The Poisoner's Handbook (38 page)
Thallium doses that killed more slowly, of course, usually produced hair loss. But again, internally the poison provided nothing in the way of dramatic evidence. There might be signs of clotting in the blood vessels, fatty degeneration in the heart and kidneys, congested lungs, or an excess of blood in the brain. But two of the Gross children had been exhumed and autopsied, and in both cases “the findings were entirely negative.”
It all added up to another reason that thallium deaths were so easily and often mistaken for other causes. Only in the laboratory did thallium give itself away. In the manner of other metallic poisons, such as arsenic, thallium lodges stubbornly in the body, permeating the tissues for weeks and even months after death. Any knowledgeable forensic toxicologist can find it there.
It is, one might say, a chemist’s poison.
LIKE THE Brooklyn physician, Gettler ran a spectroscopic analysis of the tissues and the cocoa. He also saw the green flash of light with each sample. But one test wasn’t enough for him. It never was.
He went on to use a spectrograph, a piece of equipment similar to a spectroscope but with a camera to make permanent images of the lines of light. He’d found spectrographic images extremely useful in court testimony. These “photographic flashes,” as he called them, also revealed thallium in every sample of tissue.
The spectrographic lines from the cocoa, however, he found less convincing—the color seemed off to him. And the cocoa had turned a little rancid—Gettler wondered if it could have leached some metal from the can itself. He suspected the alloy used to make the container included some copper, which could account for the greenish glow of the cocoa results.
He decided to run a series of chemical tests on both the cocoa and the tissue—an old-fashioned technique, compared to the new machinery, but reliable. He repeated the tests, to his satisfaction, over a period of four days.
While Gettler was running those tests, the police began discussing an entirely different theory to explain the murders.
IN THEIR SEARCH of the Eldert Street apartment, Brooklyn police officers had found several books with Mrs. Gross’s name on the flyleaf. Two were medical books, with information on different poisons. The last was philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s
Studies in Pessimism
, which despairingly contends that at core, the universe offers no hope of a rational existence.
Studies in Pessimism
, which despairingly contends that at core, the universe offers no hope of a rational existence.
Geoghan, the district attorney, at first dismissed the books as unimportant, but then neighbors filed in with stories about Mrs. Gross. A woman who lived two doors down made and signed a statement about a conversation she’d had several weeks before the chain of deaths began. Mrs. Gross—after learning that she was pregnant again—had said that she intended to kill her children, her mother, and herself with rat poison.
She told the neighbor that she already had the poison and that it was slow, painless, and sure to kill. “Do you mean you’d give your children poison and see them suffer?” the horrified friend asked. She said that Mrs. Gross replied: “There’s no suffering to what I’ve got. It’s sure death.” She’d learned about the poison when she worked as a telephone operator in a Philadelphia hospital. “It may take a day. It may take thirty days.” She just couldn’t bear to raise her children in such desperate poverty.
But, her friend told the police, Mrs. Gross didn’t want to poison her husband. Without the expense of a large family, she was sure he’d find a better life. According to the statement, she’d declared: “I have the best husband any woman could want. But rather than drudge along like this and live in poverty I’d do anything.”
The strongest objection to that theory of the crimes came from Frederick Gross, still in jail. He and Barbara had been married twenty years, since they’d met in Philadelphia. She was good woman and a good mother, he told the police. “It could never have happened that way,” he told the district attorney. “I don’t believe it.”
But the neighbors kept telling their stories, and even the prosecutor was starting to wonder.
THE CHEMICAL TESTS for thallium were an intricate, delicate business.
First, Gettler ground the tissue into slush. Then he poured in some nitric acid and let the mixture stand in a large flask for an hour. Then the flask went into a steam bath for two hours until all the tissue was completely dissolved. The solution was cooled, any solidified fat was filtered off through glass wool, and the flask was placed over an open flame. As the liquid heated, sulfuric acid was poured carefully into it.
