The Poisoner's Handbook

by Deborah Blum

  And Gettler, who was the third defense witness, offered a chemist’s explanation of why a small amount of arsenic had been found in the body. The New Jersey pathologists had sent samples from the organs to Gettler’s lab. They contained a grayish-white powder, Gettler said, which resembled arsenic but was actually the remnant of another element called bismuth. Scattered through the bismuth powder were a few white crystals of arsenic. He was surprised, Gettler told the jury, at how slight was the amount of arsenic found. In the liver, where poisons tended to concentrate, the levels were “infinitesimal.”

  Gettler had used Reinsch’s test, among others, and picked his way through the chemical layers of the analysis to calculate the precise ratios of arsenic and the bismuth in the samples he’d used. As the journalists gloomily reported, these few hours in the courtroom were a long drone of scientific terminology. The chalkboard used to illustrate the conclusions, one reporter said, took on the appearance of an impenetrable spiderweb.

  Like arsenic, bismuth was a metallic element used in medicines. In particular, it was a key ingredient in antinausea and antidiarrhea formulas. One of the most popular brands, Bismosal, had been developed in 1901 by a pediatrician seeking to alleviate infant cholera. The solution, wintergreen in taste and colored pink, was renamed Pepto-Bismol in 1919. Annie Creighton’s doctor had not suggested that she take Pepto-Bismol, but he had prescribed another, very similar bismuth formula.

  The problem with such formulas, Gettler explained, was that bismuth ore often contained other heavy metals, such as arsenic and lead. Not all processors were able to remove the contaminants; traces of both metals were frequently found in bismuth-based medications. When he ran Reinsch’s test, Gettler recognized the characteristic proportions in Annie Creighton’s body—large amounts of bismuth and slight traces of arsenic and lead. His conclusion was that the evidence of arsenic poisoning cited by the prosecution was really just evidence of contamination in the medicine prescribed.

  For the second time in three weeks, a Newark jury found Fanny Creighton not guilty of murder. She walked out of the courthouse a free woman on July 13, pausing on the steps, smiling at the sound of a hurdy-gurdy playing nearby. She told reporters that she wanted only to be reunited with her children: “I bear no malice toward anyone,” she said. “I realize the prosecutor did his duty. I have no plans for the future and I don’t know what I shall do. I am too happy with my family just now to think of anything else. But I shall never forget Friday the 13th.”

  AND NEITHER would Alexander Gettler. But it would be twelve years and another arsenic murder trial later before the New York press would start referring to Mary Fanny Creighton as America’s Lucretia Borgia. Only then would Gettler—and everyone else—wonder how she’d fooled so many people in the summer of 1923. What Alexander Gettler didn’t know then was that July 13, 1923, would haunt him as well.

  FIVE

  MERCURY (Hg) 1923—1925

  CHARLES WEBB courted Gertrude Gorman for eight years. He wished to marry her; he had from the beginning. But his chosen sweetheart was the only child of a widowed mother—and her mother couldn’t stand him. Gertie’s friends dismissed him with contempt: “One of those soft-spoken men you find on the arms of rich women,” they said. Her family mocked him; he was doglike in the way he followed her, an uncle pronounced.

  Webb was a soft-spoken man, quiet for a New York City estate broker. He was Princeton educated, well read, thoughtful, and as determined as he was gentle-mannered. He shrugged off the hostility and continued his courtship. He was almost fifty—a slight man in shades of gray, with pale eyes and silvering hair—when her mother died in 1920. Gertie was nearly forty then, still the devoted daughter, and the sheltered, bejeweled, fur-draped child of a wealthy and possessive parent. It took Webb two years yet to persuade her to marry him, but they wed at the close of 1922, and he happily moved into her family home on Madison Avenue.

  Ten months later his new wife was dead, collapsing in their luxury suite at the Westchester Biltmore Country Club in Rye. And one day after that, on September 28, 1923, her uncle summoned journalists to his country estate in the exclusive enclave of Devon, Pennsylvania. He met them outside, naturally, not wanting newshounds inside his house. Standing in one of the beautifully maintained side gardens, William T. Hunter basked in the floral blaze around him, the dahlias he bred and cultivated as a hobby, the golden petals of a prize-winning bloom that he’d named “Gertie Gorman” for his niece.

