The Poisoner's Handbook (13 page)
Years earlier Crones had worked as an assistant chef at the exclusive University Club in downtown Chicago. In his spare time he belonged to the city’s thriving community of anarchists, an outspoken opponent of what he considered the government oppression ruining the country. But his political views never explained—neither to his kitchen colleagues nor to his political allies—why on February 10, 1916, while making sauces for a dinner honoring Catholic bishops, he added a liberal seasoning of arsenic to the meat stock.
Seventy-five of the three hundred people at the dinner became rapidly, horribly sick. In the ensuing maelstrom of shouting emergency workers and terrified diners, Crones simply walked out of the club and caught a train to the East Coast. He was never apprehended, although he briefly stopped in New York to mail police-baiting letters to the Manhattan newspapers. His mocking notes suggested that the incompetent Chicago police should take lessons in detection, perhaps enrolling in a correspondence school, although he doubted they would since “the city of Chicago officials are fools.”
Investigators came to believe that Crones had simply stirred in poison as an experiment, for the pure pleasure of seeing the results. They hoped that this wasn’t true of their New York poisoner, who seemed more adept than Crones. The Chicago chef had loaded far too much arsenic into the soup, causing many people to put down their spoons at the metallic taste, preventing them from falling ill. Those who kept eating became sick quickly, but doctors who rushed to the scene were able to administer rapid treatment. As a result, no one had died in Crones’s experiment.
At the Shelbourne, as at the Postal Lunch, the poisoner had calculated a much more effective dose, high enough to kill but low enough to fool the victims. The lunch patrons at the Broadway eatery had had time to return to work before they became ill. Their illness attracted medical attention but not quickly enough to save everyone. If the unidentified Shelbourne suspect and the never-caught Postal Lunch killer were the same person, then police were looking for a killer who knew all too well how to pick a poison, how to use it, and how to disappear.
PURE ARSENIC is a dark, grayish element, classed among the heavy metal poisons, often found in ores extracted from mines. It easily combines with other naturally occurring chemicals; heated with oxygen, for instance, it becomes a white, crumbly powder, the linking of two arsenic atoms with three of oxygen. In this form it is called arsenic trioxide (As
2
O
3
) or white arsenic.
2
O
3
) or white arsenic.
White arsenic, the poison used at the Shelbourne, was a favorite of some of history’s most feared poisoners, ones who made Jean Crones look like the amateur he was. At the top of the list were Lucretia and Cesare Borgia, feared in fifteenth-century Italy for their ruthless mixture of politics and poison. The Borgias used white arsenic preferentially but experimented with different ways to make it more deadly. They would cook it into a more intense solution, mixing it with other poisons. They eventually created a poison they called
la cantarella
, which according to legend was so dangerous that the formula was destroyed after their deaths.
la cantarella
, which according to legend was so dangerous that the formula was destroyed after their deaths.
Basic arsenic is also deadly; the first recorded case of homicide with the pure element was reported in 1740, when a girl poisoned her father and three sisters by serving them a dish of dried pears that had been boiled in water containing rocky ore from a nearby mine. But for criminal uses, white arsenic is a better tool, slipped easily into food or drink. Its usefully murderous properties explained why, centuries after the Borgias, the poison earned another nickname: the inheritance powder. One of the best-known nineteenth-century American forensic scientists, Columbia University chemistry professor Rudolph Witthaus, coauthor of the massive 1896 tome
Medical Jurisprudence, Forensic Medicine and Toxicology
, had once tried to estimate arsenic’s popularity as a murder weapon. He selected 820 arsenic-caused deaths, recorded between 1752 and 1889—and found that almost half were homicides. (The rest were split fairly evenly between accidents and suicides.)
Medical Jurisprudence, Forensic Medicine and Toxicology
, had once tried to estimate arsenic’s popularity as a murder weapon. He selected 820 arsenic-caused deaths, recorded between 1752 and 1889—and found that almost half were homicides. (The rest were split fairly evenly between accidents and suicides.)
