Criminal Poisoning: Investigational Guide for Law Enforcement, Toxicologists, Forensic Scientists, and Attorneys (6 page)

Waite felt that if he told what had actually happened the courts would find him insane, so he revealed the whole story of administering typhoid, pneumonia, and diphtheria organisms, as well as arsenic while the Peck’s were undergoing dental work by him. It did not take the members of the jury long to see through Dr. Waite’s manipulations, and they convicted him of the murders. Dr. Waite was electrocuted at Sing Sing Prison on May 24, 1917.

1.2.11. Murderers of Mike Malloy,

“The Case of the Man Who Wouldn’t Die” (1933)

The case of Mike Malloy is a rare case of multiple individuals offending a single victim, which, in retrospect, is almost humorous in some respects. In January 1933, America was in the middle of the Great Depression. A group of Poisoners Throughout History

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men in a speakeasy in New York City devised a plan to make some easy money: they would insure the life of someone and then murder him to collect on the policy. The group, consisting of Dan Kreisberg, a local grocer; Joseph “Red” Murphy, a bartender; Anthony “Tony” Marino, the bar owner; Anthony “Tough Tony” Bastone, a hit man; Francis Pasqua, an undertaker; Hersey “Harry” Green, a taxi driver; and Dr. Frank Manzella, an ex-alderman, chose as their patsy a well-known Irish alcoholic and skid-row resident named Mike Malloy (one tough old Irishman!), who happened to come through the door of the establishment. After the $1788 in insurance policies were initiated, the group began to offer Malloy free drinks and food, which he thought was very generous coming from new friends. However, the plotters added horse lini-ment, turpentine, and sometimes antifreeze to his drinks, and the free food was filled with rat poison, carpet tacks, and other potentially harmful foreign bodies. Unfortunately for the group, Malloy seemed to ingest these substances with little harm. Becoming desperate, the men then got Malloy drunk, doused him with water, and threw him out into a park in the middle of a winter storm, hoping that the temperature would do the job. However, the next day, their victim returned for more of their hospitality!

The group then stood the drunken man up in the middle of the street and had Harry Green strike him with his taxi. Astoundingly, Malloy survived this encounter as well. Feeling that they were working too hard for their money, the men decided to carry out the murder once and for all. They took the drunken Malloy to his bedroom, ran a hose from the gaslight on the wall down his throat, and killed him with coal gas (carbon monoxide). They collected their insurance money, and all would have gone well if one of the group had not bragged about their “project” (a problem often seen when multiple offenders are involved in a crime). When the police were informed, the entire group of seven individuals was placed on trial for the murder. The outcome was not what the group of men had envisioned when they started out on their money-making scheme: four (Marino, Pasqua, Murphy, and Kreisberg) were electrocuted at Sing Sing, on June 8, 1934, for the crime. Green and Manzella received prison sentences. The seventh individual, Bastone, was shot in a dispute over the money (Read, 2005).

1.2.12. Reverend Frank Elias Sipple, “The Poisoning Pastor” (1939)

Sometimes even a minister can be a poisoner. In 1939, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Reverend Frank Sipple was a spiritual leader of the Southlawn Church of God, in the suburb of Wyoming. He decided to murder his daughter, Dorothy Ann, and gave her a capsule containing cyanide. The act was carried out one Sunday morning just before he left for the church to deliver 16

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his weekly sermon. The medical examiners determined Dorothy Ann’s death to be the result of a heart attack, missing the true cause of the girl’s death, and she was buried without further investigation. The homicide remained undetected until 1946, when Pastor Sipple attacked one of his church elders with a lead pipe in a dispute over church politics. The gentleman who had been the target of the pastor’s attack also claimed he thought the minister had once given him candies that had been tampered with. Under interrogation by the police, Sipple admitted not only to the attack on the parishioner, but also to the poisoning death of his daughter many years earlier. The suspect stated that his daughter was mentally disturbed and that he thought she would be better off dead than having to spend the rest of her life in a mental institution.

