A Colorful Little Tale of Halloween Poison

by Deborah Blum

I grew up on a dead-end street in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where remnants of swampy forest surrounded the old wood-frame homes. Live oaks lined the streets. Spanish moss dripped from their branches. Snakes coiled under the ancient azaleas that edged the yards.

It was, in fact, the perfect setting for a haunted Halloween night. And there was this one house, you know, where the yard was so dense with bush and tree that it could barely be seen through its thicket of shadow. To trick-or-treat, you walked up the dark sidewalk toward a faint glow on the front porch, just the one lit window. The air hummed with passing insects and the porch creaked like Dracula’s coffin under your feet, the slow, dry eek of old wood.

Reader, you had to beware on Halloween night. Just a block over lived a maniacal dentist who liked to dress up like a werewolf on October 31 and fill his front hall with clouds of drifting fog created by dropping dry ice (super-chilled chunks of carbon dioxide) into water. Bwa-ha-ha, he would chortle as he opened the door, as the chilly wisps of fog drifted out around him.

But this silent house, dressed in darkness, was so much scarier. We children would gather in front of the gate, unable to walk alone through those prowling shadows. The crowd would form on the sidewalk: tiny pillowcase ghosts and jeweled princesses, small pirates and glittery fairies. When someone decided we’d achieved a safe number, we’d start edging toward the green door at the top of the porch steps. Whispering about what the old man who lived there would hand out – what dangerous treats might wait for us there.

This was the 1960s and even then, people told stories, warned their children, about the psychopaths out there who might drop poisoned candy into one’s hands. In the long history of the holiday, truthfully, this has almost never happened. But the very nature of Halloween – the witch at the door, the monster in the closet – lends itself to such ideas. Wasn’t there a crazy woman on Long Island in 1964, after all, who handed out arsenic to trick-or-treaters she thought too old for the candy hunt?

It hardly mattered that as Snopes points out, she didn’t kill anyone. And her deliberate poisoning attempt seems to be an odd exception to the general goodwill of the holiday. The psychopath at the door is an urban myth. Most of the poisonous Halloween stories turn out to be mistakes or far more personal tragedies. The worst is that of a Texas father who murdered his eight-year-old son in 1974 for insurance money.

He did so by putting cyanide into into the fruit-flavored sugar inside a Pixie Stick, one of the child’s favorites. In an attempt to make the death seem like a random poisoning, the father – Ronald Clark O’Bryan – also gave cyanide-laced candy to his daughter and three other children in his Deer Park neighborhood. These other lethal treats were collected by police as (fortunately) the children hadn’t touched them.

O’Bryan – nicknamed The Candyman by the Texas media – was executed by lethal injection ten years after his son’s death. But people remembered. And they forgot that the worst outbreak of Halloween candy poisoning had nothing to do suspected killers. The biggest poison outbreak – linked to Halloween of 1950 – was simply caused by orange food coloring used by candy manufacturers.

Scores of children across the country fell ill with severe diarrhea and welting rashes after eating candy and popcorn balls tinted by the FDA approved Orange Dye No. 1 ( also known as FD&C Orange No. 1, Acid Orange 20, and Orange 1). The “FD&C” indicates that the dye is used in food, drugs and cosmetics. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Orange 1 was used primarily in candy, cookies, cakes, carbonated beverages, and meat-products such as hot dogs.

As federal investigators would discover upon investigation, the dye was also a rash-inducing occupational health hazard. Orange 1 belonged to a group of seven dyes first approved by the federal government in the year 1906, the first year that this country began regulating food safety. All seven of these dyes were coal-tar dyes, derived originally from the hydrocarbon byproducts of processed coal. Orange 1, for instance, contained benzene, today one of our better known toxic compounds.

But at that Halloween moment in 1950, no one had thought much about colored food. In fact, officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration suddenly realized that no one had really taken a good look at these turn-of-the-century food dyes for almost 50 years. The FDA promptly launched an investigation that found that, yes, Orange 1 was definitely poisonous: an oral dose of one gram of the dye per one kilogram of food killed two out of five mice in a day. A 20-week-experiment mixing the dye into rat food killed three of eight test rats.

