A Tribute to a Long-Lost Child

by Deborah Blum

When I was researching my book, The Poisoner's Handbook, I started by making a list of famous homicidal poisons: cyanide and strychnine, arsenic and antimony. The resulting catalog quickly outgrew my plans for a book of relatively modest length. How would I decide which toxic substances belonged in my particular handbook?

Since my story was of two somewhat renegade scientists trying to establish - or more accurately, invent - the profession of forensic toxicology in Prohibition-era New York, I started researching poison homicides in that time period. I focused on murders from about 1918 to 1935 in that remarkable city. I wasn't looking for famous cases - it was murder as a fact of everyday life that interested me. Those small, slipped-away stories, the cases that haunted me, the lives altered that I couldn't forget, ended up defining my poisonous history of early 20th century America.

And that's why the chapter on arsenic began with a long-forgotten mass murder:

The weather, that summer of 1922, held steady at what the newspapers like to call “fair”, the skies a gas-flame blue, the temperatures hovering near 80 degrees. On the last day of July, as Lillian Goetz’s mother would forever recall, the morning was another warm one. She offered to make her daughter a box lunch, but Lillian refused. It was too hot to eat much; she’d just grab a quick sandwich at a lunch counter.

The 17-year-old daughter worked as a stenographer in a dress goods firm, occupying a small set of offices in the Townsend Building, at the bustling corner of 25^th and Broadway. There were plenty of quick eateries nearby, tucked among the offices and shops and small hotels. Lillian, like many of her co-workers, often just stepped over to Shelbourne Restaurant and Bakery, just a half block south on Broadway.

The Shelbourne catered to the office trade, opening in the morning, closing in the early afternoon. Stenographers and secretaries in their bright summer hats and stylish short skirts, businessmen and office managers in their dark tailored suits crowded daily along its wooden counters and small square tables, hurrying through a meal of coffee, hot soup with fresh-baked rolls, sandwiches, and slices of the bakery’s renowned peach cake and berry pie.

According to police reports, on July 31, Lillian ordered a tongue sandwich, coffee, and a slice of huckleberry pie. It was the pie that killed her.

Five other people died as well and more than 60 went to the hospital that day. The scream of ambulances down Broadway was so constant that people called the police department thinking the city had caught fire. The lead suspect - although he would never be charged - was a baker at the Shelbourne, who'd caught a false rumor that he was about to be fired.

Arsenic, at the time, was remarkably easy to acquire. It was used in popular rodent poisons (my favorite had the very direct name Rough on Rats). It was used as a tonic, in brands such as Fowler's Solution. It was beloved by poison murderers because it was odorless and mostly tasteless. In a white powdery form, like arsenic trioxide, it folded almost invisibly into pastry dough.

Today, thanks to improved regulations, arsenic cannot be so casually acquired. Nor is it in the same homicidal demand. Forensic toxicology has made arsenic far too detectable a means of death. It's been identifiable in a corpse for well over 100 years, these days, in the barest trace amounts. And as a metallic element, it remains in the body (notably in the hair) for centuries. It serves, in fact, as a indelible marker of murder.

The fascinating, twisted story of arsenic then was an obvious choice for my book. The tale of little Lillian Goetz maybe less so. But there was this moment of heartbreak that just stayed with me. I read countless news stories about the Shelbourne killer. There's a moment, in one of them, in which her mother, Anna Goetz, is talking to the police about that rejected box lunch, caught at that point in which she knows, she's sure, that she could saved her daughter's life if she'd only insisted on that homemade meal.

Oh, I could see myself - the working mother of two boys - caught in that same moment, replaying that loop in which I might have rescued my child, could have kept her alive, kept him alive, if I'd only done things differently. One of the tasks that I'd set for myself in the book was - despite my real fascination with the wicked chemistry of poisons - to never glorify the subject. Poisoners represent human evil in my story. A lost child like Lillian reminds us of that, should remind us of that.

