Once the acid boiled off, a thick sludge remain to bubble blackly over the burner. “It is well to lower the flame at this point, and then to increase it again when the charred liquid has quit frothing,” Gettler recommended in a paper detailing his methods. After the liquid settled down, he trickled nitric acid into the mix, slowly, until the color changed from black to red to yellow and finally to a colorless state of clarity. Only then, after other contaminants had been ruthlessly removed, would he begin to check for thallium.
The poison could be found by several methods. One was that old standard, the flame test. The others involved forcing thallium to settle out of the solution. For instance, if sulfur dioxide was bubbled through the clear liquid and a hydrogen solution added, a pale-yellow, thallium-rich layer would settle to the bottom of the flask. Or one could add an iodine compound and precipitate out thallous iodide. Ammonia and potassium chromate caused a bright-yellow layer to coat the bottom, consisting of thallous chromate.
Of course, negative results were equally easy to see. If there was no thallium in the mixture, the liquid in the flask remained innocently transparent. To Gettler’s surprise, he ended up with both results—the sullen yellows of thallium, and the rainwater clarity of a poison-free solution.
THE CHEMICAL TESTS run by Gettler’s laboratory found thallium in all the dead children, but not in the body of Mrs. Gross. She had apparently died of encephalitis, as originally diagnosed. The children had been poisoned, but the mother not at all, providing yet another theory—that she was somehow deranged enough to want to start her marriage over, with only her husband and the single child yet to come.
Gettler’s results showed that each child had received a markedly different dose of thallium. Because the two girls had died after their mother, the district attorney was convinced that their father had to be the poisoner. But Gettler disagreed. Partly because the children had been going bald in the weeks before their deaths, he thought they’d received the poison before the mother died, killed more slowly by a lower dose than the two boys got.
Further, repeated analyses of the cocoa found not a trace of thallium sulfate, the rat poison used by Gross’s employer. If the can had contained poison, Gettler pointed out, they should have found it at greater levels than in the decomposing tissues. Based on Gettler’s findings, the autopsies, and other pathology work done at Bellevue, the medical examiner’s report proposed that while the children had been poisoned by thallium, there was no evidence linking the deaths to the father.
The Brooklyn authorities, and especially the doctor who had done the original tests, were taken aback. The doctor, even more, was angrily embarrassed. Perhaps, he suggested, Gettler wasn’t used to the spectroscope. Everyone made mistakes, even New York City’s apparently infallible toxicologist. He publically recommended that Gettler try the tests again.
That prompted Charles Norris, who brooked no criticism of his hardworking and underpaid staff, to intervene. If Alexander Gettler failed to find any trace of the poison, Norris stated, then “it was not there.” Period.
ON MAY 20, a Brooklyn magistrate dismissed the charges against Frederick Gross. His employer called the newly released bookkeeper to tell him that they’d held the job for him. Gross went straight to the hospital where his son, Frank, was in bed on a sun porch. Seeing the little bald boy in the crib, he started to cry. The five-year-old asked his father why he hadn’t come to see him on visiting Sundays.
“I was busy, son,” Gross replied. He told reporters that when his son was well enough, he was going to take him to a summer camp to play and get stronger. His mother-in-law had agreed to keep house for him again. He hoped to do a better job of taking care of his remaining family.
And so, as soon as possible, he was going back to work. He didn’t blame the district attorney, he said. He knew things had looked bad. But he had one special request of the journalists who gathered around to hear his plans: just tell everyone, just spread the word, that he had been innocent all along.
“LET YOUR VOICE be heardloudly and often in protest against the indifference, ignorance and avarice” responsible for causing poisonous compounds to so permeate everyday life, wrote Kallet and Schlink of the Consumers’ Research Union in the 1935 edition of their manifesto. “In adulteration and misrepresentation lurks a menace to your health that ought no longer be tolerated.”
The CRU was starting to wonder what poisoning issue would stir the government into taking action. The FDA had sidestepped Ginger Jake, turning that investigation over to the Treasury Department’s Prohibition enforcement officers. Although the agency had taken steps to end the use of radium-laced health waters such as Radithor, there were still no laws that prohibited interstate commerce in such risky products. Neither had Congress strengthened the FDA in response. Instead, legislators and even President Roosevelt were resisting such laws, on the grounds that they would be detrimental to business at a time of economic crisis.
The CRU feared it would take a catastrophe to change the system. In that assessment Kallet, Schlink, and their colleagues would be proved right two years later. In 1937 a small Tennessee pharmaceutical company developed a new kind of cough syrup by dissolving a sulfa drug into the solvent diethylene glycol—a complex chain of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen (HO-CH2-CH2-O-CH2-CH2-OH) also used in antifreeze formulas. Diethylene glycol had a sweet taste to it anyway, but the company made the elixir even better-tasting by adding raspberry flavoring.
