The Poisoner's Handbook

by Deborah Blum

  WELL BEFORE Gertie Webb’s organs arrived at Bellevue—stomach, kidneys, liver, intestines, all in clean glass containers—Gettler had been analyzing mercury bichloride. He’d learned from every case, from the accidental overdoses and the deliberate ones: the Italian seamstress who swallowed thirty mercury bichloride tablets, the woman who left a note explaining that she was weary of summer heat, the despairing wife who had quarreled once too often with her husband.

  None of them had died quickly: as Olive Thomas’s case had emphasized, bichloride of mercury did not offer a fast or easy way out. The seamstress, even after swallowing her bottle of pills, had taken two weeks to die. Most of the suicides reviewed by the medical examiner’s office lived five to twelve days. Evidence from autopsies suggested that the poison steadily eroded them internally. The organs looked chewed, spattered with bloody lesions, especially the kidneys, which received an excruciatingly high amount of the mercury salts as they struggled to clear the blood.

  And so the kidneys were the first place Gettler looked when checking for chemical evidence of mercury poisoning. And in his preliminary analysis of Gertie Webb’s kidneys, he found the faint, glistening signature of mercury in the tissue.

  CHARLES WEBB—Carl to his friends—was having a lousy month.

  He’d lost his wife less than a year into their long-awaited marriage. He’d been publicly accused of murdering her, first through sly hints by her relatives, then more directly by her friends: “Girlhood Friend Charges Murder,” ran the New York Times headline on October 2, over a story based on yet another cozy press conference, this one held in the living room of a White Plains vacation cottage. The accuser, a woman who had attended private schools in Manhattan with Gertie Webb, told reporters that Carl Webb was a devious man. “Until a short time ago, poor innocent Gertie did not know that she was taking poison, as I and other dear friends believe.”

  While she was still single, Gertie Gorman had signed a will dividing her considerable property among family, friends, and servants. She possessed plenty to divide: the house on Madison Avenue, a country home in Fairfield, Connecticut, three apartment buildings in Manhattan, several acres of land near the city’s northwest border at 189th Street, stock in the Bankers Trust Company and Brooklyn City Railway Company, partnership in a real estate and development company, three automobiles, a fine collection of jewelry, a ruby and diamond lorgnette for use at the opera, a solid gold mesh evening bag, silver, artwork, clothing, and furs of silver fox and sealskin, as well as several hundred thousand dollars in bank accounts.

  But after Gertie Webb became ill in Rye, she had signed a far briefer will, only twenty lines long, that left everything to her husband. This, her angry friends and relatives insisted, had been his design. He had forced this will on a dying woman, which they believed was the sole purpose of the marriage. “There will be trouble by the others when it is filed,” Webb reportedly told his lawyer, and he was right.

  THE DAY AFTER his wife’s old friend gave her incendiary press conference, the day he learned that the Westchester County grand jury had been called into session concerning his wife’s death, Carl Webb tried, in his quiet manner, to defend himself. He did not call reporters over to visit him at the country club, where he was sheltering. Instead, through his attorney, he released a written statement that began: “I have been naturally reluctant to discuss in the public press the tragedy which has recently befallen me.”

  He’d wanted time to grieve in private, Webb said, more time than he’d been allowed. “So much publicity, however, has been given to the matter and so many insinuations have been made by persons apparently hostile that my friends have urged me to make a public statement.”

  Regarding the will—yes, he had filed it for probate. But he also filed a more complex version, unsigned, as a proposed amendment. Gertie had insisted on drafting the short will after she realized how sick she was, he insisted; she’d wanted him to be her beneficiary. He had thought at the time that it gave him too much, so he had asked their attorney to draw up another document that included many of the earlier bequests. But he was unable to get his wife to sign the revised version; for one thing, the doctor had ordered him out of the sickroom.

  He hoped to honor its provisions anyway, he said: “My one desire in the matter is to carry out my wife’s wishes to the best of my knowledge and ability.” As to the accusations, he had no intention of carrying on quarrels in the newspapers. But Webb would say this: he knew nothing about any poison administered to his wife.