Still, when I received an e-mail recently with the subject line "Lillian Goetz", I had a moment where I worried that someone in the family didn't agree with me. In that, I was wonderfully wrong. The message came from Lillian's nephew Steve Goetz, a physiology teacher, and he wrote: When I began the chapter in your book covering arsenic, I was amazed to see Lillian Goetz's story featured. I had never realized that her death was a part of such a large and publicized event. Lillian was my aunt, my father Nelson's older sister. Her death by poison was rarely mentioned in the family, and most of the details were vague.

But though they rarely spoke of her, she was always there, a ghost in the house. Her death rewrote the way they lived. Steve was born in 1943 at Bronx Hospital, the facility that treated the dying girl: When my Grandfather, Lillian's father William Goetz, visited my mother who had given birth to me in 1943 at Bronx Hospital, he told her how very sad he felt revisiting the place. After Lillian's death, her parents (William and Annie) discarded all religious items in their house and were non-observant Jews from that point on. My grandmother Annie rarely left her apartment as long as I knew her, and my 98 year old mother told me the other day that that was also true since at least the early 1930's, when she first met Annie.

Steve also sent me the photograph that I've put at the top of this post. His grandmother, Annie Goetz is in the middle, with a very young Lillian holding one hand and her brother Nelson (Steve's father) holding the other. He even sent an image of the back of the photo, all names carefully written in that lovely cursive handwriting of the past with its lacy capital letters.

I've found myself studying their serious faces, taken during an era when people so rarely smiled for photographs. I've pondered Lillian's sober little face under that white hat, imagined her growing up into a dedicated, responsible young woman. But I know that doesn't really do her justice.

I wrote back to Steve Goetz, asking him if I could share the photo and family information and he answered me in the kindest way: "I had rarely thought about Lillian for most of my life - she seemed to be such a distant figure. I want to thank you for bringing her to life for me as a real person, in a way she had never existed for me before. My only tenuous link to her is her copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which I've had for many years. It contains a bookmark, a cut-out yellowed newspaper column called Our Rhyming Optimist. Aline Michaelis published 6 poems a week for her column from 1917 for the next 17 years. The poem Lillian saved is called "You Have Come Back."

Since I learned about, and was given the book, I've been intrigued that my aunt, coming from a family that seemed not to place a high priority on education or reading, should have this book of poetry. I've always felt that she must have been an interesting and sensitive person, that I would have liked to have gotten to know."

So this one's for you, Lillian. In remembrance, and regret. And a wish that you'd never ended up in my book.

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The Poisoner's Handbook

By Deborah Blum

 My book, The Poisoner's Handbook, comes out in paperback this week. It was published a year ago, and I had the pleasure of joining Women in Crime Ink as a blogger shortly later.

It's been a wonderful year to be the author of a story about 1920's forensic detectives figuring out how to catch poison killers. The book was named one of the top 100 books of 2010 by Amazon. I've visited more than 15 cities to talk about it, and I am actually booked to continue talking about through October of this year. I do sometimes show up wearing the Victorian poison ring that I purchased in honor of the book.

"Where did women actually get those rings?" my son asked me. "Did they go to the jeweler and ask to see the rings kept under the counter?"

As you may guess, my family and friends worry a little about my ongoing obsession with poison, murder, and the more sinister aspects of chemistry. I'm awfully prone upon hearing the name of a poison - say, mercury - to relate the story of 1920's film star Olive Thomas (Mary Pickford's sister-in-law) who was killed by mercury. And don't get me started on arsenic. My neighbors have promised my husband that they are looking out for him. My husband now drinks his coffee at a distance.

But I continue to find the subject endlessly fascinating. Poisoners themselves, with their devious ways and cold-hearted plotting, tell us a lot about who we are, often at our worst. Poisons themselves are a reminder that we need to navigate with care and knowledge through the chemical world in which we live.

Of course, poisons really are fascinatingly wicked chemical compounds and many of them have fascinating histories as well. In honor of the paperback publication, I thought I'd share with you a few of my favorites:

1. Carbon Monoxide: It’s so beautifully simple (just two atoms--one of carbon, one of oxygen) and so amazingly efficient a killer. There’s a story I tell in the book about a murder syndicate trying to kill an amazingly resilient victim. They try everything from serving him poison alcohol to running over him with a car. But in the end, it’s carbon monoxide that does him in.

