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>> Norman Gilliland: Welcome to

University Place.

I'm Norman Gilliland, Wisconsin

Public Broadcasting.

Prohibition gave many Americans,

otherwise law-abiding people,

the idea that breaking the law

could be fun.

And if the crime was really big,

well, the bigger the thrill.

If the crime was murder, well,

you couldn't get much more

thrilling than that.

And one of the best ways to

commit murder in the 1920s was

to use poison, partly because

there was so much poison in

everyday life, anyhow.

So how could the law determine

what was an accident and what

was murder, if poison was

involved?

Well, our guest will tell us.

She's Deborah Blum, professor of

science journalism at the

University of Wisconsin-Madison

and the author of

"The Poisoner's Handbook:

Murder and the Birth

of Forensic Medicine

in Jazz Age New York."

Glad to have you

on University Place.

>> Deborah Blum: Thanks

for having me.

>> I'm sure we'll get some

secrets here that probably

should stay here rather than be

put into use in the home.

>> I try not to give, like,

murder instructions when I'm

talking about the book.

( both laugh )

>> Well, we start with

this fantastic cauldron of

activity, the 1920s, the Jazz

Age and science really taking

off more than ever, and crime

doing likewise.

And criminals, perhaps, becoming

even more scientific in their

methods.

So did the law manage to keep up

with the criminals when it came

to poison in Jazz Age New York?

>> Well, at the start they

really didn't.

There was not a good

relationship between scientists

and the police.

They weren't used to using them.

The city of New York in

particular had not had

professional scientists really

looking at poisons, so at the

start of the Jazz Age, this

really interesting situation

where scientists are trying to

figure out how to integrate

themselves into the criminal

justice system.

There isn't a good sort of

foundation of chemistry to

understand poisons.

And poisoners are really just

one step ahead of the game when

the Jazz Age starts.

It makes it a very interesting

period.

>> So what were some of the

poisons that were out there?

And first, before we even get to

that, who were some of the

sleuths working for the side of

goodness and truth?

>> It's kind of fantastic when

you look at the period because

it was so easy to get poisons.

You could go, even a child could

go to a grocery store and get

arsenic.

It was in all kinds of regularly

used household ingredients, from

cosmetics to rat poison.

Mercury was in common medicines,

again, and mercury is a

tremendous poison.

Radioactive materials were

available in makeup and health

drinks.

I'm trying to think of another

really good one.

Poisons were everywhere.

Cyanide was used commonly in

photo processing and strychnine

was used as a stimulant, so if

you really wanted to get your

hands on a poison, they were

right there.

And the book, "The Poisoner's

Handbook," really follows the

efforts of two scientists in

particular to try to get a

handle on this and to get ahead

of poisoners.

And one of them was Charles

Norris, who was the first

professional medical examiner in

New York City.

He came in in 1918.

And one of the first things he

did was hire the first forensic

chemist ever attached to a city

in the United States.

And his name was Alexander

Gettler.

>> Was this an uphill struggle?

Was this considered a

newfangled, expensive,

speculative form of crime

busting?

>> It was an incredible uphill

struggle.

And in fact, when Norris came

in, New York and actually most

cities had an electoral

appointed coroner system.

The cities didn't require the

coroner to have any medical

training.

New York's coroners had been

sign painters and milkmen.

And so the police had spent

literally years avoiding the

so-called "science of crime" and

so not only did they have to

invent the science that kind of

defined the poisons, they had to

persuade their colleagues in the

police and in the courts that

they actually were worth

listening to.

>> This took some money, too, of

course, which couldn't have been

easy, even in the '20s.

>> It did, and because people

were so used to the old system,

the government of New York was

really resistant to funding

Norris's office.

The great thing was the Norris

was actually independently

wealthy, and he spent thousands

of dollars, which in the 1920s

was lots of money, thousands of

dollars of his own money.

He bought equipment for the

laboratory, he paid salaries.

There was one mayor he was

fighting with who took the

clocks off the walls.

He bought the clocks and put

them back.

So one of the things I've always

thought when you look at these

two guys is, you have Norris,

who's a natural public servant,

and willing to put his own money

into it, which you don't see

that often today.

And you have Gettler, who's the

most obsessive chemist in the

world.

Maybe not the world, but one of

the most obsessive, determined,

foot solider chemists.

And they come together and they

really reinvent forensic

medicine in the United States.

Gettler is called the father of

forensic toxicology, in fact.

>> Well, before we get into some

of their specific cases, some of

them spectacular, let's look at

this sort of rogue's gallery of

poisons that were out there and

fairly readily available.

>> Arsenic.