  The family had been “very much surprised when they heard she intended to marry Webb,” he said. They’d thought that she planned to devote her life to her close relatives and friends—she’d always been such a family girl, a “sensible girl.” He regretted saying it, but they’d been sadly unsurprised when the marriage killed her. They’d always suspected that Webb had been attracted to more than her sweet ways. What he really loved, her family believed, was the Gorman money. Webb was not a wealthy man, her uncle reminded the gathered journalists; his wife “had all the money.” And who wouldn’t love a fortune of $2 million (the equivalent of about $25 million today)?

  Colonel Hunter didn’t directly accuse Webb, not by name anyway, of murder. But there was no missing his intent. “Gertie was given bichloride of mercury to cause her death. That’s a bold statement, but there’s little doubt in my mind that it’s true.”

  BICHLORIDE OF mercury—also known by the unpleasant name of corrosive sublimate—is a poisonous salt of the metallic element mercury. The salt has an uncomplicated chemical structure: one atom of mercury bound tightly to two atoms of chlorine (HgCl2).

  In chemistry, though, simplicity doesn’t necessarily mean safety. Mercury is a famously risky material. And its neatly arranged salts have proven to be exceptionally poisonous, sometimes even more so than their metallic parent.

  Elemental mercury is a slippery substance. In the Earth’s crust it anchors itself by bonding with other elements, creating materials such as the rough coppery rock cinnabar, a crystalline combination of mercury and sulfur. Once cinnabar is mined and crushed, mercury can be easily separated from its mineral companions. The warmer aboveground temperatures and the decrease in pressure allow pure mercury to take the form of a very odd liquidlike metal. But unlike a drop of water, a drop of mercury touched by a finger does not wet the skin. Instead, it breaks into smaller drops, tiny glittering balls that skitter away, breaking into ever-smaller balls if touched again. That brilliant scatter effect prompted alchemists to nickname the metal “quicksilver” and to formally name it Mercury, for the fleet-footed Roman messenger god.

  The same silver-sphere formation also explains why mercury is less acutely dangerous in its purest form. High surface tension keeps the fluid metal balled up, preventing it from puddling outward, as a traditional liquid would, or from readily soaking into its environment. That same self-containing tension also keeps pure mercury from being easily absorbed by the body.

  A few people, mostly in the mid-nineteenth century, had actually swallowed a gleaming cupful, believing it would cure constipation. But the element mostly slipped right through. The mercury drinkers showed no signs of acute sickness, although many complained of developing extremely sore mouths. Neither does elemental mercury absorb easily through skin. Those spherical droplets tend to just jitter over the surface ridges on fingers rather than soak into the tissue. No one has ever called elemental mercury harmless, though. The mercury drinkers of the ninteenth century didn’t necessarily become sick immediately, but many later developed cancers, referred to as “mercurial tumors” in the medical textbooks of the time.

  Mercury salts work faster and cause more immediate injury, largely because living tissues tend to soak up salty liquids. And mercury bichloride is basically just another chlorine-based salt, a mean-tempered cousin of the familiar sodium chloride (NaCl) that we use as table salt. It’s the absorption factor that makes mercury salts so famously dangerous. These quicksilvered compounds dissolve readily in water or alcohol and spread rapidly throu
gh living tissues. As medical accounts of the 1920s noted, mercury bichloride was so corrosive, so irritating, that it could destroy tissue to the point that teeth loosened in the mouth, and the stomach eroded into a mass of bleeding ulcers. Physicians knew that because mercury salts, despite the risks, were available in an astonishing variety of commercial products.