2. Arsenic: This used to be the murderer’s poison of poisons, so commonly used in the early 19th century that it was nicknamed the inheritance powder. It’s also the first poison that forensic scientists really figured out how to detect in a corpse. It stays in the body for centuries, which is why we keep digging up historic figures like Napoleon or U.S. President Zachary Taylor to check their remains for poison.

3. Radium: I love the fact that this rare radioactive element used to be considered good for your health. It was mixed into medicines, face creams, and health drinks in the 1920's. People thought of it like a tiny glowing sun that would give them its power. Boy, were they wrong. The two scientists in my book, Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler, proved in 1928 that the bones of people exposed to radium became radioactive, and stayed that way for years.

4. Nicotine: This was the first plant poison that scientists learned to detect in a human body. Just an incredible case in which a French aristocrat and her husband decided to kill her brother for money. They actually stewed up tobacco leaves in a barn to brew a nicotine potion. Their amateur chemical experiments inspired a very determined professional chemist to hunt them down.

5. Chloroform: Developed for surgical anesthesia in the 19th century, this rapidly became a favorite tool of home invasion robbers. If you read newspapers around the turn of the 20th century, they’re full of accounts of people who answered a knock on the door, only to be knocked out by a chloroform soaked rag. One woman woke up to find her hair shaved off, and undoubtedly sold for the lucrative wig trade.

6. Mercury: In its pure state, mercury appears as a bright silver liquid, which scatters into shiny droplets when touched. No wonder it’s nicknamed quicksilver. People used to drink it as a medicine more than 100 years ago. No, they didn’t drop dead. Those silvery balls just slid right through them. Mercury is much more poisonous if it’s mixed with other chemicals and can be absorbed by the body directly. That’s why methylmercury in fish turns out to be so risky a contaminant.

7. Cyanide: One of the most famous of the homicidal poisons and, in my opinion, not a particularly good choice. Yes, it’s amazingly lethal--a teaspoon of the pure stuff can kill in a few minutes. But it’s a violent and obvious death. In early March of last year, in fact, an Ohio doctor was convicted of murder for putting cyanide in his wife’s vitamin supplements.

8. Aconite: A heart-stoppingly, deadly natural poison. It forms in ornamental plants that include the blue-flowering monkshood. The ancient Greeks called it the queen of poisons and considered it so evil that they believed that it derived from the saliva of Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the gates of hell.

9. Silver: Swallowing silver nitrate probably won’t kill you, but if you do it long enough it will turn you blue. One of my favorite stories involving a silver bullet concerns the Famous Blue Man of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus who was analyzed by one of the heroes of my book, Alexander Gettler.

10. Thallium: Agatha Christie put this poison at the heart of one of her creepiest mysteries, The Pale Horse, and I looked at it in terms of a murdered family in real life. An element discovered in the 19th century, it’s a perfect homicidal poison. Tasteless and odorless, except for one obvious giveaway, the victim’s hair falls out as a result of the poisoning!

Now that I’ve written this list, I realize I could probably name ten more. But, I don’t want to scare you.

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An Almost Perfect Murder

by Deborah Blum

In the fall of 1923, an out-of-work painter named Harry Freindlich took out a $1,000 life insurance policy on his wife Leah and then smothered her in bed.

He also, rather ingeniously, set the scene to look like an accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. He was caught, thanks to some extremely smart chemical detective work by New York City's fledgling forensic science department.

I came across this case while researching my recent book The Poisoner's Handbook, and it has always struck me as a pitch-perfect example of why chemistry is so essential in criminal investigations. We're accustomed to forensic detective work now but during the 1920s, it was more of an interesting idea than a reality. The Freindlich murder was one of those cases that helped convince a skeptical police force that science could actually help them.

Freindlich was desperate for money at the time. He was just desperate really, jobless and unable to pay the rent, much less provide food for his family. Their home was a bare step above living on the street anyway, a battered tenement on Manhattan’s lower East side. The paint was peeling off the walls; the floors were splintered. They’d been patching the appliances together with cardboard, glue, solder, anything. It was these one of these cracked appliances that gave him the idea--a gas light in the bedroom with a troublesome broken fitting that he had soldered back together more than once.