  Gertie had been completely in the care of Dr. William Meyer during the last three weeks of her life; for part of that time, he—Webb—had been kept entirely out of the sickroom, forced to pray for her recovery in an adjacent sitting room. He’d begged Meyer to bring in other doctors, but the White Plains physician had refused. Webb had himself sent for the doctor she’d once seen at the local hospital, but Meyer had refused to “consult with him or to admit him into the sick room.” Webb had then sent his attorney to threaten legal action; Meyer had at last agreed to confer with the Webbs’ doctor in New York City and to allow her husband back into the room.

  According to Webb’s statement, he then waited by her bedside, on his knees, praying, hoping for the other doctor to hurry. But by the time the Manhattan physician arrived, Gertie was dead.

  THE WESTCHESTER district attorney’s office, mistrustful of the dramatic performances now being staged in Rye, had not only asked Gettler to handle the toxicology but asked pathologists from the New York City medical examiner’s office to do the autopsy.

  Once a body is opened up, the presence of mercury bichloride is hard to miss. The kidneys are dribbled with blood, mushy with cellular breakdown, and grayish in color. But there are plenty of other indicators as well: eroded patches in the mouth and throat, ulcerations in the stomach wall, and bloody inflammation of the intestines.

  Mercury, for all its glimmering silver elegance, is a messy killer.

  The problem—at least for those accusing Charles Webb of murder—was that the Manhattan pathologists didn’t find any of that damage in Gertie Webb’s body. “All the usual tissue changes in cases of bichloride poisoning were absent,” the medical examiner’s report concluded. They found no ulceration of the stomach or intestines, no ugly inflammations of the mouth and throat. The doctors did find the lungs congested by pneumonia and the kidneys severely diseased.

  For his part, Gettler had been able to estimate the amount of bichloride of mercury in Gertie Webb’s body by comparing the Reinsch’s test readings with other data that he’d compiled. Mercury was there, but in such minuscule amounts that it was barely detectable, far below a lethal dose. He’d further analyzed the trace of mercury detected, concluding that it wasn’t corrosive sublimate at all but rather another mercury compound, one also commonly used but far less toxic.

  Gettler identified the mercury source as an old-time remedy called calomel, which was still sometimes used as a laxative or purgative. A familiar tonic, calomel had been prescribed for treating intestinal parasites in the sixteenth century. Lewis and Clark had taken it with them on their explorations of the American West. Doctors still routinely ordered it for patients with gastrointestinal illnesses, using it to flush out the system. It was gradually disappearing though, as physicians realized that it brought the unavoidable risks associated with mercury exposure.

  Calomel was, in fact, a milder salt of mercury called mercurous chloride. Its formula was a little different from corrosive sublimate: two mercury atoms for every two chlorine atoms (Hg2Cl2). The fact that the corrosive chlorine was more tied up meant the preparation was less abrasive; the fact that calomel solutions tended to be much more diluted meant that they were less acutely poisonous.

  But like all mercury compounds, they lingered in the body and could accumulate in the tissues. And they naturally concentrated in the kidneys, following the same distribution patterns that characterized the more dangerous bichloride of mercury. To test his theory further, Gettler dos
ed several cats with calomel at a level comparable to a standard prescription of the medicine. The slight sheen of mercury in their kidneys, he found, was at a similar concentration to what he’d seen in Gertie Webb’s organs.

  Acting on Gettler’s findings, the district attorney began a new round of questioning, reinterviewing Gertie Webb’s physicians.

  Dr. Meyer hadn’t prescribed calomel. Neither had the physicians she’d seen during her hospital visits. But she had been taking regular doses, investigators learned, on the advice of her doctor in Manhattan.

  “THE ONLY POISON in this case, I am convinced, is the slanderous tongues and the evil desires of those who want to make scandal,” Webb’s attorney snapped to police investigators.

