The Poisoner's Handbook

by Deborah Blum

  The problem with benzene was that it was exceptionally difficult to extract from a corpse. It could be teased out in only the tiniest amounts—sometimes no more than 0.05 grams (0.001763 of an ounce). That wasn’t enough poison to be caught by existing tests, which were not sensitive to such barely there amounts. So Gettler invented a different approach: he extracted the trace amounts of benzene by running the material through a series of acid solutions and creating a dirty-yellow concentrate, which could be used to create a stronger solution. His new method found benzene in the liver, brain, blood, fat, lungs, spleen, and heart of the dead boy. As a result, the medical examiner’s office issued a public warning to garage owners that they should ventilate their buildings when handling the solvent. As Gettler reported, the fumes had killed the boy in less than two hours.

  Gettler’s benzene work also went into a chapter on poisons that he’d written for a new textbook, Legal Medicine and Toxicology. The book was edited by a trio of forensic scientists, including Chicago toxicologist Walter Haines, a famously fanatical scientist who had once paid a circus glass eater to swallow ground glass so that he could see whether the tiny fragments caused serious internal damage. (They didn’t.) Gettler’s chapter provided detailed information on wood alcohol, formaldehyde, chloral hydrate (sometimes called knock-out drops), chloroform and ether, the cyanides, camphor, turpentine, carbolic acid, coal tar (cresol), salicylic acid (the primary ingredient in aspirin), aniline dyes, digitalis, and even poison ivy and sumac, as well as solvents like benzene.

  Ever since the fiasco of the Shelbourne Restaurant case, Gettler had also worked at improving the speed and sensitivity of detecting arsenic in human tissues. That work—as well as his growing reputation as a chemical detective—would lead him into one of the most troubling cases of his career. In his spare time (partly to help pay for his son Joe’s tuition at St. John’s Prep in Brooklyn) Gettler took on some consulting work in other jurisdictions. Just a few weeks after New York repealed its state Prohibition rules, he was hired by the defense attorneys for a young New Jersey woman who was accused of killing family members with arsenic.

  His testimony, which helped free her, would later form part of the background story of a remarkably twisted arsenic killer nicknamed “America’s Lucretia Borgia” by the tabloid newspapers.

  MARY FRANCES CREIGHTON, Fanny to her friends, was a rather lovely twenty-four-year-old that summer of 1923. She had curling dark hair and pale skin, “deep, luminous eyes” (according to the New York Evening Post), and lush “petulant lips” (according to the New York American).

  The New York Times more sedately described her as a “comely brunette” and “a young mother.” She had a three-year-old daughter, Ruth, and an infant son, John Jr. The baby had been delivered while both she and her husband, John, were being held in jail on murder charges.

  The newspapers ran few photos of the pudgy, sandy-haired husband. But Fanny Creighton willingly posed for admiring photographers in a demure long-sleeved black dress, despite the summer heat, her eyes lowered, a carved silver cross hanging at her neck, and her infant cradled in her arms.

  Resembling a Madonna, she seemed the least likely person to have killed a younger brother for a mere $1,000.

  JOHN CREIGHTON and Mary Frances Avery had been longtime friends when they’d married in 1919. He was the son of an executive with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. She, her brother, and two sisters were orphans, cared for by affluent grandparents.

  The newlyweds moved in with Creighton’s parents, who owned a big two-story home in Newark’s comfortable Roseville neighborhood. They shared the space for a year until 1920, when his mother died at age forty-seven of a sudden attack of ptomaine. His father, also forty-seven, died the following year, of a heart ailment.

  The young couple kept to themselves, John working as a clerk, Frances caring for her daughter in the tree-shaded house on North Seventh Street. She was unfriendly, the neighbors complained, unsociable when they came to call. Perhaps, the detectives thought, she had just been lonely when she first invited her eighteen-year-old brother to visit.

  Her brother, Charles Avery, and her sisters still lived nearby with their maternal grandparents. Frances did not get along with her sisters—they’d been quarreling over the inheritance from their parents—but in early 1923 her brother had come to spend a weekend.