On an early October morning, Freindlich put a pillow over his wife’s face, pressing it tight until she quit breathing. He then tossed the pillow aside and wrenched apart the soldered light. When he heard the hiss of the gas, he hurriedly left the room, closing the door sharply behind him, leaving his dead wife lying beside the baby son she’d brought to bed with her. As the police pieced it together, he then walked out of the apartment, not trying to save the baby or any of other children sleeping there.

The tossed-aside pillow had dropped right on top of the sleeping infant. The little boy abruptly woke and began crying, struggling to get free. The Freindlich’s oldest child, a ten-year-old boy, heard his baby brother wailing and ran in to see what was wrong. He tried to shake his mother awake, but she didn’t respond no matter how hard he shook her. Now sobbing, he grabbed the baby and ran to the apartment next door. The neighbor grabbed a candle and hurried to check the darkened apartment. When she saw the dead woman in the bed, she ran to the grocer’s place downstairs to call the police.

At first, it easily looked like just another accident, maybe a suicide. Leah had been a sweet woman, the neighbors told the police, but worn down, just tired out. Yet there was something about the neighbor’s story that started to bother the beat cops. If there was a lethal amount of carbon monoxide in a room, it almost always ignited in the presence of fire. Apartments in the city blew up on a semi-regular basis when someone unwittingly struck a match in a gas filled room. The city medical examiner, Charles Norris, kept a file full of pictures showing blackened walls and fragmented furniture.

If gas poisoning had killed Leah Freindlich, there should have been enough carbon monoxide to flash to fire when the Good Samaritan ran in with her candle.

Back at the morgue, the pathologist was suffering from a similar sense of disbelief. The dead woman was sheet pale, all wrong for carbon monoxide poisoning, which tended to flush the skin pink. Before beginning an autopsy, he drew blood samples from her body and asked for a quick analysis from the laboratory of Alexander Gettler, the department's newly hired forensic chemist.

The lab report confirmed everyone’s doubts: The blood was loaded with carbon dioxide. This is actually a classic symptom of suffocation. We normally inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. If someone is being smothered by a pillow, the lungs can't exhale the gas and it instead backs up in the bloodstream. So Gettler's analysis strongly suggested deliberate suffocation.

Equally important, he found no evidence of carbon monoxide saturation of the blood, nothing to suggest that she had been breathing that notably poisonous gas. The pathologist looked more closely at the body, and hidden in the hair at the back of her neck he found a black bruising of fingerprints where someone had pressed, desperately tight.

Freindlich broke into sobs when he was arrested, begging the police to take him to the roof so that he could throw himself off. He couldn’t have killed his wife, he said. No one could have wished her harm. He couldn’t go to jail; what would happen to his children? He wanted his old life back. He wished he'd never come up with this evil scheme.

And, he undoubtedly wished that New York City had never hired that first forensic chemist.

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A Simple Case of Silver Poisoning

by Deborah Blum

In two earlier posts, I wrote about the possible copper poisoning of the great British poet and artist William Blake and the apparent gold poisoning of the powerful mistress of a French king, Diane de Poitier.

The very simple lesson in both stories seems to be that regular metal exposure will kill you. And certainly there are many other examples to support this. The metal lead is a notorious neurotoxin, and recent news stories link it directly to the poisoning of some 18,000 people in mining regions of Nigeria. The metal mercury is equally dangerous, enough so that all of us are warned against eating too much seafood--especially long-lived fish like salmon and tuna--because of environmental mercury contamination in the oceans.

One could argue, of course, that this is too simple a lesson. As always in toxicology, the dose makes the poison. Health experts today actually recommend regular metal intake, at least in very tiny amounts, for strengthening everything from bones to immune function. My daily multivitamin, for instance, contains 8 milligrams of iron and .5 mg of copper. And also trace amounts of zinc, nickel, manganese, molybdenum and chromium. I occasionally worry that over a lifetime I'll have swallowed a tin can's worth of metal. And some health experts worry that long time, metals like copper and iron in vitamins may bioaccumulate (build up in tissues).

