The Poisoner's Handbook (10 page)
It was more popular as a suicide choice due to its reputation for acting quickly. As Gettler wrote, “The symptoms of acute poisoning proceed with almost lightning-like rapidity. Within two to five minutes after ingestion of the poison, the individual collapses, frequently with a loud scream (death scream).” In lesser amounts the poison kills more slowly, if faster than most other toxic substances. The average survival after swallowing cyanide is between fifteen and forty-five minutes. Fast or slow, it is never a kind ending. The last minutes of a cyanide death are brutal, marked by convulsions, a desperate gasping for air, a rising bloody froth of vomit and saliva, and finally a blessed release into unconsciousness.
WHETHER SWALLOWED or inhaled, all members of the cyanide family kill in the same way—they shut down the body’s ability to carry or absorb oxygen. In the late 1890s one daring physician swallowed a light dose of potassium cyanide to test its effects. In Gettler’s day medical papers still cited his gasping cries that he was suffocating. Although the doctor survived, no one had repeated that experiment.
Cyanide’s action is murderously precise. It attaches with stunning speed to protein molecules in the blood—called hemoglobins—that carry oxygen throughout the body. Thus the poison is rapidly circulated by the bloodstream and delivered to cells through the body. There it shreds cellular energy mechanisms, breaks down cellular respiration, and causes rapid cell death due to oxygen starvation. Cellular respiration suffers an instant “paralysis,” as Gettler once put it, and the body begins to die. Enzyme production is stymied, electrical signals falter, and as muscle cells and nerve cells explosively fail, body-rattling convulsions frequently result.
After death, the bluish tones of oxygen deprivation mottle the skin. On autopsy, the blood shows such a dark red that it sometimes appears purple. The veins leading from lung to heart are engorged with blood—evidence of the heart’s desperate efforts to circulate more and more blood as the body seeks desperately for any stray trace of oxygen. In Gettler’s time, the easily available cyanide salts provided further specific evidence of the poison because they were so corrosive. If swallowed, they burned their way down. An autopsy of a cyanide victim found the mucous membranes of the lips, mouth, and esophagus darkened to a bloody, ragged red—especially if the poison had been taken without food to buffer the impact. The stomach became swollen, discolored, clotted with swampy, streaky mucus produced as the cyanide salts broke down.
In the four years since Gettler had become city toxicologist, he’d investigated seventy-nine cyanide deaths, scattered across the boroughs. Forty-nine had been suicides, usually by sodium cyanide. Sodium cyanide was the cheapest form of the poison and, as research would show, was more efficient than potassium cyanide. (Sodium atoms are much smaller than potassium atoms, making room for a larger proportion of cyanide in the compound.) Most of the other deaths Gettler reviewed were accidental. Hydrogen cyanide gas was routinely used to fumigate buildings or disinfect ships. Occasionally workers were killed by the gas, especially if they returned before it had cleared.
Investigators wondered about fumigation as they looked into the deaths of Fremont and Annie Jackson at the Hotel Margaret. But the manager assured them that no fume-producing activities had occurred in the critical time period. So if indeed cyanide had killed the Jacksons, they had to have swallowed it, which was why the stomachs had been so carefully removed for chemical testing.
GETTLER EXPECTED to find the usual wreckage left by the poison: the bloody, corrosive trail of cyanide through the digestive system. But it wasn’t there. The tissues from the dead couple were slightly decayed but basically healthy. Still, every toxicologist knew that people reacted differently to poisons, that any known rule of evidence had the occasional exception.
So he set about doing the finer chemical tests for the poison. His plan was to check the contents of the stomachs and the tissues of the stomach muscle separately. Cyanide in the stomach would indicate only that a person had swallowed the poison. Cyanide in the stomach walls would be evidence that it had been absorbed and might even reveal how much had entered the body.
