The Poisoner's Handbook

by Deborah Blum

  The details of those deaths made it obvious that carbon monoxide does not discriminate in its victims. In the right circumstances, it will kill anyone. A newly married couple in an elegant brownstone just off Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side were killed by gas escaping from a defective rubber hose; a woman living in midtown Manhattan was killed by gas escaping from tubing leading to a stove; a man on the Lower East Side was poisoned by gas escaping from a radiator; a man on the Upper West Side fell into bed drunk and failed to notice that the flame had blown out on two gas jets that fed the lamps in his room; a city inspector was killed by illuminating gas while inspecting the water meter in a basement; a man on Morningside Avenue, on the Upper West Side, was killed by gas escaping from a small gas heater in the bathroom.

  In 1925 the details were of the same order, but the number of fatalities had gone up.

  That January fifteen people were killed by gas in one terrible day. Among them—a man in Yonkers, killed by gas escaping from an unlighted burner on a stove; a baby, dead when his mother placed him by a poorly fitted stove for warmth; a Long Island man, killed by a leaky furnace; a Bronx man, his wife, and a guest staying in their apartment, dead due to another unlighted stove burner; a young mother and her baby, killed in Brooklyn by a faulty gas heater.

  The U.S. Bureau of Mines, which had been investigating carbon monoxide risks in coal mines, released a report in the summer of 1926 Stating that “the public generally does not appreciate the danger from gas leaks.” The government was also weary of people reporting that a trained killer had set off a bomb when in actuality someone had merely left a gas jet open and then lit a cigarette. The bureau wanted to reassure the country’s citizens that not every residential explosion was the work of the Black Hand Society.

  It was usually the result of common carelessness.

  THE BLACK HAND—La Mana Nera in Italian—was an extortion syndicate organized by immigrants in New York and elsewhere (Chicago, San Francisco, and New Orleans) that used a simple and successful formula to acquire money. A letter was sent to a given target (often another Italian-American) threatening murder, arson, or kidnapping, sometimes all three, unless the society was paid off. The syndicate thrived by making good on its threats. It also believed in theatrical demonstrations, such as blowing up a car or apartment, shredding both property and victim into pieces. As its reputation for terror grew, the letters needed only the most basic signature—a hand printed in black ink.

  In New York the Black Handers were mostly former Sicilians, headquartered in the neighborhood of Little Italy. One of the society’s leaders, nicknamed Lupo (the Wolf), was so feared by other immigrants that they routinely crossed themselves at the mention of his name. The Wolf’s favorite way to kill was to strangle a victim and then set the body on fire, preferably in a park for public viewing. Lupo and his colleagues did their best work in the early twentieth century, killing even police officers who interfered with their work. In 1909 the syndicate murdered a Manhattan police lieutenant in charge of the city’s Italian Squad, which had been created as a response to organized crime. The lieutenant’s funeral drew 250,000 mourners, a testament not only to how much he was admired but to how much the society was hated.

  By the mid-1920s the Black Hand’s tactics had mostly fallen out of fashion. The newer crime bosses felt that the extortion ring attracted too much attention; furthermore, the profits from bootlegging made blackmail schemes unnecessary. (The federal government estimated liquor syndicate profits at $3 billion in 1926.) But its name was still invoked to terrorize the disobedient. Thus the reaction to explosions that the government found so irritating. “Many disastrous explosions in buildings that are attributed to the Black Hand bombs or other mysteriously placed explosives are found on investigation to be caused by gas accumulations from leaks or burners that have become extinguished by drafts,” the bureau noted stiffly.

  The government suggested that the greater risk was the silent, far-too-pervasive leaking of illuminating gas into people’s homes. In New York City alone deaths from illuminating gas continued to rise: 519 accidental asphyxiations reported in 1924 and 607 in the following year.

  The Black Hand, at the height of its power, had never killed so many in one year.

  THE LEAH FREINDLICH case posed a fascinating question for Gettler, at least the kind of question that obsessive forensic toxicologists find fascinating: could carbon monoxide be absorbed after death?