But you might ask, are all metals health risks in larger quantities? An interesting--but definitely peculiar--exception turns out to be silver, one of the precious metals. The following is a story, concerning that point, from my recent book, The Poisoner's Handbook:

In the chilly January of 1924, scientists at the New York City Medical Examiner's office got a chance at a true oddball case, the death of the Famous Blue Man. The man had spent most of his life as one of the human curiosities exhibited at Barnum and Bailey’s, the Greatest Circus on Earth, as it traveled around the country. The Blue Man had recently died at Bellevue; the pathologists said his body was one of the strangest they’d seen stretched on a marble table in the morgue.

The famed human oddity was 68 years old when he checked himself into the hospital, short of breath and complaining that when he lay flat, he couldn’t breathe at all. As his hospital records noted, he was a tall, thin man, with glistening white hair and an equally glossy white mustache. His skin was so deep a blue to appear black at a distance. His lips were blue; his tongue was blue. The scleras--what would usually be called the whites of the eyes--were also blue.

This wasn’t the exhausted bluish patchiness of cyanide poisoning though. The skin was smoothly colored with an almost lustrous look. It was that overall effect of polishing that led the doctors to a diagnosis--the Blue Man was suffering from a disease called argyria (from the Greek word argyros meaning silver). The condition was known to deposit silver through the body, staining the tissues to a deeply polished blue-gray.

The Bellevue doctors suspected that the Blue Man, a former British army officer, had achieved his later fame by dosing himself with silver nitrate. This was a salt made by dissolving silver into nitric acid and evaporating the solution, leaving behind a glossy powder, which could be mixed for other uses. Silver nitrate was easily available;  it was used in photographic processing, by dentists to treat ulcers in the mouth, and blended into drops that went into the eyes of newborn babies to prevent infections.

Their patient firmly denied any silver exposure, denied any self-medication at all. As he’d told his circus admirers, he was a freak of nature, he insisted, and blue at birth. But when he died that fall--from rapidly worsening pneumonia--they decided to take a thorough look at his story. The resulting autopsy showed that he was blue-silver on the inside too, the membranes smooth and glistening, the muscle tissue a dull, reddish brown with a faint silver tint, the spleen colored a bluish red, the liver bluish gray. Even the brain shone silver, its familiar curves and coils slightly reflective in the pale light of the morgue.

Still, how much metal did his body contain? To find out, city toxicologist Alexander Gettler made an acid solution of the organs and cooked it dry, creating a gray ash. He flushed hot water, ammonia and nitric acid through the ashes, washing the silver out of them. He then measured the silver from each organ, totaling up the results to calculate the whole body content. Gettler’s conservative estimate was that the Blue Man’s body contained a good three-and-a-half ounces of solid silver. About half the metal was in the muscle tissue, another fourth in the bones, and the rest mostly concentrated in the liver, kidneys, heart and brain.

But the silver hadn’t killed the Blue Man. He had died of the pneumonia; the only effect that silver doses seemed to have had was to turn him that remarkable deep indigo color. “Among the heavy metals which may become deposited in the human body in relatively large amounts,” Gettler wrote in his report on the case, “silver is of slight and perhaps least toxicity.”

Of course, the toxicology lab was now in possession of a nice quantity of pure silver. His co-workers took the gleaming pellets acquired from the Blue Man’s body, melted them down and shaped them into a bullet. Just in case, his friends assured Gettler, he ever had to analyze a vampire. He carefully placed the bullet on his desk. Just in case, he replied.

It's a good story--or so I think--but it also makes a case that, among the metals, silver is relatively neutral in effect (as long as one doesn't care, of course, about turning blue or accumulating internal silver deposits). It also led me to consider the possibility that with some effort, one could become the amazing precious metal human, storing wealthyinternally ,so to speak, in which case my choice would be platinum.

But as it turns out, becoming the Famous Platinum Woman,would work only if I was willing to insert the word "Dead" into that description. Platinum turns out not only to be wonderfully valuable but wonderfully poisonous. So, between you and me as concerns metal exposure, I'm hoping to limit myself to those multivitamins.