Gettler’s detailed notes explained the procedure step by step. He stored the still-full stomachs in an icebox until he was ready to run his tests. He then removed the contents and separated them from the muscle tissue. From each stomach he took a healthy chunk of about 200 grams (some seven ounces) of muscle and minced it into a pinkish-gray paste. He then drained off the stomach contents into two liter-size flasks; he placed the tissue slush in two other flasks. He then dripped acid into the flasks, just a little, but enough to further break down the contents. He distilled the liquid in a steam bath and condensed it into another flask packed around with ice.
Any cyanide would be concentrated in the clear fluid contained by that last well-chilled flask.
One reliable way to then check for cyanide was called the Prussian blue test. To begin it, Gettler took a little of the distilled liquid, added some iron-rich salts, and heated the mixture. As it cooled, a muddy brown layer settled at the bottom of the flask. He then added hydrochloric acid, drop by drop, until the dirty sludge started to dissolve. If the sludge contained a high level of cyanide, a brilliant blue layer would almost immediately form in the flask. If there was only a trace of poison, there would be no blue flash. Instead the sediment would glint green before slowly turning blue.
Gettler ran the Prussian blue test on both the stomach tissue and the contents. He ran six other tests. No blue; no anything. They were all negative for cyanide. That meant the investigation was back where it had started, with two dead bodies and no good answers.
THE JACKSON CASE had all the appearance of one of those locked-room mysteries that writers of crime fiction like so much and that working detectives despise. In fact, the door to the Jacksons’ apartment had been locked; a maid had found the bodies when she opened it with a hotel key in order to clean the room.
But perhaps they’d missed some clue to a clever murder. The New York State court system alone offered plenty of examples, from other cases, of the creative ways killers tried to sneak poison into their victims’ food and drink.
In the previous few years alone, a Westchester man, irritated one evening because his wife wouldn’t fetch his cigarettes, had placed a box of poisoned candy on the sitting room table and waited for her to sample it. A fired Mayville county clerk had sent a box of homemade candy laced with cyanide to the woman who had replaced her. A White Plains woman, irritated by the neighbor’s barking dog, had substituted a bottle of milk containing cyanide for one that the milkman had delivered. A newly married woman in Olean hadn’t wanted a stepson so she’d sent the six-year-old boy a box of poisoned chocolates while he was vacationing in Missouri, nearly killing the child’s aunt, who ate a piece when her nephew shared his candy.
One of the most famous cyanide-by-mail murder cases in the United States had occurred in New York City at the turn of the twentieth century. It involved cyanide, had the son of a Civil War hero as the suspected murderer, and featured the city’s exclusive Knickerbocker Athletic Club as the backdrop to the crime.
Shortly before Christmas 1898, the club’s athletic director, Harry Cornish, received an unexpected package at home. It contained a nice little gift: a blue Tiffany box containing a bottle of Bromo-Seltzer inside a chased silver bottle holder. Cornish shared a house, owned by his aunt, with several other family members. A couple days after the holiday, his aunt developed a severe headache. Remembering the medicine he’d received in the mail, he mixed up a glass to relieve her pain. His aunt swallowed the tonic and then, to his horrified shock, collapsed to the floor, gasping for air, her face darkening to blue as she died.
Panicked family members called the doctor, who immediately detected the characteristic bitter almond smell in the medicine bottle. The resulting autopsy showed classic signs of cyanide poisoning. Anonymous poisonings by mail were usually hard to solve, but the investigators caught a break: Cornish had saved the wrapping that contained the package. A secretary at the Knickerbocker Club recognized the handwriting on the label. That led police directly to a disgruntled former club member named Roland Molineux, who had quit the club after quarreling with Cornish.
The thirty-one-year-old Molineux seemed an unlikely suspect. He was the elegant and well-educated son of a famous Civil War hero. Former Union Major General Leslie Molineux had fought in some of the war’s most critical missions, supporting Grant at Richmond and Sherman during his march through Georgia. The general was so well respected and so well liked that his reputation cast a warm and protective aura around his son. At first the police found the very notion that Roland Molineux was a killer ridiculous. But mounting circumstantial evidence changed their minds.