  Leah Freindlich’s blood had contained no meaningful carboxyhemoglobin, proving that the illuminating gas hadn’t killed her. But what if the baby hadn’t cried? What if the neighbor hadn’t hurried to help, or the police had been slower to arrive? What if her body had had a few more hours to steep in the gas? Given more time, would the evidence have been blurred as the gas crept into the body?

  There were a few tentative reports concerning such questions. For example, in a 1909 experiment a German researcher had exposed four stillborn babies to carbon monoxide for a full day. He reported that he saw signs of the gas in the lungs but nothing in the blood, not even in the heart. His conclusion was that if the gas were absorbed after death, it was only in bare trace amounts. Gettler thought the German scientist might be onto something. He just wished the study had been more meticulous. The researcher had merely recorded his observation of cherry-red color in lung tissue. He hadn’t run tests for carboxyhemoglobin; he hadn’t analyzed blood samples; he hadn’t produced the kind of enduring results that could be considered valid some fifteen years later.

  Alexander Gettler wanted solid numbers, real data, as close to certainty as he could get. If the experiment he wanted didn’t exist, he would just create it himself.

  He started with a small collection of dead cats, collected from a city animal shelter. He then methodically exposed the bodies to carbon monoxide, putting them one at a time into a metal box, piping in illuminating gas through a small hole, sealing the box, and letting the cat corpses remain in that CO-soaked environment for one to five days. Gettler then drew blood from the animals, from locations around the body, including the heart.

  He was looking for that familiar bright discoloration in the blood, for the chemical signature of carboxyhemoglobin. First, though, he would have to adjust for an environmental complication: exposure to city air.

  THANKS TO THE streets overflowing with automobiles, the increasing reliance on gas appliances, and the sprouting of industrial factories along urban corridors, every living creature, especially in the big cities, now inhaled a constant dose of carbon monoxide.

  Animal studies conducted in New York showed that dogs and cats, for instance, had a predictable amount of carboxyhemoglobin saturating their blood. The average saturation in rural areas was less than one percent; but in New York City, CO levels in household pets and feral cats, like those in Gettler’s study, ran 1.5 percent or higher.

  Even after five days of concentrated CO exposure, however, Gettler’s dead cats remained at a basic urban blood level. That result suggested that the gas did not permeate their bodies after death. It seemed probable that the same would be true in people. To be sure, he needed to conduct similar experiments on dead human beings.

  This was where working in a medical examiner’s office offered an important advantage; dead bodies were the routine of each working day. Most of the corpses that came to the morgue had families, friends, or lovers who claimed them. But others seemed to belong to no one. They were the unwanted children—the baby who had been found stuffed into a Gladstone bag and left on an Upper West Side sidewalk—the floaters from the East River, the bums from the Bowery who drank a lethal dose of Smoke and turned up tumbled along the brick wall of an alley. Their bodies ended up in Potter’s Field, the city burial ground for the John and Jane Does of the morgue, the unknowns, the lost, the bodies left unclaimed because their families couldn’t afford to give them a burial.

  The city and the state now had so many alcohol-poisoned dead that one New York assemblyman compared Prohibition enforce
rs to the Borgia family. “The government,” he warned, “is surpassing the Italian fiends of the Middle Ages by dealing death to its own people, who constitute the backbone of the Republic.” There were so many corpses that the city could hardly keep up with burying them. In the midst of that overload, Norris decided to let Gettler experiment on three of the Bowery dead, currently residing in the refrigerated drawers of the morgue’s storage room, destined for unmarked pauper’s graves.

  To do the experiment, Gettler had a larger metal box built: six feet long, two and half feet wide, and two feet deep. The tightly fitted lid had a rubber gasket set in place where a tube could be inserted to pipe in carbon monoxide. Each end of the box was fitted with a stopcock. Each time “the body was placed in the box and the lid was fastened tightly,” Gettler wrote, “illuminating gas was passed through the box for thirty minutes and the stopcocks then closed.”