And arsenic had been the

homicidal killer's best friend

for really a couple of

centuries.

It started to sort of lose that

grip in the 1900s.

Arsenic is a wonderful poison

because it's tasteless, it's

odorless.

Ground fine it has almost no

texture, so poisoners could put

it into food.

It would mimic the symptoms, and

it does, of a natural illness.

And because scientists, up until

about the 1900s, did not know

how to extract arsenic from the

tissues of a corpse, there was

no way to prove it was a poison.

And so arsenic was actually the

first poison that scientists

tried to get a grip on.

Cyanide, which you can get from,

actually, extracted from the

pits of apricots and peaches.

>> You could make your own

cyanide?

>> If you really wanted to, and

it would be laborious, you could

make your own cyanide.

So you had cyanide, cyanide was

widely available.

Mercury was in medicines.

What else?

Antimony, which I don't go into

in the book, which is related to

arsenic.

One of the most interesting

poisons to me is one we still

have today, which is carbon

monoxide.

At that point, you had gas

lighting.

It was really easy to stage a

murder, essentially, with carbon

monoxide, and people did that.

And carbon monoxide's a

beautiful and lethal poison.

>> Yes, easily fatal.

>> And radium.

Radium's an interesting poison

because it's a radioactive

element.

And at that time, people thought

of radioactive elements as

wonderful things, so their

attitude toward it throughout

the 1920s was very different

than what we have today.

And now, you see, like in

espionage cases.

A few years ago they had a

former Russian spy who was

killed with polonium 210, which

is sort of a structural cousin

of radium, also discovered by

Marie Curie.

Now we'll look at these and

we'll say, oh, this is something

dangerous.

>> They take longer, though,

don't they, those radioactivity

related deaths?

Certainly that Russian spy took

a while.

>> Right, and again, it's dose

related.

If you had a major blast of

radiation you'd probably die a

lot faster, but the problem for

that guy and in some of the

stories I tell in the book is,

they work particularly well if

you swallow them, because some

of their radiation our skin

protects us from.

But once you get it inside, it's

a different story.

>> What about good old-fashioned

chloroform?

We usually think of that as

something just to knock somebody

out, but actually it could also

be used to kill people?

>> Oh, that's a good point.

Chloroform is really the poison

I used when I started the book,

because I was tracking a

chloroform serial killer who

confessed and still actually

walked away.

And one of the reasons he was

able to walk away is that the

coroner who took on his case

didn't know anything about the

science of chloroform, and

didn't realize they could find

it in the corpses.

And so he actually told the

prosecuting attorney there was

no way to prove that the man had

chloroform.

Chloroform was invented in the

mid-19th century, as a surgical

anesthetic.

And it was a great step up in a

lot of ways from ether, which

was flammable, because at that

time they were using candles to

light operating theaters.

>> That wouldn't be a good

combination.

>> Right.

And they used to blow up.

So along came chloroform, which

was a wonderful thing until two

things happened.

One, criminals discovered it was

really an effective poison.

And they discovered that because

doctors discovered that their

patients were mysteriously dying

on the operating table and

chloroform turned out to be

unpredictably really deadly.

>> In terms of the dose, you

couldn't tell whether this was

put-em-under or put-em-away.

>> Right, you actually could not

set a safe dose for chloroform,

which made it not a great

anesthetic.

The other thing that happened

was that home invasion

burglaries were one of the - or

burglars who did home invasions,

they loved chloroform.

And if you go back and you look

at the newspapers in the early

20th century, you'll actually

find these things where, you

hear a knock on the door, you go

to the door, someone puts a

chloroform-soaked rag over your

face, you wake up everything's

gone.

And there was one of my favorite

cases.

Hair was really valuable then

for wigs.

There was a young woman, a knock

on the door, she opens it, she

wakes up, she's bald, right?

Because that's all they were

doing, they were going around

and stealing hair.

I mean, it was a fantastically

interesting time.

So I looked at chloroform in

that sense, and I looked at a

really interesting problem which

was, you could kill someone with

chloroform, even someone really

rich and powerful.

And the example I looked at was

William Rice, who endowed Rice

University in Texas.

>> Good case, so that's one of

the earlier ones.

It was 1900, I think?

>> Right.

And Rice was apparently killed

with chloroform.

They took the killers to trial

and the doctors essentially got

in a dog fight in the courtroom

about how the chloroform had

killed him, could you even find

it in the body, and eventually

they had to let everyone go.

So it made a great case of

showing how you could actually

even figure out the poison and

still lose in the courtroom,

which was one of the problems we

see going into the 20th century.

People actually didn't believe

you could win a poison case.

