The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York
by Deborah Blum
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In Washington, D.C., where the Volstead Act—which provided for enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment—had been militantly approved, the police reported nearly a ten-fold increase in drunk driving arrests since the legislation was enacted.
In a best-selling book, 100,000,000 Guinea Pigs (reprinted nine times by 1935), a pair of consumer-advocate authors complained that American citizens had become test animals for chemical industries that were indifferent to their customers' well-being. The government, they added bitterly, was complicit.
In his examination of the young dial painters, he’d discovered a fact that was impossible to dismiss. The women were exhaling radon gas.
...death certificates were filled out with no effort at determining cause. Among the entries were 'could be suicide or murder,' and 'either assault of diabetes.' In one instance, a coroner had attributed a death to 'diabetes, tuberculosis, or nervous indigestion.' A few death certificates simply read 'act of God.
Standard Oil issued a cool response: “These men probably went insane because they worked too hard,” according to the building manager. And those who didn’t survive had merely worked themselves to death. Other than that, the company didn’t see a problem.
The name explains the structure: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen bond into a ring-shaped structure called a cresol (also found in creosote), and phosphorus hangs on to the ring like an exhausted swimmer gripping a life preserver.
Nicotine had been isolated and synthesized in the nineteenth century. In pure form, it took an ounce at most to kill the average adult.
There was the Bennett Cocktail (gin, lime juice, bitters), the Bee’s Knees (gin, honey, lemon juice), the Gin Fizz (gin, lemon juice, sugar, seltzer water), and the Southside (lemon juice, sugar syrup, mint leaves, gin, seltzer water).
That same January the city government had released a report declaring that thanks to ill-informed, corrupt, and occasionally drunken coroners, murderers in New York were escaping justice in record numbers.
I see poisoners—so calculating, so cold-blooded—as most like the villains of our horror stories. They’re closer to that lurking monster in the closet than some drug-impaired crazy with a gun. I don’t mean to dismiss the latter—both can achieve the same awful results. But the scarier killer is the one who thoughtfully plans his murder ahead, tricks a friend, wife, lover into swallowing something that will dissolve tissue, blister skin, twist the muscles with convulsions, knows all that will happen and does it anyway.
During the previous summer U.S. public health workers had accidentally killed four sailors, on two different foreign vessels, by fumigating against possible plague-carrying rats.
From almost every standpoint ethyl alcohol must be regarded as the most important poison with which medical men and jurists have to deal,” Gettler wrote in a paper, listing a seemingly endless record of fatalities. “No other poison causes so many deaths or leads to or intensifies so many diseases, both physical and mental, as does [this] alcohol in the many forms in which it is taken.
His son, Joseph, an organic chemist, had once announced that he'd decided early on against forensic toxicology: he could never have so many lives and deaths on his conscience. His father understood him. Because sometimes the dead did walk in Alexander Gettler's sleep, sometimes they rattled in the black chair of Sing Sing, and always, as he admitted in that last vulnerable interview, 'I keep asking myself, have I done everything right?
The painters were teenage girls and young women who became friendly during their hours together and entertained themselves during breaks by playing with the paint. They sprinkled the luminous liquid in their hair to make their curls twinkle in the dark. They brightened their fingernails with it. One girl covered her teeth to give herself a Cheshire cat smile when she went home at night. None of them considered this behavior risky.
Webb donated the empty plot she’d owned on the city’s Upper West Side. It comprised almost two acres of rolling land in Washington Heights—a nice little stretch between West 189th and West 190th streets, along the edge of Broadway as it ran north through the city.
The photographer had a camera strapped around one leg, attached to a cable that ran up his trouser leg and into a pocket. He could squeeze a bulb in his pocket to take one picture which would be unnoticed in the glare of sparks and the horror generated by the chair.
His thick eyebrows drew together in a familiar frown. The blood pooled around the half-body was a bright cherry red. He bent to look closer at the woman's face. It was flushed pink, even following this horrible death. Norris's reaction was recorded by a crime writer and would later become part of his often theatrical legend. He walked over to the waiting detectives and announced, 'Boys, you can't hold this man for murder.
[...] Another groggy patron wrote, about a night of clubbing: the bartender 'brought me some Benedictine and the bottle was right. But the liqueur was curious -- transparent at the top of the glass, yellowish in the middle and brown at the base . . . Oh, what dreams seemed to result from drinking it . . . That is the bane of speakeasy life. You ring up your friend the next morning to find out whether he is still alive.
Norris was particularly exasperated by a report that loosely blamed a man's death on wood alcohol. The document stated that the victim had been drinking heavily in the hours before his collapse. He'd also been stricken with sudden blindness (a classic symptom of wood alcohol poisoning) several hours before lapsing into a coma. The death certificate listed wood alcohol poisoning as a 'more than probable' cause. But 'more than probable' was hardly a professional opinion, Norris said. [...]
This work, which I may term 'organization,'' has apparently not been tried before, Norris wrote to Hylan, displaying his contempt for the previous system.
The current head of that ward, an alienist named Menas Gregory, had been trying for years to change that haunted reputation. He angrily defended people in his care, many of whom had been brought in against their will when their families had them declared crazy. The lost occupants of his ward needed help, Gregory argued, not mockery, not groundless fear. He worried at how slow people accepted that, even in his own institution. 'There is, at the present time, no place where these patients may receive proper treatment.
The first hospital building had been constructed there in 1811; only eight years later Bellevue became the first U.S. hospital to formally require a qualified physician to pronounce a death (after a desperately ill man had been discovered among the corpses stacked on the morgue wagon).
There are many persons driving automobiles in this city who ought not to drive.
Knowing the poison is never the same as knowing the killer.
At the present time I am spending nearly $300 a month from my own personal funds for work which in my opinion has absolutely to be done to keep up the work of the office,
That is the bane of speakeasy life. You ring up your friend the next morning to find out whether he is still alive.
Human life must be cheap to the one who can place the dollar above it" -John Ruston
The Prohibition era had been a great source of material for building an excellent science of alcohol intoxication
In the early twentieth century it had been used to remove the hair of children with scalp infections, such as ringworm, so that doctors could see and treat the fungus. But that practice had been abandoned when too many of the toddlers died.
Plus, truthfully, he was bored by a job that consisted of little besides paperwork, meeting with other government officials, and harassing the mayor.