In Europe, by Witthaus’s analysis, arsenic accounted for the largest percentage of nineteenth-century criminal poisonings. In France, for example, between 1835 and 1880, arsenic was used in almost 40 percent of all poison murders. “In the United States, we are under the impression that arsenic still holds the first place in frequency of criminal administration,” Witthaus wrote. But at the time of his analysis, the United States lacked the statistical information available in France. As a rough measure, Witthaus interviewed New York State attorneys and determined that from 1879 to 1889, there had been thirty-one indictments for poison murder in twelve counties. Half of those were arsenic murders; in every case, white arsenic was specifically to blame.
A primary reason for arsenic’s popularity was that when mixed into food and drink, it is extremely difficult to taste. An over-the-top dose, the kind Jean Crones had used, was different. If arsenic was swallowed in undiluted form, that was different too. Witthaus and other scientists taste-tested small amounts of pure white arsenic and found it to be rather nasty. It was hot, tasters said; it was acrid, sweetish, metallic, and rough. But when the poison was added to soup, liquor, or a cup of hot coffee, the other flavorings easily masked it. Arsenic was “under the most favorable circumstances faint” in taste, Witthaus noted. In interviews with 822 people who had survived arsenic poisoning, he reported that only fifteen thought the food had tasted in any way strange. Six talked of a bitter taste, eight complained of a metallic feeling in the mouth, and one woman said she was aware of a “nauseous” taste. Witthaus doubted the latter, noting that as the unpleasant taste “escaped the notice of 14 other persons who ate of the same poisoned pudding, it was probably more imaginary than real.”
White arsenic mixes especially beautifully into alcoholic drinks, which tend to hide even a faint metallic sensation. One group of cheerful drinkers had shared a bottle of port wine and suffered from fairly severe arsenic poisoning, but “not the least taste was perceived by any of the parties.” Sometimes people complained of a sandy feel in their mouths; they seemed unusually sensitive to the rough texture of the powder, even mixed into food. In an 1860 New Jersey case, a man had murdered his wife by rubbing white arsenic into an apple. During the trial he acknowledged that “she said there was something gritty on it,” but she’d eaten anyway, thinking he just hadn’t washed it well. Mostly, though, ground extra-fine and mixed into baked goods, as at the Shelbourne, arsenic proved an almost undetectable ingredient.
In fact, handled with skill by a calculating murderer, the poison seemed to engender a homicidal overconfidence. In 1872, one notorious British murderer, Mary Ann Cotton, killed fifteen people, including all the children of her five husbands, and several neighbors who irritated her, before she was caught in 1872, tried, and hanged. “Arsenic has also been,” Witthaus wrote, “in almost every instance, the agent used by those who, having succeeded in a first attempt at secret poisoning, have seemed to develop a lust for murder and have continued to add to their list of victims until their very number has aroused suspicion and led to detection.”
AT THE TIME of the Shelbourne killings, scientists were still not sure how arsenic killed; the action of cyanide was far better understood. Not for decades would molecular biologists work out the method by which arsenic targets key enzymes, disrupting metabolism within cells throughout the body, breaking the system down cell by poisoned cell. Part of the problem for early toxicology researchers was that arsenic, as one complained, is a great mimic.
Physicians often mistook symptoms of arsenic poisoning for natural diseases, especially if the victim was dosed gradually. General practitioners and emergency room doctors had misdiagnosed arsenic deaths as influenza; as cholera, which also causes severe gastrointestinal distress; and as heart disease, which also causes gasping shortness of breath. Such errors were found only when a suspicious relative who was sure the victim had been healthy, and distrusted a husband or wife, demanded an autopsy.
From the poisoner’s perspective, arsenic became a risky choice when doctors looked directly at the body. With the stubborn, solid constitution of any metallic element, it breaks down extremely slowly compared to organic poisons and can be detected decades after death in a victim’s hair and fingernails. Even worse for those who hope to avoid detection, arsenic tends to slow down the natural decomposition of human tissue, often creating eerily well-preserved corpses. Toxicologists refer to this effect as arsenic “mummification.” Witthaus reported that one body, exhumed after fifty-four weeks in the ground, “did not differ from a living person” in appearance except for the patches of mold growing on his face. “The growth of molds is not interfered with by arsenic,” he added austerely.