  He left the first two dead men in the box for twenty-four hours, the third for forty-two hours. In all three cases, just as with the cats, the blood in the dead men’s hearts remained at normal urban levels. Soaking in carbon monoxide for hours after death had had no effect at all. Death created its own bleak protective shield; without breath, carbon monoxide was just another gas aimlessly swirling in the air.

  IN OCTOBER 1926 Norris issued his yearly analysis of deaths in New York City. He’d instituted that procedure when taking office. Insurance companies around the country now requested the report.

  This one confirmed that automobiles and their often-drunken drivers remained the city’s greatest killers, taking 1,272 lives in a year. There had also been 984 suicides (almost 400 by illuminating gas), 356 murders (mostly shootings), and 585 alcohol-related deaths. There was also the elevator problem: 87 people had died in elevator accidents during the year—47 falls into open shafts, 36 crushed by the doors, three killed when cables broke and the machines fell.

  Then six people had been killed playing baseball, six people had died in sleighing accidents, football had killed one, three had died in fistfights, and eight people had lost their lives in diving accidents. The list could go on and on—and did. The medical examiner’s office counted a total of 5,581 deaths from such nonnatural causes that year, which—as Norris also noted—was pretty average for the city.

  THE GLOOMY STATISTICS led the way into a chilly December, clouded by fog. The mist lapped along the rivers and muffled the harbors; stranded vessels in low-floating clouds gave an eerie unreality to the usual creak of boats rubbing against docks in the water. Footsteps thudded unexpectedly in the mist; people startled at the most ordinary sound.

  In the first week of that foggy month, far too early in the morning, a Brooklyn police officer patrolling along the East River saw a man moving stealthily toward a poorly lit part of the wharf where freight-bearing ships from India docked. There was a full moon and the wind was shuffling the mist. The officer could see that the man was bent slightly, carrying a heavy-looking bundle, as he approached the India Wharf.

  Curious, the patrolman edged closer. The man placed his burden on the edge of the pier. Officer James Anderson shouted for him to stand still. He wanted to look at the bundle. But the man instead kicked the object into the river and fled into the mist. Anderson shouted again, and then pulled out his revolver and fired it three times into the air.

  Another patrolman, hearing the shots, came running and almost collided with the fugitive, tackling him to the ground. What was that package? the police asked. Who are you? What are you doing here? The man looked like a workman, dressed in corduroy pants, a heavy pea jacket, and a cap pulled down over his forehead. He was dark, short, and silent. He shook his head, refusing to answer.

  The policemen’s voices became louder, repeating the questions. The man still shook his head, glaring back at them. The rumble of a car’s engine drawing closer made them all jump. It was a battered black taxi, and the driver, on his way home, had seen the chase. He could at least identify the man in the pea jacket as his neighbor. Both lived in a cluster of apartments on Sackett Street in Brooklyn. The man being questioned was a longshoreman named Francesco Travia.

  Even through the shadows, the cops thought Travia looked ill, oddly flushed, his face rimed with black stubble. He folded his arms tighter. He wouldn’t tell them what was in the bundle, now vanished into the river. He wouldn’t tell them why he was there on the India Wharf. They took him back to the Hamilton Street police station and studied him in the light. The bottoms of his gray trousers were smudged dark red. Take off your shoes, they said. His socks were sodden with blood.

  The officers locked him into a cell and went directly to his apartment. It was what people sometimes called a bloody shambles. On the kitchen floor was a dead woman. Or rather half a dead woman. The upper part of the body—torso, arms, battered head—lay between the table and the stove in a clotted pool of red. A spattered butcher’s knife and a chisel sat on a table, smeared and streaked with gore.

  The officers returned hastily to their precinct station and formally arrested Travia on murder and dismemberment charges. A day later the medical examiner’s office, Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler working in tandem, would prove the police wrong.

  THE OFFICE was short-staffed that night, so Charles Norris was on call. He made his usual entrance, even at three in the morning, stepping out of his chauffeur-driven automobile, dressed against the cold in dark overcoat and fedora. He followed the policemen up the wooden stairs to Travia’s apartment, laid his outer garments on a chair, and walked over to inspect the dismembered corpse.