The researchers also found that manufacturers were tossing the dye into candy corn and sugary little pumpkins with surprising enthusiasm. According to a 1954 article in The New York Times, one piece of candy was 1,500 parts per million pure Orange 1. Two years later, in 1956, the FDA delisted Orange 1 as well as Orange 2 (used to deepen the color of oranges) and Red Dye No. 32. Twelve other food colorings have been delisted since that time. This doesn’t reassure everyone; consumer advocates still worry over the health effects of food coloring.

But – take at least this reassurance: it’s been a long time since we saw children falling ill across the country because they indulged in an extra handful of candy corn, not realizing that its cheerful orange was a signal for trouble. We’re mostly smart enough to realize that regulating food safety offers more protection than worrying about the crazy man behind the door.

Which brings me back to my friends and I hesitating at that shadowy gate on a Halloween night in Louisiana. Let me tell you what happened, Halloween after Halloween. Slowly, we inched down the sidewalk, creaked up the steps, quavered at the door. Slowly, the door pulled open and the slightly tottering elderly man opened the screen to drop glossy red apples into our bags.

Every year it added an extra thrill to the night. But, reader, you had to beware on Halloween night. I’m almost positive they were just bright fall apples. But our parents wouldn’t let us eat them.

Read More

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.

Read More

How to Make a Heart-Stopping Salad

by Deborah Blum

One evening, in the early summer of 2008, a Colorado sheriff's deputy named Jonathan Allen came home to find that his wife had made him a "special" dinner. Waiting on the table was his favorite spicy spaghetti dish and a big leafy bowl of salad.

As he told investigators later, some of those leaves in the salad were startling bitter. But his wife told him it was just a spring mix. He assumed it contained another of those trendy herbs that people use to liven things up. "Make sure you eat your greens," she added. "They're good for you."

So, he didn't worry when his toddler daughter tried to grab a bite and his wife, Lisa, reached out to stop the child. It was only a few hours later, when he was rushed to hospital suffering from severe stomach cramps and a wildly speeding heart, that he started to worry. And wonder.

After his stomach was pumped and the contents analyzed, Allen was no longer puzzled by his symptoms. The bitter taste was traced to leaves from a familiar and beautiful ornamental shrub, one growing in the family garden, in fact. Allen survived but he did not return to his home in the suburban Denver town of Golden, Colorado. He carefully stayed away while authorities launched an investigation into exactly how foxglove leaves got into the dinner salad.

And this year--about six months ago--42-year-old Lisa Leigh Allen pleaded guilty to felony assault, avoiding a trial for attempted murder with what The Denver Post called a "lethal plant." She was sentenced in mid-March to four-and-a-half years in prison.

A lethal plant is definitely one way to describe foxglove but--and, I have to admit, the description made me laugh--also definitely too simplistic. Yes, the foxglove plant is poisonous, but the very properties that make it poisonous also make it the source of some of our most important heart medications. I'll give that paradox away when I tell you that the common foxglove belongs to a family of plants with the Latin name of Digitalis. The plant that ended up in the Colorado deputy's summer salad is formally called Digitalis purpurea, but it also goes by some wonderfully evocative common names such as Witch's Glove, Bloody Fingers, and Dead Man's Bells.

Plants in the Digitalis family are packed with sugar-rich organic molecules called glycosides that can directly affect the rhythmic beat of the heart. The most important of these is called digoxin, or sometimes just digitalis, and is used to treat cardiac arrhythmias and to strengthen contractions of the heart. The knowledge that foxglove extracts affect the heart is nothing new--it was first reported in 1785 by a British physician named William Withering--but medical understanding of how it works is fairly recent.

For instance, digoxin (and a related compound digitoxin) are known to trigger a cascade of chemical reactions which increase the amount of calcium delivered to muscle cells. This increases the strength of the muscular contractions, thus giving new power to a weakened heart beat. Digitalis can also stimulate the nerves which regulate the internal pacing of the heart beat.

So, at the prescribed dose, digitalis is the opposite of lethal--a life-saving compound, in fact. But the proper dose is extremely small, and the body sounds warning bells if digitalis levels get too high. Early symptoms include nausea, stomach cramps, headaches and even hallucinations. It won't surprise you to know that the worst effect of digitalis poisoning is on the heart--its powerful effect on the heart muscle varies, depending on the individual, but an overdose can either slow the beat to a complete halt or speed it to a point of lethal over-taxation.

