The Poisoner's Handbook

by Deborah Blum

  Dry newspapers found Norris less persuasive. Alcohol killed thousands of people long before Prohibition was enacted, they pointed out. “Must Uncle Sam guarantee safety first for souses?” asked Nebraska’s Omaha Bee. The Springfield Republican of southern Illinois dismissed the whole outcry as “wet propaganda.” And the Pittsburgh Gazette Times pointedly raised a question that puzzled even opponents of the law: why would people persist in drinking white mule and Smoke, paint shop hooch and bathtub gin, when they must know that it could kill them?

  Didn’t the obstinate guzzler bear some responsibility? Wasn’t it possible that “the drinker himself is to blame for the ills that befall him as a result of his libations?” the Pittsburgh editors wrote plaintively.

  AS THE BODIES piled up in the Bellevue morgue, Norris pondered that question himself. Why would anyone play Russian roulette with a glass of liquor? Why did people continue drinking the Borgia cocktails—as one politician called them—of Prohibition?

  One reason, perhaps, was that speakeasy patrons didn’t appreciate the risk. They didn’t realize that the newest version of denatured alcohol was more dangerous than the wood-alcohol-laced whiskies they remembered, or the oldtime moonshine, smuggled over from Kentucky or Tennessee. The city’s drinkers had no reason to trust government warnings; they believed that the anti-alcohol administration was deliberately exaggerating the risks. This was partly true, of course, but unfortunately not entirely.

  In 1923 German chemists had figured out how to make a synthetic methyl alcohol called methanol. The key was to put carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen into an industrial pressure cooker and superheat the mixture to more than 400 degrees Fahrenheit. The result was a near-perfect methyl alcohol. Synthetic methanol was extraordinarily pure and extremely cheap to make; within a couple years the wood alcohol factories were closing their doors, giving way to the new chemistry. In 1925 Norris issued a warning that German methanol was being sold on the streets of Manhattan for half the price of the old wood alcohol. It wasn’t hard to find, he added: “We use it in our automobile radiators and around the house in cleaning fluids, paints, insect sprays and beauty lotions. It is present in over two hundred articles of common household and industrial use.”

  He hoped people would understand, he’d said, that the word “pure,” in this case, did not mean “safe.” In the case of methanol, it meant purely “poisonous.”

  METHYL ALCOHOL had another confounding factor. It wasn’t one of those poisons, like cyanide, that could make one violently sick in a few minutes and kill in less than a quarter-hour. Drinking white mule didn’t feel like swallowing poison. Not at all. It felt like sharing a friendly drink on a corner, in a basement bar, giving the familiar buzzing sense of intoxication.

  If a drinker cared to notice, the first difference between methyl and grain (ethyl) alcohol was in how long the buzz lasted. With methyl alcohol, the period of cheerful inebriation was shorter; the sensation of a hangover could come within an hour or two. If the dose was high enough, a few drinks rapidly led to headache, dizziness, nausea, a staggering lack of coordination, confusion, and finally an overpowering need to sleep. When Norris called methanol pure poison, he wasn’t exaggerating. The lethal undiluted dose was as little as two teaspoons for a child, perhaps a quarter cup for an adult man. That modest amount, far too often, was a direct path to blindness, followed by coma, followed by death.

  Unlike the grain alcohol served before Prohibition, methyl (wood) alcohol is not easily broken down in the body. The enzymes in the liver that neatly dispatch ethyl alcohol struggle with methyl. As a result, the more poisonous version lingers in the system, simmers longer in the organs, and metabolizes away only slowly. And as it stews, it becomes more poisonous. The primary by-products of methyl alcohol in the human body, as chemists had discovered, are formaldehyde and formic acid.

  Formaldehyde is a known irritant poison, capable of causing severe internal damage, and formic acid is equally destructive, best known to scientists as an essential part of the venom in bee stings. People poisoned by methyl alcohol would often seem to recover from that first bout of dizzy sickness, feel better while the alcohol was being metabolized, and then ten to thirty hours later be poisoned again by the breakdown products.