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Memories of Murder

by Deborah Blum

When I was a baby reporter - which is how I think of my early days in journalism - I covered the cop-and-court beat for The Macon Telegraph, a medium-sized paper in a rather stately town in middle Georgia.

At least the reputation was for stateliness and deep Southern history which is something one tends to miss when hanging out at the county courthouse, covering the trials of rapists and murderers. My memories of Macon - aside from very late nights at a downtown bar called The Rookery - tend to be like antique paintings, golden oils featuring dark paneling and desperate faces.

I covered one trial involving two men who had abducted and beaten to death two elderly women. The bodies were found in the woods in an adjacent county. The prosecutor brought one of the skulls into the courtroom so that the jurors could see how a blow had caused dents and chips in the bone.

In the courtroom breaks, I'd hang out with the cops, flirting a little maybe, trading crime gossip the way any beat reporter does. And often in those discussions she would come up, the killer to whom all needed to compared, the worst of the Macon killers, whose murderous trail, laid in the 1950s, still left its shadow.

"I've saved all the stories," one detective told me, and he had. He gave me a sheaf of photocopies, dark and smudgy the way they used to be, with the headlines over-black and the face of Anjette Lyles, framed by her silvered hair, shining on the page. He rubbed a finger over that smiling image, the arsenic-loving serial killer.

I used to think I might one day write a book about her, the homicidal woman whose pretty face still charmed the older police officers in Macon. Anjette Donovan Lyles, born 1925, was arrested in 1958 for killing two husbands, a mother-in-law and a nine-year-old daughter. Sentenced to die in the electric chair, she was found insane and sent to the mental hospital for the criminally insane in Milledgeville, Ga., where she worked in the prison cafeteria until she died of heart failure in 1977.

But the book already exists, called Whisper at the Black Candle, published by Georgia true crime writer Jaclyn Weldon White in 1999. It tracks Anjette Donovan through her troubled first marriage to Ben Lyles Jr. (and his mysterious death), her marriage to Buddy Gabbert (his excruciating death plagued by ulcerated sores on his skin and internal bleeding), the death of Lyle's mother, and eventually of Anjette's little daughter, Marcia.

At the time of the last two murders, Anjette was running a successful restaurant in Macon. The deaths of her husbands had not raised any suspicions, but these did, especially her daughter's death. During her trial, it came out that she'd bought her daughter's coffin two weeks before the little girl died from arsenic-spiked lemonade. After the death, Anjette shocked nurses in the hospital by gathering up her daughter's clothes, saying "Well, she won't need these anymore," and throwing them away. Autopsies found the poison in all four bodies.

There was a time, I believe, when every crime reporter, every serial killer historian in Georgia knew the story of Anjette Lyles. I have an old friend, once a staff writer at the Atlanta Journal Constitution, who, as Mary Kay Andrews, writes wonderfully charming Southern comedies of manners. I stayed with her this spring while touring for my latest book, The Poisoner's Handbook. Two former cop reporters hanging out, and old Georgia killers naturally came up. And Ms. Lyles herself, whose photograph once hung on a wall at the AJC.

"Was she all glamorous?" I asked, seeing in my memory that silvery glimmering face.

"She was a crone," my friend replied flatly.

I kind of liked that, actually. It's just right to hear evidence that prison takes a toll on serial poisoners, turns beautiful, amoral women into hags trapped behind stone.

It strikes me, though, that some murderers are made for haunting. The killings I described, the beating deaths of the old women? Sometimes I'm caught back there, in that over-bright courtroom cluttered with tales of death and bits of broken bone. And Anjette Lyles? If you can believe it, someone has created a Facebook page in her memory.

The first creepy thing is that it plays to her glamour girl side. The second, at least for me, is that when I looked the page, the most recent post was about me and my poison book. It startled me to see it there, made me wonder why. But maybe it's just what I said earlier; some murders stay in our memories. Some killers call up the ghosts.

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Need a vacation?

Women in Crime Ink contributor and today's poster, Deborah Blum is running a great contest on her Web site. The prize: a luxury trip to Chicago and a crime tour of the city by...ta da.... Deborah Blum. Click here to see details. Ends Friday, so don't delay!