Thus, Jonathan Allen's early warning symptoms--the stomach cramps, the acute nausea, the racing heart beat--added a little more evidence to the case against his wife. The prosecution was also helped by searching her computer's hard drive, where investigators found a search history for foxglove, digitalis, and the homicidal possibilities. "I couldn't fathom that my wife was trying to kill me," Allen said during his wife's sentencing hearing. He was writhing with pain shortly before calling for an ambulance: "I went to bed and laid next to her. She said, 'It's probably just stress from your job.'"

Testimony in the sentencing hearing also detailed a very troubled marriage. Lisa Allen and her father testified that her husband was possessive and physically abusive and he had warned her that she would never be able to leave. Jonathan Allen said she and her family had been telling such lies about him for years. Even the judge finally wondered out loud why the couple hadn't separated, as both of their families had urged earlier.

It would have been, after all, a much better option than mixing up a heart-stopping salad.

Read More

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.

Read More

Death of a Wonder Horse

-

by Deborah Blum

The name Phar Lap comes from an Asian word for lightning; a sky flash. A passing dazzle of light, a spark in the night.

And so he was, the big copper racehorse from Australia, his dazzling speed making him one of those unexpected beacons of hope during the Great Depression who, according to a report published in an international chemistry journal in April, was killed by a massive dose of arsenic.

Of course, no one who follows race horse history could be entirely surprised by that finding. For one thing, it built on preliminary results from 2006. But from the day Phar Lap died in California on April 5, 1932, rumors have circulated and suspicion simmered that he was killed by someone from the gambling syndicates who had invested in other horses.

After all, gamblers in Australia had earlier tried to shoot the big horse.

The Wonder Horse -- one of his many nicknames, along with the Red Terror -- was born in October 1926 in New Zealand and thought to have so little promise that he was purchased as a two-year-old by American businessman David J. Davis for about $130 (US). As the story goes, when the gangly youngster shambled into sight, the new owner was so horrified, he refused to pay to train him. The Australian trainer, Harry Telford, offered to train the colt for free in exchange for eventual part ownership of the horse.

Phar Lap won his first race a year later and, as they say, didn't look back. He'd matured into a beautiful, powerful chestnut with a cheerful disposition and a drive to win. Too much of a winner, some thought. On November 1, 1930, the day of the prestigous Melbourne Stakes, a car started following him on the way back from morning practice and shots -- apparently ordered by a rival owner -- were fired at the big horse. They missed, and no one was ever caught although a furious Davis offered a $100 reward, huge for the time. Phar Lap, though, remained unfazed. And won the race.

In fact, it was one of 14 straight victories that year, followed by 14 straight victories in 1931. In his four-year racing career, Phar Lap ran hard and often and fast. He won 37 of 51 races, and that would include his last.

Davis, by now enamoured of his bargain colt, decided to enter him in an international big prize race, the Agua Caliente Handicap, at a track near Tijuana, Mexico. The purse for the winner of that race would be more than $11,000 (comparable to about $100,000 today). Although Telford was reluctant, Phar Lap was shipped by boat to Mexico. In a hard-fought race, he once again triumphed in a flying finish, still watchable, in fact, in a YouTube video.

Three days later he was dying.

Davis had moved him to a private ranch near Menlo Park, California, while he negotiated for entrance into other lucrative private races. On that morning of April 5, 1932, one of the stablehands found the big horse convulsing in agony. Phar Lap died several hours later. Speculation of deliberate poisoning has followed his story ever since, although alternative theories have been offered -- from severe gastroenteritis to accidental poisoning from the use of pesticides on the ranch.

Phar Lap was such a sweet-natured horse that those who knew him mourned not only the loss of a champion athlete but the loss of a friend. Telford said, "A human being couldn't have had more sense. He was almost human, could do anything but talk ... I loved that horse."