  First, their vision would blur. The optic nerve and retina are acutely vulnerable to formic acid salts. The nerve, with its continual processing of images, runs in a high metabolic state, causing blood to circulate through it rapidly—which causes poison to be delivered there continuously. Autopsies often revealed a startling atrophy of the optic nerve area, the surrounding tissue swollen, bloody, and spongy. Methyl alcohol and its by-products caused similar damage in the parietal cortex, a region of the brain essential in processing vision. It concentrated as well in the hardworking lungs—the breakdown of pulmonary tissue was what usually killed people.

  In an essay titled “Our Experiment in Extermination,” published in the North American Review, Norris mounted an even more pointed attack on government policy, this time taking his case directly to a national audience and directly mocking Hoover’s description of Prohibition as a “noble experiment.”

  Like Gettler, Norris was particularly outraged by the punishment that the anti-alcohol laws had visited upon the poor. The really poisonous liquor, he wrote, was sold in low dives, funneled from backroom stills, and delivered by bootleggers “who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff with a low grade of trade.” Of those killed by methyl alcohol, “only a fraction . . . come from the upper levels of thirsty society.” The protection offered to the wealthy, the powerful, the artists, and the politicians had helped give illegal alcohol a kind of high-life image, a dangerous seductive allure: “Prohibition has undoubtedly bred a glamour to surround alcohol . . . it permits the tanning and galvanizing of young stomachs and countenances young debauchery.”

  Norris wasn’t opposed to cocktail parties or to members of the twenty-something set drinking in moderation. His concern was that new drinkers could no longer start lightly, beginning with a glass of wine or a friendly beer at the local pub. Everyone now had to start with the hard stuff because not much else was available. “Old and normal tastes for beer and wines must now be largely satisfied with deadlier intoxicants—doubly deadly intoxicants.”

  In early 1927, wet legislators in Congress tried to pass a law to halt the extra poisoning of industrial alcohol. They had failed, overwhelmed by dry legislators’ declarations that no one would be dead if people simply obeyed the law and tried to live in a morally upright fashion. Norris, in response, argued that this imposition of one group’s personal beliefs on the rest of society could not be justified as moral.

  Further, he said, the experiment of the Eighteenth Amendment proved his point. Yes, the law had changed the old ways of life, the old style of drinking. But it had created another drinking lifestyle and another kind of immorality: “It has failed to reduce, moderate or control heavy drinking. It has created a new social order of bootleggers, and its blunders have protected an infant industry until it is now so secure in the law and the profits as to be a real menace to our national security and integrity.

  “And,” Norris concluded, “death follows at its heels.”

  THAT MARCH a murder out on Long Island distracted the chief medical examiner, briefly at least, from his crusade against government alcohol policies. It was the kind of murder that would have distracted almost anyone.

  It started with a dose of mercury bichloride, then a measure of chloroform. Several tumblers of alcohol followed, and then a lead sash weight to the man’s head. It finished with picture wire pulled tight around the victim’s neck. To such a rare case, the word overkill could be applied without hyperbole.

  The complicated murder of Albert Snyder put the men of the medical examiner’s office—especially Alexander Gettler—on public display. It rapidly became a very public event, the story of the spring for tabloid newspapers and their sensation-loving readers.

  The plott
ing of Snyder’s murder—by his charming wife, Ruth, and her doting boyfriend, Judd Gray, was so bizarre that the novelist James M. Cain would later use it as a basis for his two best-known novels, The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. It was the dark theme of betrayal that attracted him, Cain later explained. For others, the ridiculous side of the crime triumphed. The New York American columnist Damon Runyon once suggested that the murderers should have been convicted on the charge of being inept idiots.

  And the killing itself, Runyon added, should have been called “The Dumb-Bell Murder.”

  IN MARCH 1927 Ruth and Albert Snyder had been married for twelve years. He was a forty-four-year-old art editor at Hearst’s Motor Boating magazine. She was thirty-two, a pretty and playful blonde. They had a ten-year-old daughter, Lorraine, for which Albert had not forgiven his wife—he’d wanted a son.