  She persuaded him to return and stay for a while, helping him find a job as a clerk in a neighborhood store; he also swept floors and stacked boxes. Several months later, in early April, the boy began suffering from ill health. He felt sick enough to visit a doctor, complaining of a dull ache in his abdomen and a perpetual thirst that dried his mouth and furred his tongue. The doctor diagnosed a mild infection and prescribed a tonic. A week later, on April 12, the boy came back. He was now constantly nauseated and had developed a burning sore throat. The doctor increased the medication, but the boy got steadily worse.

  On the night of April 20 Charles Avery suffered a seizure. Frances called a neighbor and asked her to come over, saying that her brother was making a strange noise in his throat. But the woman refused; she’d been a close friend of the elder Creightons and she didn’t like the new mistress of the house well enough to come help. The doctor was summoned, and to his shock, he found the boy dying, vomiting uncontrollably, his limbs stiffening and shaking.

  What had he done wrong? the doctor wondered. He’d had no idea the boy was so ill. He called the county physician, asking him for advice on filling out the death certificate, recounting the whole case history over the telephone. The two doctors finally agreed that it must have been one of those rare, violent attacks of gastroenteritis—like the one that had killed Creighton’s mother—and so the doctor stated on the death certificate.

  And there it might have stayed—except for the anonymous letter.

  “IS DEATH not ground for suspicion?” the letter writer asked the police, insisting that Avery’s death was peculiar, as had been the earlier ones. “This boy feared his sister as he feared death . . . I am very sorry that I cannot sign my name. I am just an outsider who is very fond of this boy. Please act quickly and beware. You will find it hard to trap this liar.”

  It was enough to send the detectives out to ask a few questions of the attending physician. They discovered that he was unhappy with his own diagnosis. Actually, now that he thought about it, the doctor had been surprised that the Creightons died so abruptly. The police then made another discovery: in the short time that her brother had lived with her, Fanny Creighton had persuaded him to invest in a $1,000 life insurance policy, naming her as beneficiary.

  Down at the corner store, the owner mentioned that Avery had complained of being constantly fed chocolate pudding at home. No matter how often he told his sister that he was tired of it, she insisted that he eat a little before bed, he had told his boss, slightly baffled by her determination. Both of them had wondered why she was so insistent about the dessert.

  Alarmed, the Newark detectives decided to search the house. They didn’t find a secret stash of poison. But they did discover that Fanny Creighton’s pale clear skin owed something to chemistry. She had a half-empty bottle of Fowler’s Solution in the bathroom. It was a popular tonic, available from any druggist. But as any toxicologist knew, it was also an arsenic solution, creating that look of near-translucent skin by a low-level poisoning of the user.

  The police promptly hired gravediggers to exhume the boy’s body. The belated autopsy and chemical tests found arsenic swirled through every organ. The Newark police arrested Fanny and her husband on suspicion of conspiring to kill the boy, and announced that they planned to dig up both of the elder Creightons as well.

  MOST CHEMISTS considered arsenic detection as the foundation of forensic toxicology. Chemists had learned to find evidence for it in cadavers in the early 1800s, but the results had been troublingly unpredictable. The first truly reliable test dated to 1846, when an outraged English chemist named James Marsh realized that his own
flawed test results—based on the somewhat erratic method used at the time—had enabled a poisoner to go free. After being found not guilty, the man had rather mockingly admitted to the crime. Marsh returned to his laboratory and worked like a madman for several years until he had found a way to catch arsenic poisoners.

  The Marsh test involved finely mincing suspect tissues, mixing in sulfuric acid and zinc, and exposing the bubbling mess to hydrogen gas in a heated tube. If the mixture contained arsenic, the resulting chemical reaction would plaster a gleaming blackish-brown layer on the glass of the tube. Marsh called this an “arsenic mirror,” and its dark shine was a sure tell for the metallic poison.