>> Because it was a fact of

prosecution's science against

defense's science?

>> That's exactly right.

The prosecutions had failed too

many times, the science wasn't

coherent enough.

You'd get these kind of furious

arguments in the courtroom.

People would throw up their

hands.

And there wasn't - we take for

granted the kind of CSI of

today.

>> It's definite.

>> Yeah, you have the state

laboratory scientists or the

federal scientist comes up and

tells us what the lab found.

They didn't have that then.

I mean, when someone like an

Alexander Gettler came and

testified in the courtroom,

people didn't know what to do

with him.

So you see in the 1920s this

evolution where the expert

witness, the scientific expert

witness, starts to become

someone people listen to.

And the interesting thing with

Gettler was that by the end of

his career in the '30s, defense

attorneys were complaining that

all he had to do was sit down in

the chair and the jury said,

"That person must be guilty."

Because he had become almost

too credible.

>> So credible.

And now you have a chunk of

something here that you brought

in.

It looks like, what are we

looking at here?

>> That's radium.

And radium was mined and you'd

find it in these kind of chunks.

That's a chunk of ore that you'd

extract radium from.

>> Just sitting there like any

other kind of household item.

>> Right.

Well, it wouldn't actually go

into your household in quite

that chunk, but that's a good

image.

That's actually a chunk of

uranium ore that you would find

radium in the tailings.

And Marie Curie discovered this.

She was working with uranium in

the late 19th century and there

was way more radiation than

uranium should have been giving

off.

And eventually, she

painstakingly figured out that

it wasn't the uranium, it was a

much more active element called

radium that emitted, had much

more intensity than uranium and

immediately people started

looking at it and using it to

treat cancer.

>> What reason did they have to

do that?

What was the inspiration that

made them want to treat cancer?

>> There had been some other

experimentation actually with

radioactive ores earlier, like

uranium, in which they'd seen

some shrinkage of tumors.

So now you have this very rare

ore that has a lot more energy.

People would actually, doctors

would take a tiny piece of

uranium and put in a glass tube

and insert it into a tumor.

So you have the thing inside

you.

But those tumors would shrink,

because we do know that

basically as the cells are

dividing, they're getting

bombarded by this lethal dose

and it kills them.

So what happened, and what makes

radium so interesting, and you

see here in this slide, "radium

is a wonderful medicine."

People started thinking of

radium as a tiny health-giving

sun.

That's the image I always think

of it, this little sparkling sun

in the ground.

And they went right from radium

to treat cancer into radium to

improve your entire health.

There were radium health books.

Radium to make you more

beautiful.

There were radium face creams.

I always imagine this, you put

it on, your skin glows, your

face falls off.

It was just horrible.

Radium candy that they used to

give to kids to kind of perk

them up.

You just can't believe, they put

radium into everything.

And the other thing they did

with radium, which is really

interesting, came out of

World War I.

And that is, one of the great

inventions of World War I was

the wristwatch because they

discovered that if you were a

soldier crawling around in a

trench with your pocket watch,

they would fall out, they would

get crushed.

The military came up with a

strap to hold the watch on the

wrist.

And then they needed instruments

that would be luminous at night

but not bright enough to let the

enemy see.

So they were looking for

something to produce this very

faint glow and they discovered

that if you mixed radium and

zinc, the zinc atoms would get

excited and they would glow.

And they came up with luminous

paints.

And after World War I, this was

an enormous fad.

Everyone wanted a wristwatch.

Everyone wanted a glowing watch.

Even a glowing clock.

And so you got this boom in

factories in which the watch

faces got more and more

beautiful, almost artists

painting these watch faces and

they hired very young girls and

they would paint these

elaborate, lacy numbers and

designs.

And to make the brushes sharp

enough to make these designs,

they would lick the point.

And every time they dipped this

brush back into their mouth...

>> They were ingesting radium.

>> They were swallowing

the paint.

>> For hours a day.

>> Yes.

They'd paint hundreds of these

watch faces a day, because they

were paid a penny a face.

And they thought they were just

making themselves healthier.

In fact, you can go back, people

later called these

the "radium girls."

And they would paint their teeth

to make little Cheshire Cat

smiles.

>> In other words, they were

playing with it.

>> Yes, they played with the

radium.

And later when scientists

finally started looking at them,

they said if they took these

girls and they turned out the

light, they glowed like ghosts

in the dark.

They were just so covered with

radium.

And the reason scientists

started looking at them is

literally they started to

crumble from within.

Their jaws broke.

>> It was the bone structure

that the radium would

disintegrate.

>> Right.

Because what happened was, and

this is what makes radium such

an interesting poison, it's

structurally a whole lot like

calcium.