The racehorse was such a hero -- and a martyr -- to fans in Australia and New Zealand that museums from both countries telegraphed to ask for the chance to display the horse. Davis, after consulting with Telford, decided to send Phar Lap's "great" heart to Australia's National Institute of Anatomy in Canberra. The skeleton went to the Dominion Museum in New Zealand. And the hide was sent to the National Museum of Victoria, in Melbourne, where taxidermists labored for four months to create a life-like replica of the Wonder Horse, from his shining red coat to his tousled mane.

In the years since his death, songs have been written to the horse, movies been made about his life story. But it's that mane that eventually solved the mystery of what -- if not who -- killed Phar Lap. Australian researchers removed six hairs and then used a highly specialized x-ray microsope to bombard them with intense radiation, illuminating the chemical makeup of the hair. The analysis (done at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois) is so precise that it allows scientists to tell whether material was absorbed from the blood or introduced after death, such as through embalming processes.

In the case of Phar Lap, researchers were able to determine that arsenic had been metabolized: the horse had been given a massive dose of arsenic one to two days before he died. Those preliminary results were released a couple years ago. The final report, the official conclusion, was published in April under the title Determination of Arsenic Poisoning and Metabolism in Hair by Synchrotron Radiation: The Case of Phar Lap.

A tidy, scientific way of describing a shameful episode and an example of epically bad sportsmanship. I'm glad that researchers in Australia were so determined to find some answers about the death of Phar Lap, even if it serves only to remind us of the realities of the American horse racing business of the 1930s, with its underpinnings of crooked money and sweaty desperation.

It's not justice, of course. Because Phar Lap deserved so much better. The big copper horse deserved to be more than a fleeting star, a flash in the sky. He deserved a chance to finish his glorious career with a much-petted old age in one of those fabled green pastures ... I hope that whoever came bearing arsenic to the stable in those soft April days of 1932 didn't finish out his own days happy and healthy. The man -- whoever he was -- deserves so much worse.

Read More

The Poisoning of a Flapper Girl

by Deborah Blum

First, this is the story of a beautiful young actress, the adventure-loving heroine of hit films such as Madcap Madge and the Flapper. But second, and perhaps important, it is the cautionary tale of her death by poison at the age of 25, just as she was making the move from starlet to full-fledged star.

The actress, Olive Thomas, had the look of a charming child - a shining bob of dark, curly hair, big violet-blue eyes, and a pale, heart-shaped face. It was a look that launched her career, starting in 1914 when she’d won a “Most Beautiful Girl in New York City" contest. She went on to become a featured Ziegfield Follies dancer, a graceful waif drifting in a zephyr of scarves. The pin-up artist, Alberto Vargas, painted her wearing only a red rose and a wisp of lacy black satin. Within a few years, she was making films for Selznick Studios.

In the way of people who seem to own charmed lives, Thomas soon married a member of Hollywood’s inner circle, Jack Pickford – younger brother of screen star Mary Pickford. The couple rapidly developed a reputation for wild behavior, intense partying, intense quarreling, usually over his numerous side affairs – he’d developed syphilis as a result of one of them. They separated, reunited, separated, tried again, ever delighting the gossip magazines. “She and Jack were madly in love with one another, but I always thought of them as a couple of children playing together…” Mary Pickford wrote sadly in her autobiography many years later.

In early September 1920, the couple sailed away to Paris, reportedly on a reconciliation holiday. They checked into the Hotel Ritz and whirled off to enjoy time in a Prohibition-free city, drinking and dancing at the Left Bank bistros until the early morning. At the end one particularly drunken spree, Pickford and Thomas staggered into their hotel room at nearly three in the morning. Jack, barely standing, simply fell into the bed. His wife, still restless, still energized by the evening, puttered around the room, wrote a letter, and finally tiring, went into the bathroom to get ready for sleep.

As Pickford told the police, he was floating in a whiskeyed haze when Olive began screaming, over and over, “Oh my God, my God.” He stumbled into the dimly lit bathroom, where she was leaning against the counter. Mistaking it for her sleeping medicine, she had picked up a bottle of the bichloride of mercury antiseptic lotion that he rubbed on the painful sores caused by syphilis, poured a dose, and chugged it down.

Also known by the rather awful name of corrosive sublimate, the compound is acutely poisonous; it kills by attacking the digestive track and eventually destroying the kidneys. As the name implies, corrosive sublimate is extremely caustic. As it burned down her throat, she had a moment to realize her mistake. He caught her up and carried her back to the bed, grabbing the phone and calling for an ambulance. “Oh my God,” she repeated, “I’m poisoned.”