  At this point they agreed with him. After the autopsy findings suggested poorly treated diseases might have caused her death, the district attorney had begun investigating Dr. Meyer: “Dr. Meyer was mistaken in thinking he had cured her pneumonic condition. When she died, Mrs. Webb had been suffering from kidney trouble, a bad heart and pleural pneumonia.” Her kidney disease, it seemed, had been worsening for some time.

  The prosecutor continued the grand jury hearings but required Meyer to waive immunity before testifying, which left him open to criminal charges. Meyer left no doubt as to his feelings: “I took deep personal umbrage . . . the inference given to the grand jury was that I, as attending physician, was not beyond suspicion.” He resented even more the implication that he had badgered a dying woman while playing amateur detective.

  He admitted that he’d told her that she was dying and that something was killing her but he didn’t know what it was. He had asked her if someone could have slipped poison into her coffee or cocoa. She had said no, but he hadn’t really believed her. “Remember, Gertie, you are dying,” Meyer testified that he’d answered. “It is very important that you tell me everything.” When she still had no suspicions, he’d realized that he would have to act for her. He’d felt it was his duty to urge a police investigation. Naturally, he’d shared his information with interested parties such as the dying woman’s relatives.

  The doctor did not like the way this case was turning out. As Meyer told journalists after the hearing, he didn’t care for the district attorney either.

  ON OCTOBER 21, the Westchester grand jury announced its findings: Gertie Webb had died of natural causes. The charges against her husband were groundless. “Accusations have been made before this body and through the public press,” it said, “which, if true, would seriously affect the status of Charles Webb, husband of the deceased. We, therefore, deem it our duty to say emphatically that all of these accusations are without the slightest foundation and we fully and completely exonerate Mr. Webb.” The county coroner backed those findings, issuing a report concluding that Gertie Webb had died of progressive kidney disease and a complicating pneumonia, misdiagnosed by the attending physician.

  Webb profusely thanked the district attorney and grand jury for their “strict sense of justice” but also expressed bitterness, stating that he hoped with time the motives of those who had accused him would be fully revealed. He certainly expected to get another chance to find them out. Gertie Webb’s relatives—her father, her uncle, her half brother, and her cousins—had tried to get the governor to overrule the Westchester district attorney. When that had failed, they’d filed a civil suit seeking to overturn her last will.

  Being a very public criminal suspect had changed Webb’s mind, though, about how to proceed with his wife’s last wishes. He decided to withdraw the amended will he’d drafted, the one sharing her property with friends and relatives.

  For obvious reasons, as his lawyer said, Carl Webb had lost the impulse to share.

  THE WEBB CASE showcased a point that Norris had tried to impress on the city police department. He wanted the officers, from detectives to beat cops, to value scientific evidence, to think of the medical examiner’s office as a useful partner in an investigation. Earlier that year he’d given a keynote address, “The Medical Examiner and the Police,” during the opening ceremonies of the School for Detectives of the City of New York, the first time a scientist had participated in that program.

  In the fall of 1923 he’d begun regular training programs for city detectives. He brought them to the morgue, had them attend autopsies, and sent them to Gettler’s laboratory. There they could watch the city toxicologist—and the New York University students he was training—work their way through poison analyses of bodies brought in from the street.

  DETECTION OF poisons such as mercury bichloride, arsenic, and cyanide formed the routine of Gettler’s laboratory. For all the mystery novelists’ fascination with more exotic toxins—the British writer Agatha Christie, for instance, launched her career in 1920 with a tale of strychnine and murder—the everyday poisons kept the city toxicology laboratory occupied.

  But in the chilly January of 1924 Gettler and his crew got a true oddball case: the death of the famous Blue Man. The victim had spent most of his adult life as a human curiosity exhibited at Barnum and Bailey’s (the Greatest Show on Earth) as it traveled around the country. The Blue Man had recently died at Bellevue; the pathologists said his body was one of the strangest they’d ever seen stretched out on a marble table in the morgue.