  Mercury compounds were sold as bedbug killers. They came mixed into laxatives, antiseptics, and diuretics. In extreme cases, doctors prescribed them for chronic bacterial infections such as syphilis. At the time when Gertie Webb’s uncle was making his accusations, both the benefits and the murderous potential of mercury bichloride were well known. The poison’s risky attributes had been impressed on film fans everywhere, thanks to a Hollywood-fueled tabloid scandal of 1920.

  IT WAS THE irresistibly tragic tale of a beautiful young actress, the adventure-loving heroine of one successful film after another: Madcap Madge, The Flapper, and—what would turn out to be her last picture—Everybody’s Sweetheart.

  The actress, Olive Thomas, had the look of a charming child, with a shining bob of curly dark hair, big violet-blue eyes, and a pale, heart-shaped face. The look launched her career, starting in 1914 when she’d won a “Most Beautiful Girl in New York City” contest. She went on to become a featured Ziegfeld dancer at the New Amsterdam Theatre, a graceful waif, drifting in a zephyr of scarves. The pin-up artist Alberto Vargas painted her wearing only a red rose and a wisp of black satin. Within a few years she was making films for the Selznick studios.

  In the way of people whose lives seem charmed, Thomas soon married a member of the Hollywood’s elite, Jack Pickford, younger brother of screen star Mary Pickford. The couple rapidly developed a reputation for wild behavior, intense partying, and intense quarreling, usually over his numerous affairs—he’d developed syphilis as a result of one of them. They separated, reunited, separated, and tried again, delighting the gossip magazines. “She and Jack were madly in love with one another but I always thought of them as a couple of children playing together,” Mary Pickford observed sadly in her autobiography many years later.

  In early September 1920 the couple sailed to Paris, reportedly on a reconciliation holiday. They checked into the Hotel Ritz and whirled off to enjoy the Prohibition-free city, drinking and dancing at Left Bank bistros until the early morning. At the end of one particularly drunken spree, Pickford and Thomas staggered into their hotel room at nearly three in the morning. Jack, barely standing, fell into the bed. His wife, still energized by the adventure, puttered around the room, wrote a letter, and, finally tiring, went into the bathroom to get ready for sleep.

  As Pickford told the police, he was floating in a whiskeyed haze when Olive began screaming, over and over, “Oh my god, my god.” He stumbled into the dimly lit bathroom, where she was leaning against the counter. Mistaking it for her sleeping medicine, she had picked up a bottle of the bichloride of mercury potion that he rubbed on his painful syphilis sores, poured a dose, and chugged it down. As the corrosive sublimate burned down her throat, she had a moment to realize her mistake. He caught her up and carried her back to the bed, grabbing the phone and calling for an ambulance. “Oh my god,” she repeated, “I’m poisoned.”

  As the story broke, as Thomas lingered in the hospital for three more days, the newspapers repeated every rumor smoking around them: Pickford’s infidelities had driven her to suicide; he had wished to get rid of her and tricked her into taking the poison. As the days passed, he became more evil, she more saintly. So many people flocked to Thomas’s funeral in Paris that women fainted in the crush and the streets became carpeted with countless hats, knocked off and trampled.

  The police launched an investigation, including an autopsy, and concluded that it was, as Pickford had said, just a terrible accident. In an interview with the Los Angeles Examiner after his return to California, Pickford dwelled on how much his wife had wanted to live: “The physicians held out hope for her until the last moment, until they found her kidneys paralyzed. Then they lost hope. But the doctors told me she had fought harder than any patient they ever had.”

  Olive Thomas’s demise, for all the feverish attention it received, was actually a rather standard death from bichloride of mercury. In New York City the medical examiner’s office calculated that the compound caused about twenty deaths a year, mostly suicides and similarly unfortunate accidents. But Thomas had definitely given the poison a new star status, at least for the moment.

  GERTIE WEBB’S uncle had publicly hinted that the same poison that ended the life of Olive Thomas killed his niece. His accusation seemed, at first, a purely spiteful act, but the authorities were becoming curious. “There is doubt as to whether or not she died a natural death,” the Westchester County coroner admitted to reporters clustered in Rye that September 1923. Her physician had refused to sign a death certificate. In response, the coroner had ordered an autopsy and asked that her viscera be removed and sent to Alexander Gettler in New York City, citing the growing reputation of the toxicology work there.

