The Poisoner's Handbook (5 page)
Yet the scientific journals supported Mors’s confession. One study of 52 chloroform deaths, done only a few years earlier, found that four people had died in less than a minute, and 22 of them had died in less than five minutes.
The coroner also assured the prosecutor that there was no way to find chloroform in a corpse, especially after a burial. Based on this information, the district attorney had refused to exhume a single body. Instead, he declared that it was impossible to find even a full quart of chloroform in a dead body, that an autopsy was a waste of time since it would yield no evidence.
Again, the existing science said almost exactly the opposite. “Chloroform not only withstands but also impedes putrefaction,” said a leading toxicology book. In animals killed with chloroform, the compound could be detected in their tissues at least four weeks after death; in the brain, where it tended to concentrate, it could be found months after death. Further, the burying of a body tended to prevent the volatile compound from evaporating.
Contrary to the confusion created by the Rice trial, toxicologists were clear that chloroform was definitely an irritant. People who swallowed chloroform—and lived to tell the tale—were shocked by the burn in the mouth. Autopsies showed that chloroform left the mucous membranes of the mouth, stomach, and intestines reddened and inflamed. The poison was caustic enough that the skin lining the throat and pharynx was visibly softened, easily peeling loose at just a light touch of a pathologist’s gloved fingers.
And whether chloroform was inhaled or swallowed, it left a betraying signature: it darkened the blood and caused it to gather in the brain, lungs, liver, and kidneys, producing clumps of bulbous, overfull blood vessels. Chloroform victims could be slightly yellow in color, showing signs of jaundice, due to the poison’s ability to wreak havoc in the liver. Alcoholics, with their often damaged livers, were among those most quickly killed by chloroform; they had been among the most frequent deaths under surgical anesthesia.
Reasonable tests for chloroform in human tissue existed even at the time of Rice’s death and had been even better established by 1915. The following directions were available in the 1890s: a chemist should mince tissue, distill it with steam, then boil the resulting “syrup” with a mix of lye and benzene. If chloroform existed in the hot chemical soup, the liquid turned yellowish-red, fluorescing—according to the textbooks—to a “beautiful” yellowish-green if exposed to ultraviolet light.
Other chemical tests could separate the poison into its basic constituents. A basic chloroform molecule consists of five atoms—one of carbon, one of hydrogen, and three of chlorine—clustered neatly together. If a chemist heated some minced tissue and added a destructive element—say, a strong acid—he could gradually break the poison apart, separating the chlorine from the rest of the solution, a process that would confirm the presence of chloroform.
The Bronx coroner obviously didn’t know this science, and if he sought advice from colleagues elsewhere in New York City, they were uninformed as well. But the possibility of chemical detection did actually exist in that frozen February when Frederic Mors walked into a police station to boast of murder. If anyone had bothered to look for it.
THE POLICE found these scientific excuses infuriating. They believed that Mors was the murderer he claimed to be.
The sheriff had said so publicly, infuriating the district attorney. In a press conference the prosecutor conceded that it was “probable” that Mors had “hurried the deaths” of eight people, maybe more—the police had discovered that another nine deaths at the home appeared suspicious. But probability wasn’t proof, and as they had no eyewitnesses, a suspect with diagnosed paranoid tendencies, and absolutely no evidence of poison in any of the bodies, the prosecutor decided that he could not justify taking the case to court.
The Bronx district attorney stated: “Mors’ fellow employees and others have given circumstantial evidence, they have told of deaths under suspicious circumstances, they have even told of smelling the odor of chloroform about Mors’ person, but nothing they have said would be accepted by a judge or jury as proof of the fact that a crime had been committed in the manner described by Mors.”
The prosecutor’s office had released the Odd Fellows home superintendent from custody, citing lack of evidence that he conspired to eliminate residents in his care. But officials couldn’t quite bring themselves to let go of Mors. The district attorney made some calls, pulled some strings, and—ignoring the report from Bellevue that found him less than certifiable—had the suspected killer committed to an asylum, hoping to use the fact that he had been institutionalized as just cause to deport him back to Austria.