  Even in Gettler’s day, the Marsh test was still a reliable way to test for arsenic in a corpse. But since Marsh’s time chemists had created a catalog of alternative ways to double-check those results. There was the sublimation test, the reduction test, the ammoniosulfate of copper test, the ammonionitrate of silver test, the hydrogen sulfide and hydrochloric acid test, Bettendorf’s test, Fleitmann’s test, Gosio’s test, Berzelius’s modification of Marsh’s test, and the recently developed Reinsch’s test, which scientists hoped would be the most sensitive yet.

  In Reinsch’s test, the organ under study was decomposed with potassium chlorate (a highly reactive compound of potassium, chlorine, and oxygen) and hydrochloric acid until the tissue dissolved into a yellow liquid. Excess chlorine was boiled away, and the remaining material was first neutralized with ammonia, then made slightly acidic again with more hydrochloric acid. A strip of copper foil was placed into the noxious mixture and left to stand for several hours or even overnight.

  The copper strip was then heated. If the tissues had contained a metallic element like arsenic, a dark purplish-gray film would glaze over the hot metal. That was the first part of the process, the first clue. Reinsch’s test was tricky because other poisonous elements—antimony, mercury, bismuth, gold, and platinum—could also tarnish the copper strip.

  To make sure of the exact poison, a chemist needed to then wash and dry the tarnished strip, put it in a sterile glass tube, and heat the tube over a flame. The heat would cause that thin poisonous film to vaporize and then, as the tube cooled, to deposit a hazy layer on the interior glass.

  That final haze provided the real answer. Mercury, for instance, glimmered silvery bright on the glass. Arsenic formed a fine frost, glittering faintly with the octahedral crystals so familiar to chemists who worked with poisons.

  JOHN AND Fanny Creighton hired one of the best defense attorneys in New Jersey, a former prosecutor named James McCarthy, who wasted no time proclaiming that his clients were innocent; he was “absolutely convinced that they had nothing whatever to do with this thing.”

  The Creightons had told him they were shocked and baffled to learn that arsenic had been found in the boy’s body. Yes, it had been found, but no one knew where it had come from. Charles Avery might even have taken it himself, McCarthy declared. Fanny had told the lawyer that she’d worried about an unhappy love affair. “We are all up in the air,” the attorney added. “My clients certainly know nothing about how it came to be there.”

  Throughout the trial, he hammered that point. The discovery of Fowler’s Solution in the household meant nothing; one could find it in thousands of households, used for the most innocent purposes. Fowler’s was a very dilute poison anyway—about one part arsenic to one hundred parts liquid. It would take gallons to achieve what Newark chemists said they’d found in the body—arsenic at four times the lethal dose. And there was no evidence, none at all, that either Creighton had suddenly started buying more concentrated arsenic materials.

  Rather, the boy himself had easy access to arsenic; he worked in a grocery store, where products like Rough on Rats were stacked high on shelves. Perhaps he was an addict. Dedicated arsenic eaters were known in Europe. In southeastern Austria, peasants reputedly smeared an arsenic paste on toast, folklore asserting that it improved their health and provided a kind of protective poison immunity. “It is not impossible that young Avery carried quantities of arsenic-containing poison around with him,” the defense lawyer speculated.

  The anonymous letters were evidence of spiteful neighbors, nothing more. The $1,000 insurance policy was a joke; after funeral expenses, there would only be a few hundred left. True, the Creightons routinely outspent their income—John Creighton made only thirty dollars a week as a clerk, after all—but plenty of people were in debt, and they didn’t mix poison into the family pudding.

  It was ridiculous, McCarthy said, on the face of it.

  THE PROSECUTOR might have argued that McCarthy was simply offering one alternate theory after another. But even he was forced to acknowledge “the remote possibility that young Avery died of an overdose of arsenic, self-administered.”

  On June 23 both Creightons—Frances, still in her demure black dress, and her husband—were acquitted of all charges. Journalists who crowded into the Newark courtroom reported that a slight smile appeared on her face and then she fainted into her lawyer’s arms. But that wasn’t the end of the story, certainly not as far as the prosecutors were concerned. There was still the question of what had happened to John’s parents.