  The famed human oddity was sixty-eight years old when he checked himself into the hospital, short of breath and complaining that when he lay flat he couldn’t breathe at all. As his hospital records noted, he was a tall, thin man, with glistening white hair and an equally glossy white mustache. His skin was so deeply blue as to appear black at a distance. His lips were blue; his tongue was blue. The scleras—what would usually be called the whites of his eyes—were also blue.

  His wasn’t the exhausted bluish patchiness of cyanide poisoning, though. The skin was smoothly colored, with an almost lustrous look. It was that overall effect of polishing that led the doctors to a diagnosis—the Blue Man was suffering from a disease called argyria (from the Greek word argyros meaning silver). The condition was known to deposit silver through the body, staining the tissues to a deeply polished blue-gray.

  The Bellevue doctors suspected that the Blue Man, a former British army officer, had achieved fame by dosing himself with silver nitrate. This salt, made by dissolving silver into nitric acid and evaporating the solution, formed a shiny powder that could be mixed for other uses. Silver nitrate was easily available: used in photographic processing, in dentistry to treat ulcers in the mouth, and in neonatal care, blended into drops that went into the eyes of newborns to prevent infections.

  The Blue Man had firmly denied any silver exposure, denied any self-medication at all. As he’d told his circus admirers, he was a freak of nature, blue at birth. But when he died that fall—from rapidly worsening pneumonia—the pathologists had decided to take a thorough look. The autopsy showed that he was blue-silver on the inside too. The dull reddish-brown muscle tissue had a faint silver tint, the spleen was colored a bluish red, the liver bluish gray. Even the brain shone silver, its familiar curves and coils slightly reflective in the brightly lit morgue.

  How much metal did his body contain? To find out, Gettler made an acid solution of the organs and cooked it dry, creating a gray ash. He flushed hot water, ammonia, and nitric acid through the ashes, washing the silver out of them. He then measured the silver from each organ and totaled up the results to calculate the whole body content. Gettler’s conservative estimate was that the Blue Man’s body contained a good three and a half ounces of solid silver. About half the metal was in the muscle tissue, another fourth in the bones, and the rest mostly concentrated in the liver, kidneys, heart, and brain.

  But the silver hadn’t killed the Blue Man; he had died of the pneumonia. The only effect the silver doses seemed to have had was to turn him that remarkable indigo color. “Among the heavy metals which may become deposited in the human body in relatively large amounts,” Gettler wrote in his report on the case, “silver is of slight and perhaps least t
oxicity.”

  Of course, the toxicology lab was now in possession of a nice quantity of pure silver. His co-workers took the gleaming pellets acquired from the Blue Man’s body, melted them down, shaped them into a bullet, and gave it to Gettler. Just in case, his friends assured him, he ever had to analyze a vampire.

  He put it on his desk. Just in case, he replied.

  CHARLES WEBB was still fighting with his dead wife’s family a year after being cleared of murder charges. He’d won the first round in this new fight; a judge had ruled that the twenty-line will was valid. Her relatives had appealed that finding, and in July 1924 they filed another lawsuit, insisting that the family home on Madison Avenue was meant to stay in the Gorman family. They also wanted a $250,000 trust fund to maintain the property.

  Webb didn’t want the house, didn’t even live there anymore. He’d moved into a residential hotel. But he’d learned that he wasn’t a forgiving man. He went back to court to challenge that claim as well. If it took years, he would make sure that he gave her family nothing, nothing at all.

  A CASE like that of Charles Webb, when science could exonerate an innocent man, was more than gratifying. It emphasized, as Norris had told the police, that forensic research was gaining its place as an investigator’s tool. It showcased the way a medical examiner’s work could be used to protect people from harm.

  But some poisons still challenged their very young science, warning the researchers against overconfidence. In 1924 the New York City medical examiner’s office encountered just such a poison, and the experience did not prove so gratifying as that of the Webb case. This new poison emphasized instead the limits of the science, the obstacles that even good chemists and crusading public officials faced, in protecting the public against the new generation of chemicals, desired by industry and promoted by a cooperative government.