Once the acid boiled off, a thick sludge remain to bubble blackly over the burner. “It is well to lower the flame at this point, and then to increase it again when the charred liquid has quit frothing,” Gettler recommended in a paper detailing his methods. After the liquid settled down, he trickled nitric acid into the mix, slowly, until the color changed from black to red to yellow and finally to a colorless state of clarity. Only then, after other contaminants had been ruthlessly removed, would he begin to check for thallium.
The poison could be found by several methods. One was that old standard, the flame test. The others involved forcing thallium to settle out of the solution. For instance, if sulfur dioxide was bubbled through the clear liquid and a hydrogen solution added, a pale-yellow, thallium-rich layer would settle to the bottom of the flask. Or one could add an iodine compound and precipitate out thallous iodide. Ammonia and potassium chromate caused a bright-yellow layer to coat the bottom, consisting of thallous chromate.
Of course, negative results were equally easy to see. If there was no thallium in the mixture, the liquid in the flask remained innocently transparent. To Gettler’s surprise, he ended up with both results—the sullen yellows of thallium, and the rainwater clarity of a poison-free solution.
THE CHEMICAL TESTS run by Gettler’s laboratory found thallium in all the dead children, but not in the body of Mrs. Gross. She had apparently died of encephalitis, as originally diagnosed. The children had been poisoned, but the mother not at all, providing yet another theory—that she was somehow deranged enough to want to start her marriage over, with only her husband and the single child yet to come.
Gettler’s results showed that each child had received a markedly different dose of thallium. Because the two girls had died after their mother, the district attorney was convinced that their father had to be the poisoner. But Gettler disagreed. Partly because the children had been going bald in the weeks before their deaths, he thought they’d received the poison before the mother died, killed more slowly by a lower dose than the two boys got.
Further, repeated analyses of the cocoa found not a trace of thallium sulfate, the rat poison used by Gross’s employer. If the can had contained poison, Gettler pointed out, they should have found it at greater levels than in the decomposing tissues. Based on Gettler’s findings, the autopsies, and other pathology work done at Bellevue, the medical examiner’s report proposed that while the children had been poisoned by thallium, there was no evidence linking the deaths to the father.
The Brooklyn authorities, and especially the doctor who had done the original tests, were taken aback. The doctor, even more, was angrily embarrassed. Perhaps, he suggested, Gettler wasn’t used to the spectroscope. Everyone made mistakes, even New York City’s apparently infallible toxicologist. He publically recommended that Gettler try the tests again.
That prompted Charles Norris, who brooked no criticism of his hardworking and underpaid staff, to intervene. If Alexander Gettler failed to find any trace of the poison, Norris stated, then “it was not there.” Period.
ON MAY 20, a Brooklyn magistrate dismissed the charges against Frederick Gross. His employer called the newly released bookkeeper to tell him that they’d held the job for him. Gross went straight to the hospital where his son, Frank, was in bed on a sun porch. Seeing the little bald boy in the crib, he started to cry. The five-year-old asked his father why he hadn’t come to see him on visiting Sundays.
“I was busy, son,” Gross replied. He told reporters that when his son was well enough, he was going to take him to a summer camp to play and get stronger. His mother-in-law had agreed to keep house for him again. He hoped to do a better job of taking care of his remaining family.
And so, as soon as possible, he was going back to work. He didn’t blame the district attorney, he said. He knew things had looked bad. But he had one special request of the journalists who gathered around to hear his plans: just tell everyone, just spread the word, that he had been innocent all along.
“LET YOUR VOICE be heardloudly and often in protest against the indifference, ignorance and avarice” responsible for causing poisonous compounds to so permeate everyday life, wrote Kallet and Schlink of the Consumers’ Research Union in the 1935 edition of their manifesto. “In adulteration and misrepresentation lurks a menace to your health that ought no longer be tolerated.”