  In late August Charles and Gertie Webb had come to vacation at the Westchester Country Club, bearing a letter of introduction from a club member. The resort catered specifically to their social set. The building was designed in the style of one of Britain’s great houses, located on almost six hundred acres of land owned by the Commodore and Biltmore Hotel Company. It offered ponds for fishing, an eighteen-hole golf course, turquoise-tiled pools, tennis courts, card games in the parlors, tea dances, and a private beach club a short distance away.

  Gertie’s mother had enjoyed the luxury hotel life as well, taking her daughter every summer to old-money resorts in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Webb had persuaded his new wife to try a different place; the old ones, with all their memories, made her melancholy. In August they’d arrived in Rye, planning to do nothing much but play tennis in the day, dance in the evening, and play cards at night. But within a week Gertie was complaining of pain in her side and shortness of breath. Webb summoned a highly recommended doctor staying nearby, William Meyer, who diagnosed a case of mild pneumonia.

  Meyer served an exclusive wealthy clientele, maintaining offices in nearby White Plains and in an elegant suite on Manhattan’s Park Avenue. He also had a favorite hobby: medical detective work. As an amateur criminologist, he regularly gave lectures in Manhattan high schools on the science of crime, especially on discovering concealed murders. To the trained eye, as he told the district attorney, Gertie Webb’s illness seemed peculiar from the outset.

  A slight case of pneumonia wasn’t so alarming in itself, but his patient seemed oddly sicker than she should have been. Meyer hadn’t liked the waxy yellow tone to her skin, the breathy weakness of her voice, and the inexplicable way her health worsened under treatment.

  Nothing he did seemed to help. Finally, he decided that her illness just couldn’t be caused by a natural disease. And in that case he knew whom to blame. He abruptly barred Webb from the sickroom. She died a few days later, but the doctor gave himself credit anyway: “If I hadn’t, she wouldn’t have lived as long as she did.”

  IN GETTLER’S LABORATORY, mercury bichloride was an unhappily familiar substance.

  He’d published his first paper on mercuric chloride poisoning in 1917, before he’d become city toxicologist, while he was holding down only one job, as chemist for Bellevue’s pathology department.

  It wasn’t a particularly difficult poison to detect in a body. But Gettler had been experimenting with it in smaller and smaller amounts, pushing the limits of Reinsch’s test, following those careful steps of heating, distilling, and condensing it until the pure poison separated out. He tried to improve the sensitivity until he could detect a mere trace.

  The final steps in Reinsch’s test involved placing a clean strip of copper in a slurry of suspect tissue and acid, waiting to see if mercury formed a glossy film over the probe. Gettler recognized that the longer he waited, the more mercury might build up on that copper probe. If the slurry wa
s high in mercury, the copper strip glossed over quickly. But if he left the strip to stew overnight before proceeding to the next stage—removing the probe and heating it in a clean glass tube—the test was more sensitive. Even if he couldn’t see mercury on the copper, he discovered, this final heating could cause that invisible trace to vaporize and condense inside the tube, coating it with a fine, just detectable quicksilver sheen. In fact, the process was so sensitive that Gettler could detect even the minimal evidence left by one measured spoonful of prescription medicine.

  He worked with other procedures as well, seeking confirmation. If a poisoned slurry of tissue was exposed to hydrogen sulfide (the noxious gas that gives rotting eggs their smell), the solution would color and discolor in precise order—yellowish-white, then dark yellow, orange, brown, and black. Mercury would also form a glittering layer over gold foil, if the gold was wrapped around zinc and placed in that poisonous brew for several hours. But Reinsch’s test was the one that Gettler came to believe most reliable, especially as he continued to refine it. If the copper wire was left overnight, if he curved the glass tubes so that not a drop could escape, the test proved sensitive enough to produce the shimmer of mercury from as little as 1/500,000 of a grain of mercury salts.