That product, Elixir Sulfanilamide, killed more than one hundred people, most of them children. Under the FDA’s minimal rules, though, the company was required to pay only a small fine for mislabeling, because “elixirs” were supposed to contain alcohol and this formula had none. The deaths spurred a consensus of outrage, led by the grieving families and intensified by the furious consumer advocates and the anguished physicians who had killed their patients. (As one wrote, he’d watched his own friends die as a result of asking him to treat them.) The head of the company stoked the national anger further by pointing out that barring the mislabeling, the product had been entirely legal: “I do not feel that there was any responsibility on our part.”
The following year Congress passed and Roosevelt signed the 1938 Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act, which empowered the FDA to demand safety testing and accurate labeling and to hold manufacturers legally responsible for harming their customers.
THAT SPRING of 1935, despite the successful resolution of the Gross case, Charles Norris just felt tired. Another poison. Another murder. Another series of unnecessary deaths. Another story to break your heart.
That April, for the first time in years, he did not attend the Detectives’ Endowment Association’s annual party at the Hotel Astor (“I am avoiding going out as much as possible”) and simply sent a contribution. When his alma mater, Yale, asked for a donation to the alumni fund, he wrote back candidly to the old friend leading the drive: “You ask me how I am. I am just recovering from a bad attack of the ‘flu.’ We must remember that we are all getting old and tired, and my expense account is much larger than my income and it has been so for some time.”
He promised to send a check for fifty dollars, but only in May, when he was sure it would clear. He was putting his spare money into the medical examiner’s office and his spare time into dealing with Mayor La Guardia, who seemed to believe that all longtime department heads must be crooks. La Guardia had ordered examinations of all such departments, and in late May the mayor’s political allies, organized into a Citizens’ Budget Committee, charged Norris’s staff with pocketing illegal fees for routine work such as issuing death certificates.
The commission calculated that 40 percent of the cases handled by Norris’s office required some sort of certified paperwork. That meant more than 20,000 potentially moneymaking opportunities over the previous seventeen years. At worst, if the medical examiner’s office charged $20 per report—a fee that had been set by other departments—then the graft total would approach $400,000 Since Norris took o
ffice.
Norris called the report a joke: “I don’t know where they get any estimates of $400,000. The insurance companies occasionally want copies of the hearings, and they pay small fees for them, but we don’t get those requests at the rate of more than two a week and the fee runs from fifty cents to a dollar.” And poor people, he added, had always been given paperwork at no cost at all.
Within a month a formal investigation by the city’s commissioner of accounts had cleared Norris’s office of graft charges. True, the office charged typing fees for lengthy documents, but they ran about fifty cents. The employees apparently had considered this a practice allowed under the law. They did it openly. Rather than $400,000 over the period in question, the amount appeared to be $4,000 during Norris’s time as administrator, or a little over $200 a year split among the typing pool.
The money, the commissioner’s report concluded, had never been shared with Norris or any member of the scientific staff. The investigators found that Norris “had no connection with the alleged illegal practices.” The chief medical examiner had, instead, “paid substantial amounts [out] of his own pocket for the expenses of his office.”
Norris accepted the findings with dignity, but he was incensed. When he was asked to join in a tribute to Mayor La Guardia, he wrote back that he was afraid he just couldn’t do that. He didn’t know the mayor well enough to comment on his good qualities.
Then Dr. Norris went on another, too-rare vacation. He was tired, damn tired, of all of it.
NORRIS RETURNED from his vacation in late August, having enjoyed a leisurely cruise to the tropical climate of South America. He was still curiously weary though, moving slowly at the office. He laughed about it a little. He was sixty-seven years old, after all. Maybe he was just getting too old for the job.
On the morning of September 11, he woke up acutely nauseated. His doctor thought he had brought back a case of dysentery from his travels, but Norris grew steadily weaker all day. He died in his bed at eight-thirty that night. The cause was given as heart failure, although many of his friends considered that he had, most probably, worked himself to death.
More than three hundred people attended his funeral at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street. Thirty uniformed policemen, including five on horseback, formed an honor guard around the entrance. His coffin lay at the front of the church, covered with ferns and banked with red roses, and as the choir sang “Onward Christian Soldiers,” policemen carried it down the aisle, followed by his wife, Eugenie, his sister, his niece, and her husband. His daughter, vacationing in Europe at the time of his death, was still trying to get home.
The chairman of the state liquor authority was there, as were the assistant chief inspector of police, the commissioner of hospitals, the president of the Academy of Medicine, the director of the Bellevue laboratories, the dean of the NYU medical school, the chief medical examiner of Boston, and the head of the New York Medical Association. Harrison Martland was there. So was Thomas Gonzales, who had taken over as acting medical examiner. So were physicians, chemists, clerks, and stenographers from the medical examiner’s offices. Alexander Gettler, city toxicologist, sat quietly in one of the front pews.
The New York papers listed every dignitary at the funeral. The list did not include Mayor La Guardia. But Norris, the constant gadfly, would undoubtedly have laughed about that.
AND HE would surely have been touched by the respect and affection shown by those who worked closely with him.
