The Poisoner's Handbook (25 page)
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.
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 plotting 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.
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.
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.
THE SNYDER- GRAY CASE served as a rather pointed reminder to toxicologists such as Gettler: it was too soon to dismiss chloroform as a poisoner’s tool.
A dozen years had passed since the Mors chloroform killings, but the drug continued to be used in crimes, albeit with less regularity. The previous year burglars had used chloroform to knock out a four-member Brooklyn family, emptying all valuables from the apartment as the victims lay unconscious. In September 1927 a female guest at the ornate and expensive Hotel Martinique on Broadway was drugged into unconsciousness by two robbers who then vanished with $1,600 worth of cash and jewelry.
Despite the efforts of the American Medical Association, many doctors continued to use chloroform anesthesia. It could be risky, they knew, but it was cheap and did the job. The continued demand from physicians also meant that pharmacies—as Judd Gray had found on his chloroform errand—kept it in stock.
Another reason doctors continued to use chloroform was that it remained notably difficult in the legal system to secure a conviction. In the past year two Manhattan doctors had been charged with manslaughter after their patients died under anesthesia, one an eighteen-year-old girl, the other a vaudeville actress whose husband had also brought a wrongful death suit. In both cases the physicians’ colleagues successfully rallied to defend them. During the civil hearing on the actress’s death, one doctor assured the jurors that he “had just been lucky” that none of his own patients had been killed by chloroform. The drug was a mystery to them all, another said. “No rules can be applied with exaction.”
The physicians all decried the unpredictability of chloroform, which they pointed out usually worked well and safely. It was too bad, all agreed, that no one really knew how to measure chloroform in a body: even scientists couldn’t predict when it might be lethal, couldn’t measure it precisely after death to calculate a killing dose. But as it turned out, Alexander Gettler would soon get a chance to change that.
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