The other complication for the would-be poisoner was that, responding to arsenic’s long history of criminal use, scientists had found numerous ways to test for it in human tissue and recognize it in an autopsy. Tests to extract arsenic from a corpse had been available for almost one hundred years and had steadily improved in the intervening period. More chemical procedures, better developed tests, and more detailed autopsy information were available for detecting arsenic than any other poison. For those studying the dead, arsenic was so easy to find that one might almost imagine it glowing in the dark, flashing its message of murder.
CHARLES NORRIS liked to get his hands bloody in the morgue on a regular basis.
A good medical examiner, he believed, kept his autopsy tools sharp and his pathology skills honed. Plus, truthfully, he was bored by a job that consisted of little besides paperwork, meeting with other government officials, and harassing the mayor. The mass murders at the Shelbourne needed to be handled by an authority figure, Norris decided.
He would do the autopsies himself.
THE BELLEVUE autopsy room was quiet and cool, with high ceilings and white plastered walls. Lights hung brightly over each long marble dissecting table; at every table’s foot was a deep rectangular copper basin with hot running water, to keep hands and instruments clean. As the standard manual reminded pathologists, blood and fluids that dried on the fingers could be “unpleasant” and dull the sensitivity needed for the operation.
The instruments lay in bristling rows. There was the section knife, with its short thick blade and heavy handle, used for making long incisions, and slim scalpels ready to make the finer cuts. At Bellevue they always laid out three instruments for probing the brain: a deep cutter, with a six-inch handle and six-inch blade “so strong it does not bend or feather too easily” to slice through the dura, the tough membrane protecting the brain; a thin, twosided blade with a rounded tip used for incisions; and a pick, used to free the brain from the spinal cord so that it could be removed from the body.
There were delicate tissue-cutting scissors and powerful bone scissors used to crunch through cartilage and thinner bones; dissecting forceps; at least one good butcher’s saw for the bigger bones; smaller saws for tasks like removing the spinal cord; brass and wooden foot-rules (twelve-inch rulers); tape measures, measuring glasses and calipers; large scales to weigh the whole body and small scales to weigh the pieces; glass-stopped jars to hold the organs for poison analysis; and the usual assortment of sponges, pails, vessels, plates, and bottles that collected in all postmortem rooms.
Before the first cut, a pathologist like Norris would need to take detailed notes on a cadaver’s outward appearance. Victims of acute arsenic poisoning tended to become so violently sick that their bodies had the slightly shrunken, emaciated look of severe dehydration. Often their hands and feet looked slightly blue due to lack of circulating oxygen. If, on the other hand, the poison had been administered gradually, the victims’ skin tended to turn yellow, even occasionally a kind of parchment brown, and scaly patches appeared on the hands and feet.
When it was time to begin an autopsy, the corpse was laid on its back, with its head dangling just over the edge of the table so that the neck was pushed forward. The first cut into the trunk of the body was a Y-cut with the section knife, two deep slices inward from a few inches below each shoulder to a point under the breastbone and then straight down through the abdominal muscles. (Undertakers had demanded that technique, rather than a slash straight down the center from the throat, so that clothing would easily cover the incisions during an open casket ceremony.)
Once the flaps of skin were peeled back, the sternum and a triangular section of ribs could be removed and the protective muscles sliced open, yielding access to the organs below. Like other pathologists, Norris followed a set routine. He inspected each organ and described its condition in detail. Since poison was suspected, he removed the organs, placed them in sealed glass jars, and sent them upstairs to Gettler’s laboratory.
In the case of arsenic, this was indeed bloody work. The entire body had to be sliced apart. Since the early nineteenth century, scientists had known that the poison accumulated everywhere. They’d found it in the liver, spleen, kidneys, heart, lungs, brain, stomach, intestines, and even the muscle walls themselves.
White arsenic (the compound isolated from the Shelbourne’s pastry) wrecked the stomach, leaving it smudged with bloody lesions; the mucous membrane lining would be swollen, yellowish, and patched with scarlet. Under a microscope, the membrane would sparkle with tiny arsenic crystals—the same ones that caused the gritty sensation in food. The poison tracked similar damage through the intestines. The heart often contained loosely formed blood clots. In a quick killing, little evidence was found in the liver and kidneys, but in a slow, chronic arsenic poisoning—favored by killers hoping to mimic the decline of a natural disease—both organs became diseased, showing signs of fatty degeneration.
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