And when you swallow it, almost,

your body takes it up like

calcium.

It goes to the bones.

And once it's in the bones you

have now this radioactive

material emitting and literally

it just destroyed the bones.

It destroyed bone marrow, so

that you started seeing

leukemias and aplastic anemias.

And it broke the bones to

pieces.

These girls had their jaws

removed.

Their spines started snapping.

Their legs broke underneath them

as they walked.

And at first, people kept

saying, "Oh no, it's not radium,

it's not radium."

Until finally the scientific

evidence was so heavy.

Gettler and Norris actually did

one experiment where they took

the body of a girl who had been

dead for six years and she

hadn't even been diagnosed with

a radium sickness.

And they took her bones and

wrapped them up in photographic

paper and left them there for a

few days.

And six years later these things

were spitting radiation.

Essentially she was radiating in

the grave.

It's sort of incredible.

>> There's another kind of

irony.

The working class destruction of

health through these long days,

exposure to hazardous materials,

is one thing, but radium being

so expensive, there would be

kind of an irony, wouldn't

there?

In that you would have people

that were very wealthy, the only

ones who could afford, say, a

radium drink or something or a

radium tonic.

>> That's right.

>> Would be more affected than

the less wealthy classes.

>> And one of the interesting

things about the story of the

radium girls is, although they

successfully eventually sued

their corporation and got

settlements, the public health

laws did not change until the

wealthy started to get sick.

And the case study for that was

a Philadelphia industrialist

named Evan Beyers, who had

injured his shoulder and his

doctor told him to drink one of

these radium health drinks

called Radithor, which was

actually made down the street

from one of the big radium watch

factories.

And he drank, like, several

thousand bottles over a few

years, he said.

And he began to look just like a

radium girl.

He dropped 80 pounds, his jaw

broke, his arms fractured.

And when he died, all of his

powerful friends then went to

the federal government and they

said, why aren't you doing

anything about us?

And so then you started to see

the first serious legislation

about radium.

>> But they continued to use

radium in watch dials, did they

not, for what, into the '60s?

>> They did, and it was again

used, hand-painted by women,

during World War II as well, so

you did see this kind of tiered

standard.

After the book came out, I

started hearing from people

whose grandparents had worked at

the watch factories up through

the '60s.

It's really interesting when you

look at the way the government

responds to some of these

issues.

People were reluctant to give up

a useful tool.

And there's a lot of

negotiations, without sounding

too cynical, there's a lot of

negotiations between businesses

and the government on some of

these regulations.

I mean, mercury, shifting gears

slightly, is a really good

example of this because there

was a common antiseptic called

Mercurochrome.

>> Sure, yes.

>> Yes, it was sort of bright

pink, orange, everybody used to

paint themselves up with it.

>> If you got a cut or a

scratch, you would paint on the

Mercurochrome.

>> I was talking to one of my

colleagues in my department who

said when he was a kid they

would use it to make Indian war

paint.

>> It smelled kind of neat.

>> Yeah, and had this kind of

bright neon-like color to it.

It was, in fact, loaded with

mercury, right?

The "mer" in that comes from

"mercury."

The FDA actually never banned

Mercurochrome.

It started fading off the

market as it got replaced by

Neosporins and some of those

kinds of things, and when the

FDA actually looked at it they

kind of said, "Well, you know,

there's a lot of mercury in

this.

We'll just declare it an

unproven product."

That means that the companies

have to come back and prove that

it's safe.

And all the companies went, eh,

why would we do that when we can

sell it overseas?

>> Oh, sure.

>> And so what happened is, all

these companies that make

Mercurochrome in an antiseptic

don't sell it in the United

States anymore because they're

not going through the safety

process.

But if you go into the

literature overseas, it's still

around.

And it's been around since about

the turn of the 20th century, so

it's right in this period.

So you do see this really

interesting dance with

regulation on poisons.

Interesting being a very polite

word.

>> And here we have another

interesting way of, what would

you say, applying poison.

Doesn't look too healthy.

( both laugh )

>> Well, we're not drinking

radium anymore, that's for sure.

>> -- out of the cooler there.

>> Right.

And this is, I think this

picture is, we had a lot of kind

of nice pictures of radium,

extracting ore in this picture.

And we still use radiation to

treat cancer, right?

But if you go now to get any

kind of radiation treatment,

like a basic X-ray, the person

who is doing that treatment is

not hovering around.

They go somewhere else.

And it wasn't just radium.

They used to have X-ray machines

in shoe stores, I don't know if

you remember this, right?

>> I've heard of, yeah.

>> Yeah, kids would go in and it

was like a game.

