by Deborah Blum
The new investigation—to his very probable relief—found no evidence that he’d been wrong in that case. But it strongly suggested that she’d outwitted detection in the other charge, the murder of her brother. During interviews with a psychologist hired by the police department, Mary Frances confided that she had actually killed her teenage sibling; she’d wanted the insurance money. Her poison of choice at the time had been not the dilute Fowler’s Solution (which the police had found) but the pesticide Rough on Rats, which she’d managed to throw away.
That arsenic-rich formula was also the poison that Gettler found in Ada Appelgate’s body, right down to the other ingredients mixed into the rat bait. It followed the pattern that forensic scientists had observed even in the nineteenth century. Arsenic killers were often so successful with their first murder that they tended to believe they could get away with it again.
CREIGHTON HAD not aged well in the years since the 1923 murder trials. Her dark Madonna looks were gone. She appeared older than her thirty-six years, squat and triple-chinned; in photographs, she had an oddly froglike look. Her alleged co-conspirator, Everett Appelgate, was exactly her age but looked much younger. He was trim, brown-haired, and blue-eyed, proud of his looks. When detectives asked him if his relationship with Fran Creighton could be a motive for murder, he hurriedly denied it. They were housemates and friends, he said, and that was all there was to it.
The police were only slightly off target, though. And the correct answer explained why a top-dog journalist like Kilgallen, of Hearst’s New York Journal American, would cover a seedy suburban murder case. And why she would title her account of the trial “Poison and Pedophilia.”
Appelgate wasn’t having an affair with Mary Frances Creighton. He was enjoying one with her rather beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter.
Q. You had intercourse with Ruth in the very bed where your wife lay?
A. Yes.
Q. What did your wife say to that?
A. She didn’t know anything about the intercourse.
Q. You were nude?
A. Yes.
Q. Was your wife nude?
A. Yes.
Q. And Ruth slept nude?
A. She came in clothed.
Q. But she soon stripped.
A. Yes.
Q. So we have a picture of your wife and Ruth and you in this bed, nude?
A. Yes.
The trial began on January 13, 1936.
Appelgate testified that he’d wanted to marry Ruth Creighton. Although he denied that Ada had known about the affair, witnesses said differently.
Ruth testified that Appelgate had once asked her if she would like him better if he were single. She also recounted an incident in which she was riding home in the Appelgates’ car. The couple was quarreling. When they got to the house, Ada slammed out of the car. Her husband came after her, knocking her to the ground. She got up, screaming at him, “If it was Ruth, you wouldn’t have done that.”
John Creighton was also called as a witness. He told of a Labor Day party when the Appelgates again quarreled and Everett slapped his wife in the face and shoved her down into a chair. She snapped at him, “If you ever do that again, I will tell something that will put you where you belong.”
Creighton admitted to being puzzled at the time. Later Appelgate told him he wished he could put Ruth in an apartment “and keep her there and not have her around the house, and if she got in trouble, I could get a doctor to fix her up.” He said, “What do you think of that?”
Creighton testified that he was dumbfounded, saying, “What do you mean by that, Appy? You wouldn’t do anything to my daughter, would you?”
Appelgate, he said, had completely denied it: “No, sir. You know me. I would not harm a hair of her head.”
John Creighton had believed his friend. It appeared now he’d been wrong, not to say stupid, about it.
ACCORDING TO Appelgate, John was the only innocent parent in the Creighton family. He testified that Mary Frances had known that Ruth was sleeping with him; she was even helping him keep track of Ruth’s menstrual periods. She liked the idea of her daughter being married and out of the overcrowded house.
Appelgate admitted that he’d driven Mary Frances to a cut-rate drugstore to buy a packet of Rough on Rats and had given her the money for it. But he insisted that she had told him that she needed the poison to deal with some mice in the house. He had been shocked, he said, when his wife died. Mary Frances testified that he had taken her to the drugstore and given her twenty-five cents to get rat powder, then taken it from her and put it in his pocket.