There was some speculation that his daughter might have had some information on the untimely death of Sipple’s first wife in Illinois and was possibly going to take the matter to the local authorities. The court found Reverend Sipple guilty of murder, and, in 1946, he was sentenced to life in prison. Ill with terminal cancer, he was released from prison in December 1959 to return to Grand Rapids, where he died just 14 weeks later.

1.2.13. Sadamichi Hirasawa, “The Poisoning Bank Robber” (1948)

On January 26, 1948, a mass killer with a most unique plan struck at the suburban Shiinamaki branch of the Teikoku Imperial Bank in Tokyo, Japan.

Sadamichi Hirasawa, pretending to be a Dr. Jiro Yamaguchi, entered the bank’s facility at closing time, telling the 14 bank employees that they must drink some medicine to prevent an outbreak of amoebic dysentery then rampant in the district. The employees obediently swallowed teacups full of a liquid heavily laced with the deadly poison potassium cyanide. Thirteen of the bank’s employees died on the spot, at which time Hirasawa looted the bank of more than 180,000 yen (then about $600) and vanished into the general population.

In one of the largest manhunts in Japanese history, the police laboriously interviewed thousands of people who had received business cards from a man pretending to be a physician and, finally, pinpointed Hirasawa. Sadamichi was identified by the lone surviving bank employee, admitted his guilt, and was imprisoned for life. After spending 40 years on death row, he died in 1987, gaining international fame as the longest resident on death row anywhere in the world.

Recently there has been speculation that Sadamichi might have been innocent of the robbery, and that the crime was actually committed by a ren-egade member of the Japanese army’s disbanded and very secret “Unit 731”, which, during World War II, had carried out bacteriological research experiments on human prisoners of war in Manchuria. In Japan, a campaign contin-Poisoners Throughout History 17

ues to this day for the posthumous overturning of his conviction for this crime (Triplett, 1985).

1.2.14. Christa Ambros Lehmann, “The Poisonous Neighbor” (1954)

The Lehmann case is interesting because of the relatively common background of the poisoner and the poison she selected. In February 1954, in the town of Worms, Germany, Christa Lehmann purchased five chocolate truffle candies at a local shop and delivered four of them to her friends, keeping one candy as a special gift for a woman who had been objecting to Christa’s association with members of the woman’s family. The targeted victim, instead of eating the candy, placed it in a kitchen cupboard as a treat for her daughter to eat. When the daughter sampled the treat, she complained of the bitter taste and dropped it on the floor, where it was quickly consumed by the family dog. Within a short time, both the girl and the pet were dead, and the attending physician was somewhat puzzled by the common symptoms and sudden fatalities exhibited by the two victims. Eventually the cause of the deaths was traced to a relatively new chemical substance called E-605, which had been developed as a potent insecticide by the Germans during World War II. We now know this substance as parathion. It acts much like a nerve-gas agent, causing rapid alterations in a person’s autonomic nervous system and a characteristic set of symptoms, eventually leading to death. Suspicion fell immediately on Christa as the poisoner of the candy, and during police interrogation, she confessed to lacing it with E-605. While in police custody, she also admitted to killing her husband and her father-in-law with the same toxic compound. The court sentenced her to life in prison. Unfortunately, the discussion in the press of the poison and its potential soon led to a rash of E-605

suicides in Germany among individuals depressed over the state of the country after the war.

1.2.15. Arthur Kendrick Ford,

“The Accidental Poisoner for Sex” (1954)

The case of Arthur Kendrick Ford illustrates that not all poisonings are murder in the first degree. Arthur Ford was infatuated with two female coworkers in his London chemical company and decided he needed some chemical assistance in gaining their sexual attentions. Having heard about the effects of Spanish Fly as an aphrodisiac, he obtained the natural form of cantharides from the firm’s stockroom, stating that he needed it to breed rab-bits. On April 27, 1954, Arthur entered the company’s office and offered three of the secretaries coconut candies in which he had placed large doses of the powdered cantharides. Neither he nor the unfortunate women knew the 18

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horrible physical torment they would soon endure. Cantharidin, which is derived from the ground-up bodies of a Mediterranean beetle, is a powerful blistering agent normally used in dermatology to burn off warts. The corrosive effect of this compound on the human anatomy is disastrous. After only a few hours, all three women were hospitalized in torment, two of them dying from the ill effects. When autopsies revealed the cause of the deaths, Ford broke down while being interviewed and confessed to his involvement. He was placed on trial, but because it was not his intent to murder, he was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to only 5 years in prison.