As the story broke, as Thomas lingered in the hospital for three more days, the newspapers repeated every rumor smoking around them – his infidelities had driven her to suicide; Pickford had wished to get rid of her and tricked his wife into taking the poison; as the days passed, he became more evil, she more saintly. So many people flocked to Thomas’s funeral in Paris that women fainted in the crush and the streets became carpeted with countless hats, knocked off and trampled.

The police launched an investigation, including an autopsy, and concluded that it was, as Pickford had said, just a terrible accident. In an interview with The Los Angeles Examiner after his return to California, Pickford couldn’t stop dwelling on how much his wife had wanted to live: “The physicians held out hope for her until the last moment, until they found her kidneys paralyzed. Then they lost hope. But the doctors told me she had fought harder than any patient they ever had.”

Olive Thomas’s death by bichloride of mercury wasn’t the first, wasn’t the only, and wouldn’t be the last. In New York City, the medical examiner’s office calculated that the compound caused about 20 deaths a year, mostly suicides. But Thomas definitely gave the poison a new star status, and her death still serves as one of many reminders – not always appreciated – that mercury has made a poisonous path through far too much of human history.

Read More

Black-Eyed Borgia

by Deborah Blum

Mary Frances Creighton, Fanny to her friends, was a rather appealing 24-year-old in the summer of 1923. She had curling dark hair, pale skin, “deep, luminous eyes,” according to The New York Evening Post, and lush, “petulant lips,” according to The New York American.

The New York Times more sedately described her as a “comely brunette,” or as “a young mother.” She had a three-year-old daughter, Ruth, and a newly born son, John Jr. The baby had been born in the Newark, N.J. jail, while both she and her husband, John, (together, above left) awaited a trial on charges that they’d killed Fanny's young brother with arsenic.

Hence all the publicity. The newspapers ran few photos of scrawny sandy-haired John. But Fanny Creighton willingly posed for admiring photographers: dressed in long-sleeved demure black, despite the summer heat, eyes lowered, carved silver cross hanging around her neck, infant cradled in her arms.

The image was of a gentle Madonna, the least likely person to have killed a younger brother for a life insurance payout.

The jurors also believed her an unlikely murderer. Both the Creightons were found innocent of the charges. But, in fact, although her husband was only a dupe in the affair, Fanny Creighton was guilty. She admitted to the killing a dozen years later. That was after she’d been charged with yet another arsenic murder.

In the second case – the murder of a close friend’s wife on Long Island – Creighton (and the close friend) went to the electric chair. This time, the press did not find her so appealing: “The Black-Eyed Borgia” screamed one headline. And this time the evidence was not so easily brushed away – the forensic results were so precise that the laboratory could identify the brand of arsenic-laced rat poison used – and the guilty decision came very quickly.

The different endings to two prosecutions of the same woman offer a remarkable measure of how much and how fast forensic science had grown up in the intervening decade. Today, we tend to take such scientific expertise for granted. This is not to imply perfection in a human enterprise. We’ve all followed recent scandals involving overworked criminal laboratories that misstated or even made up some of the findings. But that involves people making bad, really bad, decisions. The basic science itself – our ability to tease a poison out of tissue, identify a blood type, analyze traces of fibers or soils – those techniques stand as solid.

That was far from true in the early 20th century. Elected coroners often knew nothing about science or how to determine cause of death. As I learned in researching my book, The Poisoner's Handbook, death certificates from the time period sometimes merely gave “Act of God” as the cause. Police detectives regarded these strangers from laboratories with real suspicion, refusing to accept their findings. And lawyers found laboratory results to be a wonderfully easy target.

All of that worked perfectly to Fanny Creighton’s advantage in her first murder trial: “My clients know nothing of how this boy came to be poisoned!” her lawyer declared.

John Creighton and Mary Frances Avery were long time friends when they married in 1919. He was the son of an executive with the Pennsylvania Railroad Company. She, her brother and two sisters were orphans, cared for by affluent grandparents.