>> A do-your-own X-ray?

>> A do-your-own X-ray.

You'd go, they'd image their

foot, cool, they could see the

bones.

They'd image their hands.

We goofed around with radiation

for a long time, and way after

the Radium Girl case, which was

settled in 1928-29, before we

started saying, you know, this

is really not such great stuff.

>> Just go out and play in the

DDT instead.

( both laugh )

A good wholesome afternoon.

>> That's right.

It's a different poison.

>> And is this another look at

the radium extraction here?

>> Mm-hm.

This is radium extraction and if

you move it on one more, radium

mining.

This is uranium mining,

actually, so you've got a lot of

images of radioactive material.

>> Geiger counters used to be

popular in the '50s, too, in the

atomic age, of course.

And here we have, of course, an

intent but standard scientific

scrutiny of something.

>> Right, and this actually is a

machine in which you can image,

it's like...

you're actually imaging light

emissions as you heat a chemical

element.

And then you see them fan out in

the spectrum and that allows you

to identify it.

For instance, I did a chapter on

a poison, thalium, which you

don't see much now, but used to

be used a lot, also in makeup

and in rat poison.

And thalium makes this gorgeous,

when you heat it, spring green

line.

It's like almost startling and

beautiful when you see it in a

machine like that.

This is radium, again.

You see the glowing lights there

related to the luminescence, and

I believe that that's Marie

Curie, actually demonstrating

her affection.

She loved radium, she called it

"my beautiful radium."

>> She carried a piece.

>> She did, she used to carry

little vials of it in her

pockets.

And she died of aplastic anemia.

>> But there was no connection

made at the time between her

death and radium?

>> She would never admit how

dangerous it was.

She really struggled with

admitting that anything that she

thought was so important and had

done so much good in science was

actually dangerous.

She probably went to her grave

never really accepting it.

>> Here's another sort of casual

packaging approach.

( both laugh )

>> A nice little jug of mercury.

Yeah, I was talking about

mercury earlier with

Mercurochrome, but mercury was

one of the famous poisons of the

1920s.

People used it to treat

infections.

It was a really famous

antiseptic, and they used to

have it in an incredibly strong

form, mercury bichloride, which

is also called corrosive

sublimate.

We don't see this so much

anymore, but mercury

thermometers to test a fever

used to be really popular.

Now they're digital.

>> The mercury, at least, was

self-contained, right?

>> If you look at this image,

one of the things that makes

pure mercury like this so

interesting is that when it is

liquid at atmospheric pressures,

it forms these little balls.

It's the most strange liquid.

>> Yeah, you get these little

balls that roll around, but then

they will sort of connect with

each other, they'll pool.

>> That's right, and if you

touch them they break apart.

Yeah, when I was a kid, we used

to do this for fun.

You'd break your family

thermometer and then play with

the little mercury balls.

And the good thing is that it

didn't absorb through your skin,

it skitters off your skin.

Pure elemental mercury actually,

people, not recently, but in the

1800s, used to drink cups of it.

They thought that it was somehow

health-giving.

They'd swallow a cup, they'd get

really inflamed tissues.

But pretty much didn't acutely

poison them, because it slid

right through in that

self-contained way.

Other things, when you mix

mercury into a salt, like

bichloride of mercury, then it's

really dangerous.

And so here in this collection

of bottles, what you're going to

see is mercury salts.

And they were common medicines.

>> In the apothecary context,

some of everything.

Well, let's talk murder now.

we mentioned William Rice,

founder of Rice University, year

is 1900.

>> Right.

>> And somehow he runs afoul of

chloroform.

How would that not have been

detected as a murder rather than

as some kind of accident?

>> Well, proving a poison

especially in that time was very

difficult.

One of the things that makes

poisoning so interesting is that

you almost never see the person

commit the crime.

And two, you have to figure out

when and if they purchased the

poison.

And if poisons are like common

medicines, then you can't even

prove intent, really.

"Well, I had this with me.

I need this medicine for this

purpose.

It was entirely innocent that

this person, let's say,

accidentally drank my medicine."

>> So what do we think

happened to William Rice?

>> The theory with William Rice

and chloroform was that a very

conniving lawyer and his valet

conspired to kill him.

They had forged a will in which

they both inherited.

And shortly after they forged

this will, he mysteriously died.

And the valet actually confessed

to killing him with chloroform.

He had borrowed this chloroform.

People actually would take

chloroform sometimes as a

medicine, even doctors would

prescribe it in small doses if

you were having trouble

sleeping.

>> Take a little whiff of

chloroform.

>> You'd have a little bottle of

chloroform and a sponge.