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The Chemistry of Murder

by Deborah Blum

Just for the moment, consider yourself a forensic scientist, an investigator summoned by the police to the scene of a rather puzzling death.

The scene in question is a small, rather shabby apartment in which there has clearly been a gas leak. The cops have opened all the windows to air the place out. In the bedroom at the rear of the dwelling you find a young woman who has clearly been dead for several hours. She lies on the bed - pale, cold and stiff.

Immediately, you realize that something is very wrong with this picture. You have the body sent back to the city morgue for blood tests. And those tests confirm your initial suspicion - the woman did not die of carbon monoxide poisoning.

In fact, further investigation finds that she was suffocated with a pillow before the gas came spilling into the apartment. The killer set the scene hoping that the police would believe it was an accidental death.

So what was the giveaway clue? What made you suspicious when you surveyed that sad little scene?

In fact, this one has an easy answer. If the woman had died of carbon monoxide poisoning, she would not have been pale. Her skin would have been flushed pink; people have actually been known to comment on the healthy look of corpses after a carbon monoxide killing.

There's a very straightforward chemistry to this. When we breathe life-giving oxygen rich air, the oxygen attaches to proteins in blood that carry the gas to every cell in our body. But carbon monoxide (a simple mixture of one carbon atom to every one oxygen atom) bonds much more efficiently to those proteins. I tend to think of it as a chemical thug. It muscles oxygen out of the way, grabs onto the carrier proteins (hemoglobins) and rapidly saturates the blood. That means that even if you are breathing air with some oxygen in it, the carbon monoxide crowds it out.

When enough carbon monoxide invades the blood stream, people die - usually a saturation above 50 percent although some people have been killed by levels in the 40 percent range. Carbon monoxide is a byproduct of the burning of fossil fuels - from gas for lighting, to natural gas for heating, to gasoline in automobiles - and it is an exceptionally efficient killer; in a closed garage, for instance, with a car left running, it has been known to kill people in as little as ten minutes. An analysis by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimated that about 500 people in the United States die from carbon monoxide poisoning every year and 15,000 require emergency treatment for exposure to the gas.

These poisonings leave visible evidence behind. As carbon monoxide levels rise, it sets off a reaction that turns the blood a deep cherry-red, a rosy chemical pink. Even the internal organs gain a dark cherry appearance, easily visible on autopsy. If a body is found pale and cold, many things could be responsible for that death - but definitely not carbon monoxide.

The crime scene I described above actually comes from a murder case in my book, The Poisoner's Handbook, and occurred in 1923. Further investigation found that the dead woman's husband had taken out an insurance policy on her life, suffocated her with a pillow, and then - this is the 1920s, when gas lighting is still prevalent - snapped a gas fitting on a lamp in the bedroom and let the illuminating gas flow out, assuming that police would be fooled.

When pathologists took a closer look at the body, they discovered that he had held the pillow so tightly against her that he had left bruises on the back of her head. When the full chemistry workup was done, the scientists found merely normal urban levels of carbon monoxide in the blood - nothing close to lethal at all.

The husband went to prison and in this case it would be you, the good forensic scientist, who put him there. If someone tried this today - using, say, a "leaky" gas generator instead of old-fashioned illuminating gas - they too would get caught. They too would go to jail. Because a little chemistry - even as simple a calculation as this - goes a long way in catching a killer.

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The Strange Death of Mike the Durable

by Deborah Blum

In the winter of 1933, the empty store stayed dark all day, dusty wooden crates piled high behind the windows. But if you lived close by, you knew that the door opened at night and that behind the stacked boxes was a bare-bones little speakeasy, a sofa, four tables, a plywood bar along the back wall, a fair supply of bootlegged whiskey, and a bartender who slept it off at night on the sofa.

The speakeasy, such as it was, kept its owner out of the breadlines. Barely. Sometimes his patrons paid; sometimes they didn’t. They’d empty the ragtag of coins out of their pockets and put the rest on a tab. Sometimes they paid that tab, sometimes not. The worst was old Michael Malloy, who drifted in and out of employment – street cleaner, coffin polisher - according to whether he was able to stay upright. There were nights when the owner would have sworn that he was pouring most of his profits down Mike Malloy’s neck.