Molineux had an account at Tiffany & Co. and had made a purchase at the Fifth Avenue store in December, which would have provided him with the familiar blue box. He worked for a family dye company, had studied chemistry, and had a personal laboratory equipped with an array of poisons used in dyes—mercury, arsenic, and cyanide-rich Prussian blue. His office was located within blocks of the post office from which the package had been mailed. And the son was nothing like his father: he was instead a man with an outsize sense of superiority. His quarrels with Cornish had involved the other’s refusal to expel “lesser” families from events. He’d written to the club asking for Cornish’s removal, describing him as a “vile, bad man.”
The police investigation turned up something even more disturbing. A month earlier, in November 1898, another member of the Knickerbocker Club had died unexpectedly. The dead man, Henry Barnet, had been pursuing a rather beautiful young woman whom Molineux wanted to marry. Barnet’s death had been considered a natural one; the death certificate blamed a sudden weakness of the heart. But now detectives discovered that Barnet had also received an anonymous package of medicine in the mail and died shortly after taking it. They exhumed Barnet’s body and discovered that the stomach and other organs contained a high concentration of cyanide.
Less than three weeks after Barnet’s death, Molineux had married the woman in question. The police were sure that Molineux had killed both people, but prosecutors decided to try him only for the death of Cornish’s aunt, where the evidence—including the handwriting sample—was stronger. The case went to trial in late 1899, and at its conclusion Roland Molineux was sent to Sing Sing to await execution.
But the prosecutor had made an unfortunate decision in his closing argument: he’d repeatedly talked to the jury of Barnet’s death, even though Molineux had not been charged in that case. He dramatically told the jurors that he could hear not one but two voices in the night calling to him for justice: Cornish’s tragically dead aunt, and Henry Barnet, “in the vigor of his youth and manhood, stricken down in that same manner . . . And will a jury of my countrymen quail before the honest and just verdict? I think not.”
Molineux remained in prison almost two years, writing a book about his experiences called
The Room with the Little Door
while his father fought to clear him. He was still writing it on October 15, 1901, when the New York State Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the references to Barnet’s death had been improper and reversed the conviction. A year later the district attorney insisted on trying Roland Molineux again, convinced of his guilt. But this time the general hired an array of handwriting experts to contradict the damaging evidence of the mailing label.
The Room with the Little Door
while his father fought to clear him. He was still writing it on October 15, 1901, when the New York State Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the references to Barnet’s death had been improper and reversed the conviction. A year later the district attorney insisted on trying Roland Molineux again, convinced of his guilt. But this time the general hired an array of handwriting experts to contradict the damaging evidence of the mailing label.
Roland Molineux was acquitted in the second trial, which took place in 1902. His wife promptly divorced him. The verdict in New York drawing rooms was that the son was guilty of both cyanide poisonings but that the second jury had exonerated the father. After his acquittal, Roland Molineux remained obsessed with the life and plight of the unjustly convicted man. He wrote several more books and collaborated on a play about the criminal’s plight, then suffered a mental breakdown and was committed to the New York State Hospital for the Insane in 1913. He died in the asylum four years later, at the age of fifty-one.
People who followed poison cases saw in Molineux’s the same lessons as in the Rice case, or even in Mors’s. Despite a clear motive and strong evidence that the victims had died of cyanide poisoning, Roland Molineux had escaped conviction. The lessons were hard to miss: poisoners were hard to catch and even harder to convict.
MEANWHILE, more than a week after the bodies had been discovered, the Jackson case remained a complete mystery.
The medical examiner’s office had ruled out food poisoning, due to the stiff and cold condition of the two bodies when found. In ptomaine cases, the bacterial infection tends to raise body temperature, enough that corpses retain heat longer than those killed by other means. The Jacksons’ bodies had been too cold too soon to be caused by ptomaine.
Gettler had conducted a careful analysis of the couple’s brain tissue for alcohol and found traces in both of them. Perhaps, the police proposed, the Jacksons had sipped some disastrous wood alcohol cocktails with their dinner. But everyone who had known the victims dismissed the idea: the Jacksons were ardent churchgoers and Prohibition supporters, they said.
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