracked similar damage through the intestines. The heart often contained loosely formed blood clots. In a quick killing, little evidence was found in the liver and kidneys, but in a slow, chronic arsenic poisoning—favored by killers hoping to mimic the decline of a natural disease—both organs became diseased, showing signs of fatty degeneration.
It took only a day for Norris to compare his autopsy notes with Gettler’s organ-by-organ chemical analyses. The results weren’t really a surprise. Both of them had found the same thing—poison fanned through the bodies like a sparkling dust blown by a prevailing wind.
THE POLICE continued to hope, sincerely, that they were not hunting a stranger killer. They preferred that the motive be personal, sabotage maybe, and that the murders had been committed by someone with a grudge against the management.
They’d interviewed the Shelbourne’s owner, Samuel Drexler, who was in a state of pure shouting rage. Most of his thirty-two employees were still sick. They had eaten leftover pastry, when the lunch rush finished, and had been felled along with the customers. There was no way, according to the proprietor, that the poison could have been mixed in accidentally.
The exterminator whom Drexler employed did not use arsenic-based pesticides; the restaurant’s wallpaper was not tinted with one of the well-known arsenic-dye greens. Neither did he accept a tentative police theory that one of his competitors might have crept into the kitchen and poisoned the dough to harm his business. He also rejected the idea of a crazed arsenic killer roaming the city.
“That is entirely out of the question,” he snapped to reporters. “No one sneaked in.” But he did accept the idea that someone bore a grudge: “This was absolutely malicious and intentional.” As he told detectives, his own suspicions fell on the two bakers in his kitchen, who could easily have mixed an extra ingredient into the dough. Notably, neither of them had fallen ill on the fatal Monday.
Neither the baker nor his assistant—a teenage boy and friend of the baker—would admit to mixing up the suspect dough. Each insisted that the other had done it. “Is that so?” Drexler replied to the reporters jostling around his restaurant. “Their stories conflict, do they? Well, I am not in a position to throw any light on that.” He had given the authorities plenty of information to help them solve the case, he added, but his own impression was that “they are completely baffled.”
He posted a sign on the door of his closed restaurant, announcing that he would pay $1,000 for information leading to the arrest of the killer.
A MAJOR DIFFICULTY in finding the murderer was that almost anyone in New York City—or anywhere else—could acquire arsenic with little effort. Every day people walked into drugstores, grocery stores, garden supply stores and bought some version of the poison for the most practical reasons.
Arsenic was mixed into tonics like the popular Fowler’s Solution, used for skin treatments, prescribed by doctors, dispensed at drugstores. It was available as a weed killer, a bug killer, and a rat killer. Hardware stores, groceries, and farm and garden supply shops offered up white arsenic in remarkable variety. There was Rough on Rats, a grayish powder made of 10 percent soot and 90 percent arsenic trioxide; Rat Dynamite, 9 percent bran and 91 percent arsenic; Lyon’s Poisoned Cheese, a soft pale block containing some 93.5 percent white arsenic. William’s Fly Paper, Dutcher’s Fly Paper, and Daisy Fly Killer were all laced wit
h arsenic, easily leached out simply by soaking them in water.
Arsenic was the primary ingredient in a number of dyes that were especially popular in the nineteenth century and sold under such names as Scheele’s Green, Paris Green, Emerald Green, Parrot Green, and Vienna Green. Mixing arsenic with copper and hydrogen yielded shades that ranged from the brilliant color of a new-leafed tree to the softer tones of a shaded moss. Over the years arsenic-based dyes were used to color fabric, the artificial leaves on hats and wreaths, cardboard boxes, greeting cards, labels, candles, India rubber balls, oil paint, artificial plants made of tin, Venetian blinds, carpets, soap, and faux malachite for jewelry. As the Shelbourne’s proprietor had noted, arsenic-green wallpaper remained common through the city (though not in his particular restaurant). But even untainted wallpaper could be made poisonous by paperhangers who liked to mix a little arsenic into their horse-hoof paste, thinking it would help keep rats out of the walls.