1.2.16. Nannie Hazel (“Arsenic Annie”) Doss,

“The Poisonous Romantic” (1952–1954)

Nannie Doss was a female serial killer, if there ever was one. By the time she was finally detected, she had successfully poisoned 11 victims: 5 husbands, 2 children, her mother, 2 sisters, and a nephew. Nannie, a housewife living in Tulsa, Oklahoma, first came to the attention of the local authorities in 1954

when a suspicious physician decided to perform an autopsy on her deceased fifth husband. The analysis revealed an amount of arsenic equal to 20 lethal doses. The exhumation and toxicological analyses of other members of her family who had died over the years also revealed the presence of arsenic. On interrogation, her crimes came to light, and she stated that she had done away with her husbands because she had found them dull. This was probably related to the fact that Nannie’s favorite reading material consisted of romance magazines and her domestic life had not measured up to her romantic fantasies. She said, “I was just searching for the perfect mate, the real romance of life.” Found guilty of the multiple murders, in 1955, she was sentenced to life in prison, where she died of leukemia in 1965 (Nash, 990, p. 1006).

1.2.17. Graham Frederick Young, “The Toxicomaniac” (1971)

Perhaps one of the most fascinating of the poisoner personalities is that of an Englishman named Graham Young; he was a “toxicomaniac,” or a person obsessed with poisons. The poisons gave him a feeling of power over other people, and he used poisons throughout his life to nefarious ends. When Graham was 11 years of age, his father gave him a chemistry set for his birthday, and from that time on he followed his obsession with chemistry and toxicology. He read incessantly about the crimes of the infamous poisoners and became very conversant with the subject of poisons. He once told his sister that he would become more famous than the well-known British poisoners Palmer, Pritchard, and Crippen. Graham’s stepmother died when he Poisoners Throughout History

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was 14 years old, and no one suspected that he had played a key role in her death by administering an antimony-containing compound. Other members of his immediate family, as well as school friends, also became subjects for his toxicological experiments. In 1962, when one of his teachers accidentally found strange notes and drawings in Graham’s school desk, the authorities were called in to investigate. In his room at home, they found enough various poisons to kill almost 300 people, along with an extensive reference library on poisons. He was remanded to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum where, after only nine years, the asylum’s psychologists deemed him rehabilitated and released him.

In 1971, Graham began working at a photographic optical firm in Bovington, England that specialized in the production of high-quality optical lenses. In the production of these lenses, the company utilized the deadly poisonous element thallium, which coincidentally happened to be one of Graham’s favorite poisonous tools. One of his jobs at the facility was passing out the daily tea on breaks. A wave of illness soon spread throughout the company, and two of his coworkers died from a supposed viral nervous system illness. When the company doctor was called in to address the concerns of the employees over what had become known as the “Bovington Bug,” Graham drew attention to himself by freely spouting his knowledge of toxicology, and what he felt the physicians had missed in their diagnosis of a viral cause. He said that they failed to see that the symptoms were much more consistent with thallium poisoning. A review of Graham’s past soon revealed that he had been hospitalized for his poison mania, and a search warrant was obtained for his lodgings. In his room the investigators found a diary that revealed the names of the individuals he had selected for his toxicological experiments, and notations on the effects of the administered poisons over the course of their intoxications. While he was awaiting trial Graham boasted that he had committed the perfect crime in 1962, in the killing and subsequent cremation of his stepmother. In June 1972, Graham was found guilty of two murders, two attempted murders, and two charges of administering poisons and was sentenced to life in prison. In 1989, at age 42, Graham died in prison of a heart attack. He is still one of the cruelest yet forensically fascinating poisoners in history (Holden, 1974; Young, 1973).

1.2.18. Ronald Clark O’Bryan, “The Halloween Killer” (1974)