About the night of the murder, she said: “Shortly after dinner that night, I went to the icebox and got the milk and poured it into a glass and he gave me or handed me a powder and told me to put it in the milk. Sort of a grayish white substance, a white paper.”
Q. You knew the powder was arsenic?
A. Only his saying so.
Q. So when you put that eggnog on Ada’s table and waited for her to drink it, you knew there was arsenic in it?
A. That’s true.
Q. And you stood by and watched her die?
A. I didn’t know she was dying.
Q. You didn’t know she was dying?
A. Well—not exactly.
On January 30 Mary Frances Creighton and Everett Appelgate were convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to die at Sing Sing. In May the New York Court of Appeals upheld the decision in both cases, noting that Creighton was “proved guilty beyond reasonable doubt” and that “as to Appelgate, the jury were justified in finding him guilty. His motive for disposing of her is apparent. . . his conduct speaks for himself.”
The execution of the two killers was scheduled for July 16 at eleven o’clock at night. It was relatively quiet at the prison. These weren’t the kind of killers to draw an overflowing crowd. They hadn’t aroused the sympathetic fascination that Ruth Snyder compelled almost a decade earlier. But the journalists following the case were there, sitting on those same hard wooden pews, watching convicted killers strapped into the harness of that same black chair.
Appelgate walked steadily to his seat, determinedly calm. As the guards fastened the straps, he said only, “Before I die, I say I am innocent of this crime.” Mary Frances had to be wheeled into the room. She was so terrified that she couldn’t walk. As they rolled her into the Death House, she was clutching a rosary. She had met with the prison chaplain that afternoon, who persuaded her that some additional faith in God might help. A longtime Protestant, she’d been baptized a Catholic at four o’clock that afternoon, agreeing that “it will make it easier for me to die.”
She said nothing as she was settled into the chair. But just before the current went on, she threw the rosary beads to the floor.
THE CREIGHTON conviction must have been bittersweet for Gettler, who was no doubt tormented by the role he played in exonerating Creighton some twelve years before. Yet while the first trial served as a plaguing reminder of science’s fallibility, the second trial was testament to the great progress Gettler and his colleagues had made in earning forensic toxicology a place of respect in the courtroom. During Creighton’s first trial for the death of her brother, defense attorneys had been able to mock the prosecution’s scientific evidence. By the time of her second trial, defense attorneys were complaining that the city lab’s reputation was too strong, and that Gettler was so well respected that jurors tended to accept whatever he said.
This dramatic shift in popular opinion was made possible by Norris’s and Gettler’s unfaltering dedication to furthering the study of forensic toxicology. Norris’s and Gettler’s often thankless work—the long nights in the laboratory, the endless fights with the mayor’s office, the battles against the federal government and big business alike—had produced real results. Norris and Gettler had, indeed, changed the poison game.
THE TRIUMPH of the Creighton trial—an act of justice made possible by scientific evidence—belonged to both men,
and though Norris was not alive to celebrate the accomplishment, a picture of the two colleagues, taken about a year before the trial in their Bellevue laboratory, pays tribute to the work they did together. In that scene, now filed away in the city’s archive, Norris perches on a stool, bent over a microscope that sits on a long table cluttered with glass beakers and notebooks. Gettler leans over his shoulder, face intent. One can almost hear his voice, soft yet serious in explanation. The photograph is black and white, of course, but we can well imagine that lights above their heads glowed with gold incandescence and the Bunsen burner flames, on the lab bench behind them, shimmered a pale unearthly blue. Perhaps it was late in the evening—as it often was when they conducted their tests—and darkness was gathering outside amber-lit windows. It would have been quiet in the lab, peacefully so, but they would have known that out in the shadows, another poisoner was waiting in the dark, planning his next move.