And you'd put the sponge over

your face and it would knock you

out and you'd get a really great

night's sleep, allegedly, right?

And this valet had borrowed his

brother-in-law's chloroform and

confessed to doing this.

But again, and this is right in

the 1900s, people were not sure

how to detect it in a body.

So that you could have someone

come in and say, "Yeah, I killed

him.

Yes, I used chloroform."

But they didn't know how to

find any evidence of that, so

they didn't know if you were

just the world's greatest

show-off.

"I want all this attention, I'm

going to confess to killing a

multi-millionaire."

And in the case of the serial

killer, Frederick Mors,

I mentioned,

it was the same thing.

He walked into a police station,

he confessed to killing eight

people with chloroform.

They had all died in his care,

but because they didn't know how

to extract the chloroform - they

did, they weren't aware that you

could get the chloroform out of

the body.

Because these were people in an

old person's home, they could

have died anyway, they could

never make up their minds.

At least the police were sure he

did it, but the coroner less

sure and so he just eventually

disappeared.

>> That name "Mors" was a

pseudonym.

>> It was, he had changed his

name from - he was an immigrant

from Austria.

He had changed his name from the

name "Menerick" to "Mors"

because "mors" meant death and

he had changed it right before

he started killing people.

So there was a lot of actually

very good evidence that he had

killed these people.

There were other people who had

seen him with chloroform and

cotton in his pockets.

They'd seen him in mysterious

circumstances.

He had a book about poisons in

his closet, but they still did

not actually put him away.

>> There was one of the most

notorious cases of the '20s

involved an actress, by the name

of Olive Thomas, and mercury.

How was that ever settled and

how did it come about in the

first place?

Accident or murder?

>> No one knows.

There are still plenty of people

who think her husband, who was

the younger brother of screen

actress Mary Pickford, his name

was Jack Pickford.

>> And this is Olive here.

>> This is Olive.

She rocketed to fame out of New

York and starting in about

1914-15 she won the "most

beautiful girl in New York"

contest.

She was a Ziegfeld dancer.

>> Not all of her pictures look

quite this demure.

>> Innocent?

>> I guess, we mentioned

Ziegfeld.

There was also a man by the name

of Vargas for whom she posed,

and this is just part of that

particular picture.

>> Right, sort of the upper

part.

She was fairly fearless.

And shortly after she posed for

this Vargas portrait, David

South-- picked her up.

She went to Hollywood.

She was a rising star of kind of

adventurous, charming,

incurably brave young heroines.

She was in "The Flapper,"

"Madcap Madge."

And she married Pickford.

They had a really wild marriage,

lots of partying, lots of

drinking, lots of infidelity,

especially on his part.

He developed syphilis.

And his doctor had prescribed a

mercury compound for that,

bichloride of mercury, which is

one of these really toxic

mercury salts we were talking

about earlier.

And at one point, he suggested

to her that they kind of have a

make-up vacation and they went

off to Paris.

And one night...

The only story that we know

about this is his story, because

she did not survive the

vacation.

One night he said they went back

to the room really drunk.

He got in bed and she went into

the bathroom to kind of get

ready for bed, and according to

him, then accidentally drank his

mercury bichloride.

And she lived about three more

days before she died.

It was a huge scandal at the

time.

It was about 1920.

Many, many people thought he'd

killed her.

>> What would be his motive?

>> To get out of a marriage that

was holding him back from other

relationships.

And other people thought she'd

committed suicide.

>> You have three possibilities,

don't you?

>> You have three possibilities.

That she just had it, that there

was something that happened that

night that he did not say.

But again, imagine that he had

killed her.

He didn't go around killing

anyone else, so it's sort of

hard to say, yes, he did it.

But imagine that he had.

He innocently goes to Paris, he

has this medicine that he's been

prescribed.

He's in a hotel room, this

happened about 3:00 in the

morning.

She is dying when they leave the

hotel room and the only person

who tells this story is him.

There would be no way to prove

that, and there wasn't.

>> There was another famous case

of someone who literally got

away with murder the first time,

Ruth Snyder.

>> Yes, and that's a mercury and

a whole lot of different poisons

story.

Ruth Snyder was a kind of, also

a lively young woman.

She was blonde, very, you know.

She had an abusive older husband

and she took on a lover named

Judd Gray.

She was not a lovely person,

either.

She and Judd used to meet in New

York City, and she had an

eight-year-old daughter and she

would meet at the Waldorf

Astoria in New York and have her

daughter ride the escalators up

and down till the tryst was

over.

And eventually, she and her

lover decided that they would

get rid of her husband and they

took out two insurance policies

with double indemnity clauses.