The newlyweds moved in with Creighton's parents, who owned a big, two-story home in Newark’s comfortable Roseville neighborhood. They shared the space for a year until his mother died at age 47 of apparent attack of food poisoning in 1920. His father, also 47, died the following year, of a sudden heart ailment.

 

In the 1920s, a powdery form of arsenic called white arsenic, also known as arsenic trioxide, was mixed into an astonishing array of home products. These included a tonic to improve one’s complexion (Fowler’s solution), prescription medicines, weed killers and pesticides, such as the popular rat poison Rough on Rats, which was 10 percent soot and 90 percent white arsenic. In their analysis of Charles Avery’s body, forensic scientists could easily detect arsenic in the tissues – tests had been available since the mid-19^th century – but they were unable to figure out which of these many poisons was responsible.

Fanny Creighton used Fowler's Solution to improve her pale complexion. But as her attorney pointed out, the mixture was so dilute that it would have taken gallons to kill the boy. Avery had access to rat poison at the grocery where he worked. The Creightons' attorney suggested that he might have taken it himself. His sister said he was depressed about a girl. The jury found the poison evidence so inconclusive that they quickly returned a not-guilty verdict. The angry prosecutor – convinced that Fanny, at least, was a murderer - then charged her with using arsenic to kill her mother-in-law. But that case foundered on even thinner scientific results. As Fanny Creighton walked away from the courthouse, she sent the prosecutor a message of forgiveness: “I bear no malice toward anyone.”

After the trial, the Creightons left New Jersey and moved to the small town of Baldwin on Long Island. During the Depression, they rented part of their home to another couple, Everett and Ada Applegate. Fanny had lost her dark Madonna looks by then. But her daughter Ruth was a rather lovely 15-year-old, and Ev Applegate decided he'd much rather be married to Ruth than to Ada, who was both fat and ill-tempered. Ev began sleeping with Ruth on the sly, and he told Fanny that if only he were free, he'd be glad to marry her daughter.

On September 27, 1935, Ada Applegate died of acute gastrointestinal distress. Prompted by an anonymous letter, the police opened and investigation and requested a forensic analysis. This time the tests -- done by New York's star toxicologist Alexander Gettler -- were inarguable. Not only did Gettler find three times the lethal dose of arsenic in Ada Applegate's body, he was able to identify the impurities in the poison as soot -- in fact, the exact proportion of soot found in Rough on Rats. The police traced the purchase of the poison, and Applegate and Creighton admitted to buying it together.

Creighton (left) also admitted, in an interview, that she'd used Rough on Rats to kill her brother. Investigators just hadn't known then how to identify it so precisely. It was such precision -- and a new awareness by police and the public of the science itself -- that changed the way we think about forensic medicine. There also was a very definite message in the end of Mary Frances Creighton's story. 

On July 16, 1936, she and Everett Applegate went to the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison.

Read More

Jazz Age Science Enters Courtroom

by Deborah Blum 

The first week of December 1926 was clouded in fog. The mist lapped along the rivers, muffled the harbors, made eerie the dry creak of boats rubbing against docks in the water. 

Far too early one morning a Brooklyn police officer patrolling along the East River caught a half-glimpse of a man hurrying through the fog.  As the figure neared the edge of a wharf, the officer could see that the man walked slightly bent as he carried a heavy-looking bundle. The patrolman shouted for the man to halt but instead he hastily dropped his burden and kicked it into the river.

The officer called again as the man fled. Together with a hurriedly approaching fellow patrolman, he tackled the fugitive to the ground. But the stranger refused to answer any of their questions. They took him to the station house where, in the sudden brilliance of a lit room, the officers suddenly realized that their captive’s trouser cuffs and socks were sodden with blood. Once they’d pried out his name, they hurried to his apartment.  The kitchen was a scene from a horror movie, complete with bloody cleaver and jagged saw on the table and a woman’s body on the floor.

Half a body, actually. Everything below the waist was missing – and the police now deduced, long lost in the East River.

I’ve had a love-hate reaction to this story ever since I discovered it in the forgotten archives of New York City history. It’s terrible and it’s tragic.  It’s soaked in blood, literally. But it has a really terrific twist at the end. And even more important, it’s a classic story of chemical detective work from a time when forensic science was so new that scientists were a peculiarity in the courtroom.