Malloy and money were the topics of discussion one night after he’d had passed out again atop the plywood bar. The speakeasy boss, Tony Marino, and several of his friends were playing an idle game of pinochle, drinking some bootlegged whiskey, all of them worrying over money and the Depression’s hard times.

If only one of them had a wealthy relative or, barring that, a sick one with a good insurance policy. The right kind of dead family member would have really come in handy right then. Too bad none of them had an expendable relative. But perhaps, Marino suggested, they could create one -- someone no one would miss, someone hardly worth keeping alive anyway.

As the story was later told, to a man, they turned to look at Mike Malloy, snoring off another bender in the backroom bar. And at the moment, in a ragtag speakeasy in the Bronx, was chosen the worst possible victim of a murder scheme, a man the newspapers would later dub “Mike the Durable.”

The saga of the almost invincible Mike, the improbably cursed murder syndicate, and the investigation that sent all four of those card players to the electric chair, is probably my favorite true crimes story from The Poisoner’s Handbook. It’s just natural Alfred Hitchcock material, with the same macabre sense of the ridiculous, a corpse that just won't go away, that pervades Hitchcock's film “The Trouble With Harry".

I’m not arguing that murder – in this case the death of a harmless and rather pathetic old man – is laugh track material. But this particular story is a dark comedy of errors. And it definitely proves that familiar saying – you couldn’t make it up – reminding us that even the most creative fiction writers can’t always top what people come up with all by themselves.

The conspirators in the Malloy scheme finalized their plans in January of 1933, clustered around a table at that no-name speakeasy. They’d persuaded their amiable victim to pose as the brother of bartender Red Murphy – in exchange for free whiskey – and taken out two insurance policies with a combined payout of $1,800.

In addition to Murphy, the others in the oddly assembled plot included Marino, a fruit vendor named Daniel Kriesberg, and Frank Pasqua, an increasingly money-strapped funeral home director. Their initial idea was simple. Prohibition was still in effect, and New York City was awash in poison alcohol, the product of shoddy home brews, government efforts to contaminate the liquor supply as an enforcement tool, and bootlegger concoctions. They would just provide Malloy with a generous allotment of bad alcohol and watch him go down.

But the old derelict thrived on bad whiskey, drank himself into a stupor every night, and returned the next day. So they decided on poisonous snacks to go with the liquor – bad oysters, rotten sardine sandwiches, sandwiches with metal shavings, sandwiches with glass. He loved those too.

A month later, they had yet another plan. They waited one night until he passed out, carried him to a park bench on a freezing February night and poured water on him. He didn’t even wake up during the soaking. But he was back next night without so much as catching a cold. Finally, the exasperated would-be killers hired a cab driver, Hershy Green, to run over Malloy in a nearby street. But a policeman found him after the accident and took him to a hospital. He was back in the bar, asking for a drink, a few weeks later.

It wasn’t until the end of February that they figured out a way to kill him, using illuminating gas, dense with poisonous carbon monoxide. Finally, they started collecting their insurance money. But unfortunately – at least for them - the story of the indestructible Malloy was too good to stay secret. It started circulating in other bars, making its way round other card games, until the Bronx police picked the rumors and began an investigation.

And the conspirators had other bad luck too. They’d paid a corrupt local doctor to sign a death certificate attributing Malloy’s death to poison alcohol and had their victim hastily buried. But the city exhumed the body. And even though this was several months after the death, forensic scientists could detect lethal levels of carbon monoxide in the old man’s tissues.

Both the cab driver and the physician made deals and testified for the prosecution. And Murphy, Marino, Kriesberg and Pasqua all went to the electric chair in the summer of 1934. A reporter for the now-vanished New York Daily Mirror recorded the execution in crisp staccato: “The kw-e-e- of the dynamo. Two thousand volts and ten amperes. The rip-saw current that tears one apart. Three shocks.” It was, he wrote, “the State’s toast to old ‘Mike the Durable’.”

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