If he died an accidental death,

they would get about $90,000

which was a lot of money in the

1920s.

Then she put mercury in his

alcohol.

It was 1920s, everyone was

drinking bootleg alcohol.

She spiked his alcohol and

apparently she put way too much

in it and it tasted really nasty

and he didn't drink it.

So eventually they came up with

a plot.

They used chloroform to knock

him out.

They gave him poisoned alcohol.

Then when he didn't die fast

enough, they hit him over the

head with a sash weight and

strangled him with picture wire.

And then after they had done

this enormous mess they tried to

stage a fake burglary and she

claimed that a giant

Italian-American had come into

the house, tied her up, and

killed him.

Someone later, Damon Runyon, who

was a famous columnist in the

Times, called it "the dumbbell

murders" because Judd Gray had

tied her up but he had tied her

feet and not her hands, so no

one could figure out why she

just didn't untie her feet.

And there were other things that

eventually went wrong with this.

Alexander Gettler testified in

that trial and he actually

testified that if they had just

waited, he probably would have

looked like he died of natural

causes.

And both of these guys went to

the electric chair.

>> And that was the prototype

for "The Postman Always Rings

Twice"?

>> "The Postman Always Rings

Twice," because James Cain said

that he was fascinated by the

themes of love and betrayal.

Because the part of the story I

didn't just tell you was that

once they were both arrested,

they spent the entire rest of

the trial and after the trial

ratting each other out and

blaming the whole thing on each

other.

And Ruth actually did such a

good job of blaming it on Judd

that while she was in prison she

got almost 200 marriage

proposals.

I know this happens nowadays,

but it's really hard to imagine

why anyone would want to propose

to someone who had poisoned her

husband's whiskey and hit him

over the head with a sash

weight.

And her execution, she was

electrocuted at Sing Sing, is a

really notorious journalism case

because a newspaper reporter

smuggled a camera in.

And he took a picture of her

literally jittering with

electricity in the chair.

And the front page, it was the

New York Daily News, and the

paper was just that picture.

And she was so notorious at that

time that the front page of the

paper was the picture of her in

the electric chair and the word

"Dead."

And that was it.

And then they smuggled their

photographer out of the country

so he wouldn't be arrested.

>> Interesting, having to do

with, as long as we're talking

about alcohol, which was just

one of the things that they

tried in the Snyder case.

The US government also got into

the act in terms of using

alcohol as a poison.

>> Yeah, this to me was actually

the most shocking story in the

book.

There are many homicidal killers

in human history.

Mass poisonings by governments,

especially American government,

not so common.

So Prohibition turned out to be

a very difficult law to enforce,

and a huge failure.

And if you look at what

happened, if you just took New

York as a model, instead of

drinking less, people drank

phenomenally more.

In the 1920s, and in 1920 when

Prohibition started, there were

no speakeasies, and at the end

of the decade there were 30,000

speakeasies in New York City.

>> 30,000 in New York City.

>> Yes.

And so the government got so

frustrated by this, they

realized that a lot of the

whiskey that was going to the

speakeasies was actually

industrial alcohol that was

being stolen by bootleggers.

About 60 million gallons a year

of industrial alcohol was being

stolen.

And what the bootleggers would

do is, distill out all the

additives that make this not

drinkable alcohol, it makes it

taste bad, and then serve it.

I mean, this was nasty alcohol

anyway.

>> Serving it straight?

>> Yeah, they would serve it

straight.

Or, some of our favorite

cocktails were invented in the

1920s to hide the taste.

The screwdriver was invented

then, my favorite, the sidecar,

the bee's knees, I believe the

Bloody Mary.

All of these things that hid the

taste of the bad alcohol.

So the government said, fine.

If we can't get people to just

obey the law, we'll make this

whiskey so dangerous they won't

want to drink it.

And they actually put an

unbelievable number of poisons

in industrial alcohol that

couldn't be distilled out.

They put methyl alcohol, which

is really lethal.

It metabolizes in your body into

formaldehyde, and formic acid.

They put cyanide, they put

mercury.

They put arsenic, they put

benzene.

And literally once they started

these new formulas, people

started dropping dead in the

street.

More than 10,000 people were

killed by this program.

>> And the government, it never

seemed to occur to anybody who

came up with this idea that

right away people would start

dying but it wouldn't just be a

deterrent, but it would actually

kill people?

>> You know, when you go back

and you look at the newspapers

of the time, you see, they used

to have what they called "wet

and dry" legislators.

And the "wets" wanted to get rid

of Prohibition, and the "drys"

wanted to keep it.

So you have the wet legislators

saying, we've turned into the

Lucrezia Borgia government,

where we're murdering people.