EPILOGUE
THE SUREST POISON
Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine,
are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON,
“Old Age,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1862
AT THE TIME OF Norris’s death, Thomas Gonzales and two other medical examiners in the Manhattan office—Morgan Vance and Milt Helpern—were working on a comprehensive textbook on forensic science. Legal Medicine and Toxicology was published two years later and dedicated to Norris. When the authors published a second edition in 1954, they updated the procedures and poisons, but the dedication remained as ever: “To the memory of Charles Norris, First Chief Medical Examiner of The City of New York.”
Alexander Gettler remained New York City’s chief toxicologist until January 1, 1959, retiring at the age of seventy-five. The mandatory retirement age was seventy, but the city approved a special dispensation in his case. On the day he left office, he estimated that he’d analyzed more than 100,000 bodies.
He’d also published a library’s worth of papers—work on ethyl and methyl alcohol, cyanide, carbon monoxide, fluoride, chloroform, benzene, thallium, the micro-isolation of volatile toxic substances from tissues, investigations of the Reinsch test, and occasionally casework that had nothing to do with a poison. He also helped train that new generation of forensic toxicologists—that special club known as the Gettler Boys—who would go on to head forensic laboratories from Long Island to Puerto Rico.
One of Gettler’s former students, Abraham Freireich, who worked on the alcohol intoxication studies and was a founding member of the Academy of Forensic Sciences’ toxicology division, echoed the comments of many when he wrote, “If any one person deserves the appellation ‘father of toxicology and forensic chemistry in the United States,’ it is Dr. Gettler.”
Henry Freimuth, who worked with Gettler on his studies of carbon monoxide poisoning and later became head toxicologist at the chief medical examiner’s office in Baltimore, Maryland, pointed out that all of Gettler’s tests were done with what toxicologists now call “wet” chemistry, relying on test tubes and Bunsen burners, beakers and body parts. To check and recheck his results on alcohol content in the brain, for instance, Gettler sometimes needed half a pound of tissue, compared to the bare smear of material used in the “dry” chemistry enabled by newer machines.
The work was so often grisly that Gettler created a test of laboratory applicants’ fortitude. He kept a white enameled can of disintegrating brain tissue in the refrigerator. Potential toxicologists would be asked to use it in a demonstration of distillation, first by grinding the decaying brain tissue into a slurry of grayish slime. As it oozed over the applicants’ gloves, the queasy among them bolted from the laboratory. “If they did not, they then passed the first step of their evaluation,” wrote Irving Sunshine, who passed the test, studied under Gettler, and went on to become one of the country’s leading forensic toxicologists, teaching at Cleveland’s Case Western University while serving as chief toxicologist for Ohio’s Cuyahoga County.
Sunshine helped pioneer the profession’s shift from wet chemistry to dry, using sensitive instruments such as the gas chromatograph and mass spectrometer, which could process trace samples. He believed this shift was so important that he often worked directly with equipment manufacturers and tested prototype machines in his laboratory. The machines, Sunshine said, were needed in an era when poisonous new compounds were being developed at a rate far eclipsing that of the early twentieth century.
But consider, he added, the even greater challenge to Alexander Gettler, at a time when everything depended on the scientist’s intuition and inventiveness—and absolute understanding of chemical reactions. Gettler had once sat up all night building a tiny apparatus to collect drips of chemical solution from an infant’s brain—to show that a nurse, overenthusiastically applying medicine for a lice infection, had poisoned the baby. Gettler and his crew of young chemists “laid the foundation on which today’s relatively esoteric technology is based,” Sunshine said. “They could function with a test tube and a beaker. Where would today’s toxicologist be if the electricity shuts down?”
Unlike his famous chief, Charles Norris, who frequently used his position as a public platform, Gettler was an essentially private man in a visible job. He turned down a proposal for a television series based on his work because his wife hated the idea. His students recalled his eccentricities with affection—the way he’d sneak away every day to call his bookie, his addiction to horse racing, his passionate love of the Yankees and card games. They remembered the way he’d stand, shirtsleeves rolled up and cigar tucked in a corner of his mouth, and survey a tray filled with beakers containing treated liver extracts, then identify the poison. “Few ever had the privilege of watching ‘the old man’ do the classical color spot tests [such as those used in search of the blue of cyanide] on these residues,” Sunshine wrote. “However, everyone marveled at how well he identified the offending agents.”