Mors was sent to the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane in Poughkeepsie. He had been there about three months when he learned of the deportation plan. A week before his scheduled removal, in May 1915, Mors walked away from the asylum—simply disappeared on a warm spring day. In response to an angry complaint, the director of the hospital pointed out that the asylum wasn’t a home for the criminally insane and that he’d been given no warnings about Mors when he’d admitted him. The staff hadn’t considered him dangerous. His behavior had been what it was at Bellevue—polite, quiet, and maybe a little “paranoically inclined,” as Gregory had put it. But no one at the asylum had thought that he might be someone to keep locked away.
Mors disappeared so completely that the police suspected that he’d once again changed his name. He’d been born in Austria with the name Milnarik. He’d explained the change carefully in that first confession, as he watched the detectives through the haze of cigarette smoke. He’d picked the new name for its meaning in Latin. It meant Death.
BY THE TIME Frederic Mors disappeared with the spring winds, the city and state governments had come to grim agreement. “It is clear,” Leonard Wallstein told the New York newspapers, “that the welfare of the city absolutely requires the immediate abolition of the elective coroner’s system . . .”
The governor, embarrassed by all the attention being given to corruption in the state’s major city, demanded that Riordan step down from office. And the state legislature passed a bill that had been consistently defeated in earlier sessions, establishing a new medical examiner system for New York City. It required that the position be filled by a qualified doctor, one with pathology experience, who would need to pass stringent professional tests to get the job, and who would appoint a well-trained staff, the kind capable of building a case at least against a self-confessed murderer.
The law had one catch, though. The clever politicians of Tammany Hall had built in a three-year delay—the medical examiner system wouldn’t become official until January 1918. The authors of the clause expected that by that time, the reformers would be out of office, and the new mayor—well, he would damn well do as he was told.
TWO
WOOD ALCOHOL
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3
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1918—1919
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3
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1918—1919
A
S HE LIKED to boast—and did, as often as possible—John F. “Red Mike” Hylan was a self-made man.
S HE LIKED to boast—and did, as often as possible—John F. “Red Mike” Hylan was a self-made man.
As a politician, he wangled an amendment to New York’s state constitution that created two new judgeships in Brooklyn. Hylan then took one for himself. After all, as he pointed out, he was a fully qualified lawyer. He had worked as a locomotive engineer for the Brooklyn Elevated while studying for his law degree—until he was fired, reportedly for reading textbooks while he drove the train. He did not think affectionately of his old employer. One of his loudly voiced beliefs was that the city needed a public transportation system, free of the greedy railroad bosses. And of course, controlled instead by the party machine.
Tammany Hall considered Hylan a man with potential. People noticed him—big, pink-faced, copper-haired, with a showy mustache and a booming, blustering voice. He was gratifyingly unlike the pedantic reformists running the city, especially the annoyingly preachy Mayor Mitchel. In 1917 the party tapped Hylan to run against Mitchel. The new candidate confidently assured the voters that reformers were intellectual elitists, all talk, no action, filling the city offices with “lazy do-nothings, rolling around in city automobiles with cigars in their mouths and making themselves conspicuous at baseball games when they should be in their offices.”
A majority of New York voters agreed. Hylan’s election was considered a stunning upset and, by many, a depressing defeat of good government. Even President Woodrow Wilson was startled into impolitic comment, “How is it possible for the greatest city in the world to place such a man in high office?” But Red Mike stepped into the job with triumphant assurance, standing on the white marble steps of City Hall, bare-headed, his hair glowing like a torch in the fall sunlight. “We have had all the reform that we want in this city for some time to come,” he announced.
It wasn’t just talk. Hylan immediately began restoring the party faithful to office. One of the first was ex-coroner Patrick Riordan. And while he was mostly successful at restoring the fallen, the mayor would later concede that the Riordan appointment did not go exactly as he had hoped.