The staff took up a collection to have a portrait of him painted and hung in the main office. Everyone donated: stenographers and clerks, pathologists and chemists, his longtime chauffeur, and the cleaning woman. Gonzales organized a fund for a Charles Norris Fellowship in Forensic Medicine, to support promising students in the new NYU program. As Gonzales wrote to one contributor, no one was surprised by the generous response, “because of the great friendship and admiration of so many, like yourself, for Doctor Norris.” Tributes came from around the world, across the country, but the most fervent came from those who’d worked alongside him.
A letter from the medical examiner on Staten Island was typical. It began on a stately note, praising Norris’s skills as a pathologist and his pioneering work in making forensic medicine a respected science. And it closed on a personal one: “In sending my small contribution I am expressing my gratitude to the Chief for his friendship, for the many personal acts of assistance, for his extremely generous and whole-hearted support when most I needed it in my early days in the office, for his stimulating and encouraging words and cheery smile specially at moments when the difficulties of the office made all the world seem rather bleak.”
BUT perhaps the best way to appreciate Charles Norris and what he had accomplished was to observe the New York City medical examiner’s office at work. Norris’s carefully built team of forensic detectives—with their hard-earned reputation for excellence, and their insistence on training and scientific procedure—would be well challenged in the days following his funeral.
They found much of it predictable—the auto accidents, the alcoholic collapses, the shootings and beatings, the familiar backbeat of life in the way it too often goes wrong. In the autumn following Norris’s death, the department would work with police in investigating a butler who had stirred lead acetate into his mean-spirited employer’s soup; a paintbrush salesman who slashed a friend’s throat in a Broadway cafeteria because he suspected him of sleeping with his wife; a subway porter in Queens who stabbed a man who refused to tip; and a night watchman who killed a seventy-one-year-old baker for his payroll money. The deaths continued in that seemingly inevitable rhythm that Norris had known, fought, and sometimes simply mourned.
Still, there was one case, less than two weeks after his funeral, that would stand out from the steady patter of death—a killing made memorable by its chilly calculation, its sexually twisted motives, and by the fact that one of the suspects had an uncomfortably recognizable face, at least to Alexander Gettler.
THE CASE BEGAN in mid-September, when a thirty-six-year-old Long Island housewife suddenly fell desperately sick, vomiting constantly, doubled over with abdominal pains. Her doctor, suspecting a gallbladder attack, sent Ada Appelgate to the hospital. She returned home after a week, still a little shaky on her feet, and went straight to her bed, still wretched enough that she refused food, drinking only milk, sometimes with a little egg and sugar mixed into it.
Two days later, on September 27, she woke up again violently ill, falling rapidly into unconsciousness. Her husband, Everett, called the doctor and the police, begging for someone to bring oxygen. When the doctor arrived, the police were still trying to coax breath from a dead woman. The doctor had been treating Ada for obesity for some time. She weighed almost 270 pounds—and he decided that her overtaxed heart must have finally failed. He wrote “coronary occlusion” on the death certificate and had the body sent to a funeral home.
That might have been that, except that the Appelgates shared their home with a rather notorious couple who had once been tried for arsenic murder: John and Mary Frances Creighton.
THE CREIGHTONS had been living quietly since their acquittals some twelve years earlier. They’d sold their house in New Jersey and bought a small bungalow in the Long Island town of Baldwin. John had taken a job in the county engineer’s office. Their children, Ruth, now fifteen, and Jack, twelve, attended the local schools.
During this time John had joined the American Legion. His friends in the lodge included Everett Appelgate, who was a local officer in the organization. Appelgate worked as an investigator in the Veterans’ Relief Bureau, and he and his wife and daughter lived with her parents. After the Appelgates quarreled with Ada’s father, Creighton offered to let them live in the bungalow for a share of the costs. The home had only two bedrooms on its ground floor. The adults took those; Ruth and the Appelgates’ daughter, Agnes, slept in the attic; and Jackie Creighton slept on a cot set out on the porch.
br /> It was crowded, too cozy maybe, but “the Great Depression was with us,” wrote the journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who would cover the murder trial on Long Island, “and the idea of two families sharing so small a home was not likely to startle anyone.”
None of the neighbors particularly liked Ada. She had a habit of criticizing people who annoyed her, which seemed to be almost everyone. But the two families seemed to get along just fine; no one knew of any trouble in the home on Bryant Place.
After her death, given the Creightons’ history, the police asked Appelgate if they could order an autopsy on his wife. To their surprise, he refused. The district attorney called Appelgate to tell him that his office could compel an autopsy, but it would look better if the husband agreed.
After Appelgate reluctantly consented, pathologists removed the dead woman’s organs and sent them to Gettler’s laboratory. He reported back that he’d found arsenic in every organ; he calculated that Ada must have received more than three times the lethal dose. After a few more days of investigation, on October 6, the Nassau County police charged Mary Frances Creighton—currently calling herself Fran—and Everett Appelgate with murder.
THE REAPPEARANCE of Mary Frances Creighton gave Gettler a jolt.
As Kilgallen pointed out in her account of the trial, he’d been a defense witness in one of her earlier arsenic murder trials. His own chemical analysis had helped clear her of the accusation that she’d murdered her mother-in-law.