And you have the dry legislators

saying, well, they just

shouldn't drink it, then.

They're morally corrupt anyway.

So Prohibition was a moral

crusade.

With all the religious fervor of

a moral crusade.

So they considered these guys

kind of collateral damage to the

wind.

>> They were kind of weeding out

the ones who weren't really good

citizens anyway.

>> That's right.

These were law breakers.

They were breaking the law, they

didn't have enough self-control

not to drink.

They weren't good people.

And you heard all of those

answers.

And in the dry newspapers of the

time, there was actually one

editorial that said, "Is it the

government's responsibility to

protect the lives of souses?"

So it was an enormous divide.

Both Norris and Gettler were

furious about this.

They bitterly crusaded for it.

And Norris actually wrote a

national magazine article that

he titled "Our Essay in

Extermination," in which he

basically said what everyone

else was saying, "You're killing

a lot of people, please stop."

To no effect.

Eventually what happened was, it

didn't stop people from

drinking, which is kind of one

of the phenomenally interesting

things about the culture of the

1920s.

People just didn't want the

government to tell them how to

behave.

>> There was a real culture of

getting away with things.

>> Yes.

>> It was fun and a way of

expressing your independence.

>> It was probably, to me, one

of the more anarchistic decades

of United States history.

>> The more control, the more

anarchy in response.

>> Yes, that's exactly right.

So people continued drinking,

and they continued dying.

>> So was there such a thing,

Deborah, as the "golden age of

poison"?

And if so, what would have

brought it to a close?

>> Well, one was the rise of the

Norris and Gettlers of the

world.

They trained the next

generation, they used to call

them the "Gettler Boys," the

next generation of forensic

toxicologists.

So you get really good science.

It's no longer as easy to get

away with it.

And if it's not as easy to get

away with it, it's not as much

fun, right?

And you get better public

health.

The world really changed in this

period in interesting ways that

protect us now.

>> So there was some psychology

that came out.

Is there anything that, in terms

of the psychology, that you

think is a common thread among

these users of poison?

>> The homicidal poisoners?

They believe they can get away

with it.

I mean, poisoners are the most

interesting killers to me,

because you never have an

impulse killing.

All poisonings are premeditated.

>> Sometimes they take time to

unfold.

>> And poisoners are willing to

wait.

Because what they want to do is

get away with it, and they do.

A lot of poisoners, the biggest

mistake they make is that they

then kill again and get caught

the second time.

>> And we did have a case of

that.

>> So, and one of the stories in

my book, I have an arsenic

murderess, Fanny Creighton, who

in the early 1920s - actually, I

really like this story for two

reasons.

In the early 1920s, she kills

her 17-year-old brother with

arsenic and gets away with it

and gets $1,000.

She'd insured his life before

she killed him.

Part of the problem was, again,

you know, there's too much

arsenic around.

And science at that point wasn't

good enough to identify the

source of the poison, so they

could never figure out where the

poison came from.

>> In 1935, she's involved in

quite a complicated scheme that

involves the murder, that she

and her husband are still

together, sharing a house.

She decides to get rid of the

other woman in the house, and

there's a very complicated

scheme in which she murders this

other woman.

She wants her daughter to marry

the other husband.

And in this case, she uses a rat

poison and the science is so

good that they're not only able

to figure out that it's a rat

poison that is the arsenic, they

can identify the brand.

And once they identify the

brand, they're able to find

where she buys it.

And this time, she goes to the

electric chair.

And while she's in prison, she

says, "Yeah, okay, I admit it.

I killed my brother."

So you see a much better

science.

And you see an acceptance of the

scientific expert.

And you see the whole thing

closing around her.

So that now these poisoners, I

mean, look at this.

She got away with it once,

right?

And the second time she doesn't.

And so you see this enormous

change in the ability of science

to catch a poisoner.

>> She sort of brackets that

whole age, doesn't she?

In a kind of Hitchcockian way.

You might get away with it once,

but try it again and you're

overplaying your hand.

>> She also eventually went to

the electric chair.

Her husband refused to take the

body.

She's buried at Sing Sing.

>> Well, on that not entirely

cheerful note for

the perpetrator...

>> But optimistic for the

rest of us.

>> Optimistic for the rest of

us.

We'll take leave of that poison

in the Jazz Age New York, but

fascinating tour of cases and

perpetrators and sleuths.

>> Thank you, it's really been a

pleasure being here.

>> My guest has been Deborah

Blum.

She's the author of "The

Poisoner's Handbook."

I'm Norman Gilliland,

thanks for joining me.

I hope you'll be with me next

time for University Place.