But when interviewed about his work, Gettler retreated into propriety like a turtle into a shell. He was so careful about the information he shared that sometimes he gave out no information at all. He had the personality of a clerk, wrote one journalist. He would be more famous, said another, if he weren’t so pedantic. In a 1955 profile, “The Man Who Reads Corpses,” published in Harper’s, the writer described the toxicologist as “a crusty, precise man of seventy, barely saved from an air of primness by an everpresent cigar.”
Several years after he retired, Gettler suffered a stroke. It slowed him down; he took to walking with a cane. He and his wife, Alice, moved from Brooklyn to Yonkers, to be closer to their son, Joseph, a chemistry professor at New York University, and his family. He died on August 3, 1968, and was buried in the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne. “His interest in his former students and assistants never abated,” Abe Freireich wrote. “On visiting him just a short time before his death, the entire afternoon was spent in bringing him up to date on the whereabouts and activities of his former disciples. His influence lives on in most of the major toxicology laboratories in the country.”
Gettler’s own assessment was typically more modest. In a fleeting moment of openness, he admitted to the Harper’s correspondent that for all his obsession with detail, the carefully repeated experiments, the data bank of chemical information that he’d built up over the years, the results still weighed on him. His chemistry had helped the innocent escape murder charges—Charles Webb, Frank Travia, Frederick Gross. But it had also helped convict and send others—Ruth Snyder and Judd Gray, Tony Marino and the Mike Malloy conspirators, Mary Frances Creighton and Everett Appelgate—to the electric chair.
His son, Joseph, an organic chemist, had once announced that he’d decided early on against forensic toxicology: he could never have so many lives and deaths on his conscience. His father understood him. Because sometimes the dead did walk in Alexander Gettler’s sleep, sometimes they rattled in the black chair of Sing Sing, and always, as he admitted in that
last vulnerable interview, “I keep asking myself, have I done everything right?”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
WHEN I WENT TO college, I dreamed of becoming a chemist (which my children assure me reveals the true geekiness at the core of my personality). I changed my mind on the day that I set my hair on fire—think long, dangling 1970s braids, think Bunsen burner. “Do you smell smoke?” the graduate student running the classroom laboratory inquired. Or it might have been the day that I smoked out the entire room due to a certain incident involving toxic fumes that I prefer to forget.
A chemistry lab is a dangerous place for an absentminded daydreamer of a student—in other words, me. But put a focused and meticulous scientist there instead and he or she can illuminate the intricate, internal machinery of anything from a crystal of sugar to the labyrinthine structure of strychnine. I still remember that dazzle of realization from my classes. It’s probably one of the reasons I occasionally, wistfully, describe myself as a lapsed chemist, although we’re talking about a lapse of decades.
Even such a brief foray into chemistry teaches that anything, in a large enough amount, can kill. Life-giving water itself is lethal if you gulp down too many gallons. As toxicologists say, the dose makes the poison. But poison by water doesn’t unnerve us. The real scare comes from those elements and compounds whose toxicity is measured in drips and drops. Luckily for us, and other life on Earth, such materials are rare. But somehow we’ve managed to find or create many of them. We use them pragmatically, and for good—our medicine relies on countless toxic compounds—and in deliberate evil.
There exists a kind of murder mystery pleasure to the subject of poisons; crime novelists, especially in the early twentieth century, have written them into countless tales of deathly intrigue. I’ve always admired the stylish writing of those vintage novels, which is a nice way of saying that I’ve read and enjoyed numerous stories involving murder by arsenic and cyanide. That hasn’t affected the fact that, in reality, I find poison killings among the most disturbing of all homicides.