  In fact, Albert was almost never satisfied. He expected Ruth to keep a meticulous home. He criticized every misplaced dish or dirty corner in the house. He slapped both his wife and his daughter around when they annoyed him. And in the way of Prohibition, he was becoming a heavy drinker. He brewed his own beer in the basement, patronizing the local bootlegger when he wanted the hard stuff. It never seemed to occur to Snyder that he’d taught his wife to hate him, or perhaps he didn’t care. Ruth escaped as much as possible, taking the train to Manhattan to lunch with friends while Lorraine was at school.

  In the summer of 1925, at the lunch counter of a Fifth Avenue restaurant, she idly flirted with the man on the next stool over, a rather attractive businessman with curly dark hair and horn-rimmed glasses. By the end of that summer, Ruth Snyder was regularly meeting Judd Gray at the Waldorf-Astoria, the hotel he used while conducting business in the city. Gray was a corset salesman who lived in East Orange, New Jersey. His wife disliked the boozing he did while entertaining clients, so he had a good reason to stay in Manhattan while on business.

  Two years into their affair, the lovers decided to run away together, but they needed money. Gray, better educated and more financially astute, helped Ruth to arrange $45,000 worth of life insurance for Albert. The policy carried a double indemnity clause. If his death was “due to misadventure,” the payout would be $90,000.

  Neither of them wanted to wait too long for the money; they could start new lives only if Albert would cooperate.

  ON THE MORNING of Sunday, March 20, 1927, Lorraine Snyder hysterically hammered on the next-door neighbor’s kitchen door. She’d found her mother bound and unconscious on the living room floor. When help arrived, Ruth woke slowly. She whispered, painfully, that burglars had broken in, tied her up, and clubbed her on the head.

  The neighbors ran down the hall, looking for her husband. When they pushed open the bedroom door, they found Albert Snyder lying facedown on a blood-streaked pillow. A length of picture wire was twisted around his neck, its ends sticking in the air.

  When the police arrived, Ruth told them that she and her husband had gone to a bridge party the previous night, returning at about two in the morning. She’d hardly fallen asleep when she heard a noise in the hall. Rising to investigate, she saw an enormous man coming toward her, “an Italian-looking” thug. She’d prepared to scream, but then everything had gone dark. He must have cracked her on the head, she said, and she’d awakened hours later to find herself trussed on the floor.

  The house was a shambles, sofa cushions thrown on the living room floor, pots and pans scattered around the kitchen. The floor surrounding the bed where Albert Snyder lay dead was in a similar state. But strangely enough, or so the detectives thought, the clutter in the bedroom included Albert’s shining gold pocket watch, with its pricey platinum chain.

  FROM THAT puzzling point on, the story proceeded to fall apart.

  The doctor examining Ruth Snyder found no head injury, no bump, no bruise, nothing to account for what she insisted had been six hours of unconsciousness. She’d been discovered with her feet bound, but her hands had not been tied. Why, wondered the detectives, hadn’t she just untied her feet? Ruth insisted that, although her husband’s watch remained, some of her own jewelry and furs were definitely missing. But the three rings and silver bar pin turned up, wrapped in a rag and stuffed under her mattress, and the police found her squirrel coat in a trunk in the basement.

  Also in the basement, they found something more damning. In a corner where Albert Snyder had made a workshop, they discovered a toolbox pushed under a bench. Inside, along with screwdrivers and hammers, was an iron sash weight, smeared with blood. The rounded edges of the weight matched perfectly the rounded bruises they’d found around Snyder’s face.

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING Ruth Snyder confessed.

  That is, she blamed Judd Gray for everything. He’d worked out the life insurance business. He’d bought the murder weapons. He’d come to the house shortly after she and her husband returned from the bridge party. He had a key to her home; she had seen him standing in a shadowed corner. He was wearing rubber gloves. “My God, Judd,” she’d gasped. “You’re not going to do that, are you?” But he was determined, she said. He’d made her do it.