The CRU was starting to wonder what poisoning issue would stir the government into taking action. The FDA had sidestepped Ginger Jake, turning that investigation over to the Treasury Department’s Prohibition enforcement officers. Although the agency had taken steps to end the use of radium-laced health waters such as Radithor, there were still no laws that prohibited interstate commerce in such risky products. Neither had Congress strengthened the FDA in response. Instead, legislators and even President Roosevelt were resisting such laws, on the grounds that they would be detrimental to business at a time of economic crisis.
The CRU feared it would take a catastrophe to change the system. In that assessment Kallet, Schlink, and their colleagues would be proved right two years later. In 1937 a small Tennessee pharmaceutical company developed a new kind of cough syrup by dissolving a sulfa drug into the solvent diethylene glycol—a complex chain of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (HO-CH
2
-CH
2
-O-CH
2
-CH
2
-OH) also used in antifreeze formulas. Diethylene glycol had a sweet taste to it anyway, but the company made the elixir even better-tasting by adding raspberry flavoring.
2
-CH
2
-O-CH
2
-CH
2
-OH) also used in antifreeze formulas. Diethylene glycol had a sweet taste to it anyway, but the company made the elixir even better-tasting by adding raspberry flavoring.
That product, Elixir Sulfanilamide, killed more than one hundred people, most of them children. Under the FDA’s minimal rules, though, the company was required to pay only a small fine for mislabeling, because “elixirs” were supposed to contain alcohol and this formula had none. The deaths spurred a consensus of outrage, led by the grieving families and intensified by the furious consumer advocates and the anguished physicians who had killed their patients. (As one wrote, he’d watched his own friends die as a result of asking him to treat them.) The head of the company stoked the national anger further by pointing out that barring the mislabeling, the product had been entirely legal: “I do not feel that there was any responsibility on our part.”
The following year Congress passed and Roosevelt signed the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which empowered the FDA to demand safety testing and accurate labeling and to hold manufacturers legally responsible for harming their customers.
THAT SPRING of 1935, despite the successful resolution of the Gross case, Charles Norris just felt tired. Another poison. Another murder. Another series of unnecessary deaths. Another story to break your heart.
That April, for the first time in years, he did not attend the Detectives’ Endowment Association’s annual party at the Hotel Astor (“I am avoiding going out as much as possible”) and simply sent a contribution. When his alma mater, Yale, asked for a donation to the alumni fund, he wrote back candidly to the old friend leading the drive: “You ask me how I am. I am just recovering from a bad attack of the ‘flu.’ We must remember that we are all getting old and tired, and my expense account is much larger than my income and it has been so for some time.”
He promised to send a check for fifty dollars, but only in May, when he was sure it would clear. He was putting his spare money into the medical examiner’s office and his spare time into dealing with Mayor La Guardia, who seemed to believe that all longtime department heads must be crooks. La Guardia had ordered examinations of all such departments, and in late May the mayor’s political allies, organized into a Citizens’ Budget Committee, charged Norris’s staff with pocketing illegal fees for routine work such as issuing death certificates.
The commission calculated that 40 percent of the cases handled by Norris’s office required some sort of certified paperwork. That meant more than 20,000 potentially moneymaking opportunities over the previous seventeen years. At worst, if the medical examiner’s office charged $20 per report—a fee that had been set by other departments—then the graft total would approach $400,000 Since Norris took office.
Norris called the report a joke: “I don’t know where they get any estimates of $400,000. The insurance companies occasionally want copies of the hearings, and they pay small fees for them, but we don’t get those requests at the rate of more than two a week and the fee runs from fifty cents to a dollar.” And poor people, he added, had always been given paperwork at no cost at all.
Within a month a formal investigation by the city’s commissioner of accounts had cleared Norris’s office of graft charges. True, the office charged typing fees for lengthy documents, but they ran about fifty cents. The employees apparently had considered this a practice allowed under the law. They did it openly. Rather than $400,000 over the period in question, the amount appeared to be $4,000 during Norris’s time as administrator, or a little over $200 a year split among the typing pool.
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