  His thick eyebrows drew together in a familiar frown. The blood pooled around the half-body was a bright cherry red. He bent to look closer at the woman’s face. It was flushed pink, even following this horrible death. Norris’s reaction was recorded by a crime writer and would later become part of his often theatrical legend. He walked over to the waiting detectives and announced, “Boys, you can’t hold this man for murder.”

  The Brooklyn police assured him that they could.

  The body was taken to the Bellevue morgue. It had barely arrived when the cops at the Hamilton Street station called to say they were sending a man and his daughter down to look at the body. The sixteen-year-old daughter had come to the police station to report her mother missing. The girl’s description—a stocky woman in her early forties with dark hair, heavy brows above brown eyes, a round face, and a thick neck—matched their corpse perfectly.

  It took Alice Fredericksen and her father, Frederick, a while to get to Bellevue by train and surface car. In the interim the morgue attendants did their best to disguise the damage, heaping sheets over the corpse until only the face was visible. When Fredericksen arrived, he took one shrinking look and identified his wife, Anna, lying on the marble table.

  On further inquiry, it turned out that the Fredericksens knew the murder suspect. Their family ran a rooming house on Henry Street, around the corner from his apartment building. Travia was a loner and a drinker, but no one had thought of him as a violent man. And Anna had been plain easygoing, not the kind of woman to provoke a murder. Both father and daughter were shocked—and bewildered.

  IN HIS quiet laboratory, Gettler took blood from Anna Fredericksen’s heart and began putting it through the standard chemical tests. In each glass vessel, each ceramic dish, the bloody solutions, instead of turning the darkish grays of normal oxygenated blood, flamed that brilliant red. Her blood was saturated with carboxyhemoglobin. And as corpses didn’t absorb the gas, and as the saturation level was lethal, Anna Fredericksen had been dead, Gettler reported, before Travia had picked up his knife.

  FRANCESCO TRAVIA had come to New York with his children twenty-two years earlier, after his wife died in Italy. His parents had immigrated before him; they still lived in Coney Island. Once in New York, he’d decided on a new and solitary life. He took to calling himself Frank, left his children with his parents, found a job, and stayed alone in his little apartment. He preferred to drink alone as well, sp
ending his Saturday nights with a pint of whatever bootleg whiskey was available.

  As he told investigators—in a sudden, frightened confession—Anna Fredericksen had come by in search of some booze. They were out of alcohol at home, she complained. She was known as a heavy drinker in the neighborhood. Her husband admitted to police that she “frequently drank intoxicants” and that her usual bootlegger had been unable to deliver that weekend.

  Travia said that he and Anna had finished his own supply of liquor, sitting at his kitchen table. When he tried to get her to leave, they’d fallen into an argument, and then, well, he’d felt incredibly sleepy and had fallen asleep at the table. He woke sometime later, he wasn’t sure, foggy-headed. She was still there, lying on the floor. He went to shake her awake. She was creepily cold to the touch, creepily stiff. He could only think, he told police, that he must have killed her while they’d argued, shaken her to death, strangled her, he didn’t know. But he did know there was a dead woman on the floor. And, he was absolutely sure that he’d be charged with murder once she was found.

  So there in the dark of early morning, he decided that his only chance was to get rid of the body. But she was a big woman, tall and chunky, too large to simply haul away over a shoulder. Maybe the alcohol had confused him, he admitted, or maybe it was something else. But Travia decided that he’d have to cut her into smaller pieces and then get rid of her one part at a time.

  He used his butcher knife to do the sawing and his chisel to splinter through the bones. Then he wrapped the lower half of her body in newspapers, burlap bags, and an old raincoat and carried it down to the river. He hadn’t figured out what to do with the upper half, but then he never got that chance. That was his story. He swore it was true. And whether one believed it depended on whether one believed in the scientific results from Bellevue.