  WALTER AND Annie Creighton lay at rest in Newark’s Fairmont Cemetery, founded in 1855, 150 stately acres of gentle hills, leafy elm trees, beautifully trimmed firs, and elaborate marble mausoleums. Many of the city’s most influential citizens also lay there: Civil War heroes, U.S. congressmen, professional baseball players, Newark mayors, brewery owners, and the founder of the well-established Mennen Company.

  The city ordered the couple’s bodies exhumed in May, turning the dignified burial grounds into a madhouse of journalistic competition. Police fought a near-military action at the gates, fending climbers with cameras off the walls. One photographer who eluded them and made his way almost to the gravesite was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct.

  In desperation, the pathologists decided not even to attempt to move the bodies to the morgue; they erected a rough tent over the gravesite and conducted their autopsies on gurneys. Behind the cloth flaps, using buckets of water to keep their saws and knives clean, they’d cut deep into the decaying bodies. They left unsure exactly what had killed the couple, but they were able to clear up one question: neither Creighton appeared to have died of the diseases listed on the death certificates.

  Grimly, the doctors scooped the internal organs into glass jars, placed them into fiber bags, and marched their samples past the shouting reporters. The results were dramatically revealed several weeks later, during the Avery trial: the senior Creighton’s body appeared to be clean of poison, but in his wife’s body, crystals of white arsenic were discovered.

  Just one day after being acquitted of her brother’s death, Mary Frances Creighton was rearrested and charged with killing her mother-in-law. The Newark prosecutor did not charge her husband this time—he’d come to suspect that she was the killer in the house. She looked like a lost Madonna, but he could promise any listener that she was nothing of the kind.

  THAT WAS exactly what prosecutor Victor D’Aloia told the second jury, letting his voice carry through the packed courtroom, through the double wooden doors, into the hall, where the overflow crowd tipped forward, trying to hear. This woman sitting quietly in her black dress and jet-bead necklace was a liar and a murderer, he said.

  A nurse who had cared for the elderly Mrs. Creighton testified that the woman had first become ill after her daughter-in-law fixed her a cup of cocoa. The invalid was just recovering when Frances offered to watch over her while the nurse went down to the kitchen for breakfast. When the nurse returned twenty minutes later, the elder Mrs. Creighton’s eyes were fixed on the open door, wide and terrified.

  “What has happened?” the nurse had cried, hurrying to the bed. Her patient only looked at her, gurgled in her throat, and then vomited onto the floor. The nurse sent an urgent summons to the doctor, and they fought for an hour to save her, b
ut Annie Creighton died late that December morning in 1920.

  The physician admitted he hadn’t suspected arsenic. Because his patient had been unable to speak, he’d concluded that she’d suffered a cerebral hemorrhage brought on by the violent distress of some kind of food poisoning. Only after the earlier trial, and the carnage in the graveyard, had he realized that her symptoms were consistent with arsenic poisoning.

  “I KNOW that Fanny is guiltless of killing my mother,” John Creighton told reporters. “If my mother died of unnatural causes I know in my innermost heart that my wife is innocent of responsibility for her death.”

  Creighton sat behind his wife during the trial, the polished wooden railing between them, listening silently to the sharp discussion of what could be found in a disintegrating body and other debates over chemical detective work.

  Prosecutors had called in two prominent pathologists, Otto Schultz of Columbia University (who had competed for Norris’s job in 1918) and Harrison Martland of Newark City Hospital (who had studied at Bellevue), considered one of the best forensic scientists on the East Coast. Both testified that they believed the woman had been killed with white arsenic.

  Fanny Creighton’s lawyer countered with three New York experts, all from Bellevue and New York University, who methodically tore apart the prosecution case.

  The first doctor said he still found the original ptomaine diagnosis most credible; there were too few lesions in the body, he said, to support arsenic poisoning. The second expert, a Bellevue pathologist, said the same thing. He testified that lethal doses would have created the classic internal damage, so visible in the Shelbourne Restaurant deaths, the bloody tracks so characteristic of the poison. In every other case of arsenic poisoning that he’d investigated, “there was always present some or more typical lesions or effects.” In this case, he saw none of that predictable damage.