I’ve been working as a science writer for most of my career, first at newspapers (won a Pulitzer in 1992 for writing about primate research) and as a book author. In the past decade, I’ve published books on the biology of sex differences, on the science of love and affection, and on whether it’s possible to prove life after death. I sound, I know, like someone with a short attention span. Mostly I just like exploring the different ways that science changes our lives, alters our history, explains who we are today.

Of course, when I first started thinking about writing a book about poison and murder it was also because I just found the subject fascinating. I grew up with my mother’s collection of early 20th  century crime fiction: Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Georgette Heyer, Leslie Ford, all of whom found poison to be the most seductive of murder weapons. I liked the idea of trying to catch some of that seductiveness in a book that would also explain the science of how poisons actually work. 

But it wasn’t until I started looking at the early history of forensics that I found a way to tell the story.  My book, "The Poisoner's Handbook," would become the tale of two forgotten scientists – medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler -- from early 20th century New York City who helped launch the science of forensics in the United States and also solved some of the most famous murder cases of their time.

The 1920s was a treasure trove of innovative, dangerous chemistry.  There were compounds created by military innovations of the Great War, by industrial applications, research into new medicines, and the speakeasy culture born with Prohibition, with its smoky jazz clubs and dubious cocktails. Morphine went into teething medicines for infants; opium into routinely prescribed sedatives; arsenic was an ingredient in everything from pesticides to cosmetics.

Against that background, early forensic scientists literally had to invent rules of chemical detection as they went.  Alexander Gettler, for instance, wrote the fundamental paper on cyanide (still cited by the EPA), created the first tests that could prove intoxication at time of death, discovered how to detect chloroform levels in the brain of a dead person, and did some of the fundamental work on the still-dangerous gas carbon monoxide and how it kills us.  He’s still mentioned by experts as “the father of forensic toxicology in the United States.”

The twist on that dismembered body story I mentioned earlier comes from work done by both Gettler and his boss, Charles Norris. As it turns out, it’s not so much a story of death by hacksaw as death by poison. The toxic material in question turns out to be the very lethal gas, carbon monoxide.

Norris was the pathologist on duty the night Brooklyn police discovered the partial body of Anna Frederickson in the apartment of Francisco Travia. By the time Norris arrived at the scene, the police had already charged Travia, a longshoreman, with hacking the woman to death. But Norris, after looking at the body, insisted that they were wrong.

The woman’s face and what was left of her body was flushed an odd cherry red. People who bled to death, he pointed out, tended to be waxy pale. He took the half-body back to the morgue at Bellevue for autopsy and sent tissue and blood samples to Gettler.

If you know carbon monoxide, you know it’s characteristic for people poisoned by the gas to be flushed pink, even after death. Carbon monoxide crowds oxygen out of the blood stream. Its chemistry gives it a more effective grip on blood-borne proteins that normally distribute oxygen.  As the blood is saturated with the by-products of carbon monoxide, a unique chemical reaction causes to become a brighter, pinker color.

Not only does the skin of a carbon monoxide victim become strangely rosy but also internal organs are stained a deep cherry-red. This effect is so persistent that carbon monoxide saturated blood will often remain that startling crimson weeks or even months after death.

Before the Travia case, Gettler had run experiments proving that the body cannot absorb carbon monoxide after death. So when tests showed that Travia’s victim had lethal levels of carbon monoxide in her blood, it was obvious that she had to have absorbed those killing levels while still alive. In other words, she was dead of carbon monoxide poisoning before Travia cut her up.

Faced with the evidence, Travia confessed that he and the victim had been drinking (illegally, since this was during Prohibition) that night. Both had passed out and when he awoke, she was dead. Not realizing that his gas stove was leaky, he was afraid that he’d be suspected of murder. So he decided to make the body disappear, cutting it apart and putting the pieces in the river.

The police refused to accept his explanation or the new strange science of forensics. But when Travia went to trial, the jury believed his story. He was found guilty of illegally dismembering a body and sentenced to a year in prison. If convicted of murder, he would have been destined for the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. The chemical detective work of Norris and Gettler saved his life – and would go on to make forensic toxicology an essential part of solving crimes today. 

Read More