  A police hunt for Judd Gray found him on a northbound train out of the city. He was carrying a bottle of poisoned whiskey—one that Ruth Snyder had asked him to bring, he said. She was the killer, Gray assured the police, who’d poisoned her husband and slugged him to death with a sash weight.

  The bungled burglary plot was her idea, he said. She’d seduced him into buying chloroform to knock Albert out; she’d bought the sash weight. Judd said he’d been so terrified that he’d landed only a glancing blow and then Ruth had leaped forward to finish the job. It was she who’d caught up the weight and smashed it against the side of her husband’s head, dropping him to the floor. Yes, he’d helped her drag the unconscious man into bed, and yes, he’d later gone back and used the picture wire to make sure Snyder was really dead. But Gray insisted that he’d been in such a daze that he hardly remembered any of it. The fault belonged entirely to her.

  AT THE murder trial of Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray in April, the courthouse in Queens installed fifty extra phones to accommodate the jostle of journalists. Crowds packed the streets, shoving for a glimpse of the criminals or the celebrities attending the trial. Vendors fought for the right to sell hot dogs and soda, and merchants complained that so many police officers had been diverted that neighborhood robberies had risen due to lack of patrols.

  Inside the courthouse celebrities were given the coveted seats: the filmmaker D.W. Griffith, the mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, the historian Will Durant, the songwriter Irving Berlin. So many Broadway entertainers attended that their benches were dubbed “The Actors Equity Section.” Even the Marquess of Queensbury and his wife came from England, the nobleman claiming that he wanted to watch American justice at first hand. At his club, the marquess said, the betting was five to one against sexy Mrs. Snyder being convicted of capital murder.

  As a spectacle, the duo was worth it. They spat accusations at each other. Whenever the details became too gruesome, Ruth Snyder fainted. (She faints easily, her lawyer explained.) Judd Gray sobbed while explaining—the police had discovered where he’d bought the weight, the chloroform, and the picture wire—how she’d coerced him into doing her dirty work.

  But if one looked past the lovers’ theatrics—and some, like Damon Runyon did—the most revealing testimony came from Alexander Gettler. In his dark suit and with his quiet voice, he neatly dismantled both of the accused killers’ stories. He did so using only the chemistry and pathology reports that he’d brought from Bellevue.

  Gettler had entered the case after the police sent his lab the bottle of whiskey they’d found on Judd Gray. The bottle contained so much bichloride of mercury, he’d discovered, that the contents were acridly undrinkable. If Ruth Snyder had tried it on her husband, Gettler said, the man would have undoubtedly spat it out. Gettler himself had never seen such high levels of corrosive sublimate added to liquor. “Nice
woman,” he remarked ironically to the investigators. Gray claimed that Ruth had asked him to dispose of the bottle. But the tabloid crime reporters were enjoying theorizing that she’d been hoping her lover would take a quick nip. Newspapers began calling the trial the “Ruth versus Judd Case.”

  Gettler testified that Albert Snyder’s brain was sodden with bootleg alcohol. The man had been woozy with drink. Gray’s story—that Snyder had fought back, that Gray had been forced to defend himself with the sash weight—was simply not credible, Gettler said. The man couldn’t have even been propped upright to fight. In addition, the conspirators had given Snyder a strong dose of chloroform.

  The blows of the sash weight had fractured Snyder’s skull, the medical examiner’s office concluded, but he could have survived that. The strangling noose of the picture wire might have cut off his last breaths, but the man was already dying. Gettler’s chemical analysis suggested that what really killed Snyder was the suffocating combination of alcohol and chloroform. If his killers had left well enough alone, if they hadn’t tried for the double indemnity payout, he might have appeared to die in his sleep. If they’d been just a bit smarter, just a little less greedy, they might have gotten away with it.

  As it was, it took the jury only ninety minutes to find both Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray guilty of first-degree murder. On May 9, 1927, both were sentenced to die in the electric chair.