At the Shelbourne, of course, the possibility of accidental arsenic contamination had been quickly dismissed. The poison had been too carefully mixed into the dough to be a mistake—exactly the reason so many suspected that the bakers were responsible. The senior baker even had something of a motive. He admitted to the police that he had heard a rumor that he was going to be fired. It had turned out to be untrue, but he had realized that his job was safe only after the mass poisoning. The homicide department assigned plainclothes detectives to shadow the bakers. Other detectives interviewed kitchen staff at nearby restaurants, hunting for gossip or evidence of simmering resentments at the Shelbourne. Beat officers were sent to canvass shops for arsenic sales.
As the investigation unfolded, restaurants around the city reported that their customers were firmly rejecting all offers of blackberry and huckleberry pie for dessert.
POISONED PIE wasn’t the only murderous problem the police were grappling with that summer. Prohibition had cranked up the level of violence in the city; gunfights rattling the streets were becoming relatively routine. The business of illegal alcohol had quickly become a lucrative gift to the city’s gangs, who’d built newly efficient organizations to manage the multimillion-dollar bootlegging industry.
Racketeers across the United States purchased 80 percent of the liquor distilled in Canada; they’d invested in small fleets of boats to smuggle alcohol (and Chinese immigrants) in from the Caribbean; they’d opened “import businesses” for taking undercover liquor orders and advertised their wares by placing flyers on car windshields or slipping order forms under apartment doors. They were operating stills in all corners of the city. In July federal agents Izzy Einstein and Moe Smith raided a pharmaceutical laboratory in the Bronx and found three hundred-gallon stills, seventeen barrels of industrial alcohol, and twenty-two barrels of redistilled alcohol, which they described as “rat poison.”
Rat poison or not, the gangs were fighting with terrifying intensity to control its distribution.
Barely a week after the Shelbourne poisoning, bootleggers’ gun battles exploded again around the city. A gunman opened fire on a gang leader walking down Second Avenue past a millinery shop; the spray of bullets killed two bodyguards and punched holes through the gangster’s straw boater before he ducked into the shop, dived through the hat displays, and fled out the back door. A few days later, on August 11, a revenge hit was made on the failed assassin outside a 12th Avenue restaurant. The shooter, a rising young gangster named Lucky Luciano, killed his target, and injured an eight-year-old girl who was unfortunately nearby as well as a taxi driver waiting for a fare in his parked cab.
A depressing similarity between the gangster shootings and the Shelbourne poisonings was the absence of witnesses. People who offered evidence in gangster shootings frequently ended up dead; out of fear few came forward with information. In the poison pie case, the killers worked in successful secrecy. No one had observed the mixing of arsenic dough. No one had tracked down a poison purchase by either suspect. The police department’s dogged inquiry and surveillance had failed to turn up any solid information for a prosecution.
“There is no greater mistake than to arrest a man on insufficient evidence,” the Manhattan district attorney announced, conceding that they had no real suspect and no immediate hope of finding one. “We cannot now show who possessed the arsenic and we cannot produce any person with a motive which seems sufficient. All we can do is follow every possible clue. This takes time. We believe that the perpetrator of this crime will eventually be caught and punished.”
But realistically, the prosecutor doubted it. The Shelbourne Restaurant killer would never go down as a famous poisoner; he would never be remembered the way Mary Ann Cotton was. But from a poisoner’s perspective, he’d probably accomplished something better. Cotton was hanged, after all.
He walked away.
ONLY TWO YEARS into the great Prohibition experiment, the State of New York was ready to give it up. Where were the high moral standards, the uplifted culture, and the return to prewar innocence promised by supporters of the Eighteenth Amendment? So far the effects seemed almost the opposite, considering the street shootings, the increasingly brazen speakeasy trade, and the mounting deaths from poisoned alcohol.