THE TIRELESS Leonard Wallstein, now representing the newly formed Citizens’ Union, promptly threatened legal action. The
New York Times
pointedly recounted Riordan’s past in embarrassing detail, including the misconduct hearings where “witness after witness testified that Riordan was incompetent and was repeatedly intoxicated while on duty.”
New York Times
pointedly recounted Riordan’s past in embarrassing detail, including the misconduct hearings where “witness after witness testified that Riordan was incompetent and was repeatedly intoxicated while on duty.”
Angry civic groups reminded Hylan—and the public—that Riordan lacked even the most basic qualifications written into the law, which specified “a skilled microscopist and pathologist.” Riordan had not even pretended to abide by the new law, which required that he take a civil service examination for the position. Further, three well-trained doctors, all with backgrounds in pathology,
had
applied and passed the examination: Dr. Otto Schultz, a professor of medical jurisprudence at Columbia University; Dr. Douglas Symmers, a professor of pathology at New York University; and Dr. Charles Norris, chief of laboratories at Bellevue and Allied Hospitals.
had
applied and passed the examination: Dr. Otto Schultz, a professor of medical jurisprudence at Columbia University; Dr. Douglas Symmers, a professor of pathology at New York University; and Dr. Charles Norris, chief of laboratories at Bellevue and Allied Hospitals.
Hylan had not foreseen such energetic opposition. He’d already ordered new, gold-leaf letters put on the doors of every coroner’s office in the five boroughs, each reading “Dr. Patrick J. Riordan, Chief Medical Examiner.” The new mayor didn’t care for being pushed around by a bunch of outsiders. He decided to show his critics who was boss by punishing the overqualified applicants. The mayor’s office announced that by taking the required examination, all three of those applicants had engaged in criminal behavior.
The reasoning went thus: the doctors had been required to perform autopsies as part of the examination. But state law specified that unclaimed bodies were to go to medical schools for teaching purposes. Since the job applicants had prevented that process, the mayor said, he was directing the civil service commission to file felony charges against them. The three doctors might have to do jail time, he warned, which would bar them from holding the city office.
In late January the accused applicants, a trio in dark suits and stony expressions, stood in a city courtroom. There they had an unobstructed view of the Hylan-appointed civil service commission consulting with Patrick Riordan, who could be seen nodding his white head during a whispered discussion. According to published accounts of the meeting, the head of the civil service commission then leaned forward and addressed each physician: “Doctor, you are accused of a felony in that you performed an autopsy illegally and you are asked to show cause why your name should not be stricken from the civil service list. Have you anything to say?” The applicants refused to cooperate. All three replied that they first wanted the charges set out in writing. They had been given no explanation of why they were facing criminal charges for taking a city-required test. The civil service commission’s allegation that they were guilty of “infamously disgraceful conduct” did not constitute a legal complaint, according to their attorneys, who stood beside them.
Fine, then. The commission postponed the hearing, announcing that all would return once the formal charges were drafted. But before the hearing could be rescheduled, even before the week was out, Wallstein led a blast of renewed protests that pushed the state government to intervene. Republican Governor Charles S. Whitman, a former Manhattan district attorney, informed Hylan that his actions were in violation of the law, which did indeed require a qualified forensic scientist for the position, and that his tactics were an embarrassment to the state and “an offense against public decency.” Whitman informed the mayor that he wanted to see a professional medical examiner in New York City—immediately.
On January 31, 1918, Hylan appointed Bellevue’s Charles Norris as the new medical examiner. He had warm feelings, he insisted, for his new agency head. All he had ever wanted was “a high-class man for this post.” In reality, the choice of Norris was a small but bitter act of rebellion. Norris had been ranked second in the examination results, behind the professor from Columbia. Hylan couldn’t justify dropping to the third choice, but he refused to be pushed all the way. To emphasize that point, he announced that Norris should consider himself on probation for the next three months.
But Norris took a six-month leave from his job in the Bellevue laboratory anyway. He knew he was in.
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