Even by federal estimates, two-thirds of the so-called “whiskey” (as described by the Treasury Department) currently sold in city drink establishments was denatured alcohol, redistilled to remove the worst of the poisons, colored a golden brown with food coloring, and completely dangerous. Twelve people had died in one month from “rum” purchased in the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn. The mixture sold from the back room of a corner grocery for fifty cents a pint was undiluted wood alcohol. Even as such deaths were reported, people continued to drink—defiantly, mockingly, determinedly—until by 1922, arrests for public drunkenness in New York City had topped 11,000, compared to a mere 7,028 in the year before Prohibition took effect.
Like many states, New York had passed a law providing law enforcement support for the outlawing of alcohol. But by the time Lucky Luciano sprayed bullets across 12th Avenue, support for state policing of Prohibition had shifted into anger at the regulations and their effects. Republican Governor Nathan Miller, who had supported dry enforcement, was defeated in his 1922 bid for reelection by former governor Al Smith, an uncommonly outspoken wet Democrat. After six months of quarreling, the state legislature passed an act to repeal New York’s Prohibition enforcement law. The bill went to Smith in May 1923.
Returned to the governor’s office, which he had lost in 1920, Smith found himself conflicted over whether to sign the bill into law. Another powerful state Democrat, Assemblyman Franklin Delano Roosevelt, warned him to keep his ambitions in mind; Smith wanted to stay governor and hoped to run for president eventually. Roosevelt, who also opposed Prohibition, nonethless suspected that signing the bill would damage Smith’s national chances. The prominent Prohibitionist publisher Frank Gannett told Smith that his newspapers would never support him again if he signed the bill. The leaders of the Anti-Saloon League predicted violent clashes, approaching a civil war, if New York undermined national policy. On the opposite side, the Democratic party machine, controlled by Tammany Hall, informed Smith that if he failed to roll back the hated dry law, he would never hold state office again.
On June 1 Smith officially put an end to New York’s Prohibition legislation, trying to portray his action as a reasonable response to unreasonable pressures. He wasn’t legalizing drink or neutralizing the Eighteenth Amendment, he insisted. He was just returning the responsibility for enforcing an unpopular law to the federal government, which was, after all, responsible for the whole debacle.
EVEN IN THE tidy Brooklyn home of Alexander Gettler, it was impossible to avoid the complications wrought by Prohibition. Gettler, his wife, and their seven-year-old son, Joseph, occupied the law-abiding top floor of the family home.
But only one stair-flight down was lawlessness. His in-laws who occupied the rest of the house had set up a bathroom brewer
y on the second floor. They were willing to heed his warnings about buying alcohol at the corner store, but they weren’t willing to give up drinking it.
Gettler might be the city’s chief toxicologist. His analyses of illegal alcohol might provide evidence in countless cases against owners of backroom stills and bootlegged bottles of whiskey. But he knew better than to take on his wife and the seven other Irish-Americans occupying the house.
He wasn’t all that fond of Prohibition anyway; he’d analyzed the corpses of too many people felled by wood alcohol to believe that it was about saving people. So he didn’t mind drinking home-brewed beer with his family. Besides, he was working hard enough to want a drink every once in a while.
GETTLER WAS a workaholic, always, and in the summer of 1923 he was juggling three jobs: associate professor of chemistry at New York University, city toxicologist, and chemical pathologist for Bellevue and Allied Hospitals. He was beginning to earn a reputation outside the city as well.
In the spring of 1923 he’d published a how-to paper on detecting the industrial solvent benzene in cadavers. It was the first major research report on the subject in eight years (the previous one being a German paper showing that the compound could be isolated in animal organs). He had decided to tackle benzene because, as he wrote, “nothing of importance has been accomplished since then” and because its increased use in automobile garages, where it handily dissolved grease from dirty engine parts, now posed a real public health risk. Gettler’s paper, published in the Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, concerned the case of a sixteen-year-old boy found mysteriously dead on the floor of a small garage in the Bronx. The teenager had been filling cans with the solvent shortly before collapsing. But the autopsy findings had been inconclusive, except for bloody congestion in all organs.