The autopsy, for instance, had found fluid in Rice’s lungs. The defense called in one of the late President McKinley’s doctors to assure jurors that chloroform was not a noxious, irritating substance that caused fluid to form in the lungs. The physician, while on the witness stand, pulled a small bottle of chloroform out of his pocket, held it under his tongue and his eyes, and declared that he hadn’t felt a thing. The old man, he said, had died of pneumonia—it wasn’t surprising that his lungs contained fluid. The physician was countered by a pathologist from Cornell who insisted that chloroform was strongly irritating and could rapidly cause the lungs to swell and fill. He blamed the poison, and the poison only, for Rice’s congested lungs.
The next witness contradicted the Cornell pathologist, and so it continued until the jury simply dismissed the medical evidence, voting for conviction based on the valet’s testimony and the forged documents. Jones was sentenced to life in prison, and Patrick was sentenced to death and sent to Sing Sing prison in 1902. But the convictions remained tainted by uncertainty. New York executions usually ticked along, Swiss-clock efficient, but Patrick’s date with the electric chair kept getting pushed back. After four years the governor commuted his sentence to life, citing the unholy mess of medical arguments.
And in 1912 Patrick was pardoned, based largely on new statements from medical experts, saying that the autopsy evidence was inconclusive about the poison in question. “Doctors Say Chloroform Didn’t Kill Rice,” the New York papers wrote. All these years later, no one was sure if New York had wrongly convicted an innocent man or let a murderer go free.
That was the position they seemed to be in with Frederic Mors. They had no way to prove he was a murderer, and no way to be sure he wasn’t. The Bronx district attorney decided that he had only one other avenue to pursue. If their self-confessed murderer really was crazy, if they could get a good alienist to diagnose him, they might not need the chloroform evidence. They could just have him safely put away. The DA decided to send the strange little suspect to Bellevue Hospital, home to the best psychopathic ward in the city, and possibly the entire country.
LIKE ALL OTHER buildings in New York, Bellevue and Allied Hospitals wore a slick coat of ice that February, gleaming over the brick and stone, adding slippery polish to the wrought-iron gates and curved staircases, a cold winter sheen to the sedately styled Victorian buildings.
The Bellevue complex spread over four city blocks along the East River, built on land that had once nourished a farm called Belle Vue, for its beautiful prospect on the river. The first hospital building had been constructed there in 1811; only eight years later Bellevue became the first U.S. hospital to formally require a qualified physician to pronounce a death (after a desperately ill man had been discovered among the corpses stacked on the morgue wagon). Its ambulance system had started in 1869; its children’s clinic (the first in the nation) in 1874; its chest clinic, to combat tuberculosis, in 1903. It was from the start a public hospital—in the winter of 1915, nearly a thousand people were treated at Bellevue every day. “It gathers the dead and dying from river and streets and is kept busy night and day with the misery of the living,” wrote one New York Times reporter, attempting to capture the rather ominous mystique of the place.
Some swore, peering through the black railings to the stone buildings with their arched windows and Corinthian columns, that the whole place was haunted. Stories still were told of the “Bellevue Black Bottle” of the late nineteenth century, containing a mysterious potion supposedly used to winnow out the poorest patients. And of the morgue there where, after a disaster, the bodies literally overflowed. In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building on Washington Square had burned; more than one hundred young seamstresses had died; their blackened bodies had been stacked like cordwood on the piers behind the hospital. Mothers from the Gas House district, the gritty, crime-ridden neighborhood just south of the hospital, used its name to threaten troublesome children; “I’ll send ye to Bellevue” was almost as dreaded a warning as “I’ll tell the Gerry Society on ye,” the nickname of the city’s Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, hated for its relentless policing tactics.
The hospital’s famed psychopathic ward, home to the lunatics, the crazies, the suicidal, and the homicidal, only added to the rumors. Its windows were barred; ivy climbed the stone walls—in the winter, their creepers tangled like old bones. Passersby swore, swore that at night they could hear screams through the glass, see shadows stalking past the windows like unchained beasts.
The current head of that ward, an alienist named Menas Gregory, had been trying for years to change that haunted reputation. He angrily defended people in his care, many of whom had been brought in against their will when their families had them declared crazy. The lost occupants of his ward needed help, Gregory argued, not mockery, not groundless fear. He worried at how slowly people accepted that, even in his own institution. “There is, at the present time, no place where these patients may receive proper treatment.”
Unlike many late-night arrivals to the psychopathic ward, though, Mors seemed happy enough to be there, Gregory told the police. They’d let him bring a pile of books—he was teaching himself better English—and he spent most of his time lying on his cot, reading, muttering over pronunciations. At the end of ten days, Gregory agreed that Mors was “not well mentally.” The man was definitely watchful, possibly a little paranoid. He seemed usually controlled, quiet, and polite. Mors was cold, calculating, and somehow just off, slightly inhuman in his reactions. But the alienist saw no evidence that their self-confessed murderer was delusional; it was extremely unlikely that he’d invented the killings; and he wouldn’t call him a homicidal lunatic. Did that make him capable of planning multiple killings? The Bellevue experts could offer a definitive yes. Did that give the district attorney the proof he wanted? A definitive no.
YES, NO, MAYBE, all the answers led them nowhere, nowhere they wanted to be in a criminal investigation involving eight suspicious deaths. The Mors investigators weren’t the only ones stumbling their way through poison murders, but it wasn’t particularly comforting to realize that. If anything, a newly published survey only made their situation seem worse.
That same January the city government had released a report declaring that thanks to ill-informed, corrupt, and occasionally drunken coroners, murderers in New York were escaping justice in record numbers. Infanticide, for instance, was almost never punished. And “skillful poisoning can be carried on almost with impunity.”
The report was conducted by the city’s commissioner of accounts, a reform-minded zealot named Leonard Wallstein. The commissioner had spent a full year studying the long-established political coroner system and concluded that it was a joke, a travesty, a disgrace, a public scandal, and a sheer waste of taxpayers’ money. That was only the beginning of his list of epithets. He could add specific complaints about the coroner now in office, Patrick Riordan, who had been observed sneaking nips from his hip flask during recent criminal trials. Two Manhattan civic clubs were demanding Riordan’s removal from office.
But Wallstein’s report, released in January 1915, was less concerned with the bad habits of one city coroner than with the failures of the whole system. The problems originated, he argued, in the fact that the coroner was an elected official. In New York City, political party bosses regularly fixed elections to reward loyal supporters with lucrative positions. The most powerful political machine in the state belonged to the Democratic Party, which kept headquarters in a rather modest three-story brick building named Tammany Hall, situated on East 14th Street. The party bosses had occupied that home for so long—it was built in 1830—that many New Yorkers referred to the party machine itself as Tammany Hall.
The political masterminds on East 14th Street had not put the clean government crusader Leonard Wallstein into power. Nor had Tammany Hall wanted him there. In a rare act of rebellion, city voters in 1914 had elected a mayor promising government reform. Wallst
ein’s coroner investigation—prompted in part by the actions of Patrick Riordan—fulfilled a promise made by the administration of Mayor John Purroy Mitchel. One of Mitchel’s friends had become entangled in a scheme involving kickbacks between an undertaker and the coroner’s department.
The coroner system was only one example of the party machine’s bad influence, Wallstein said, but a particularly egregious one. Riordan, who held his position solely through Tammany Hall influence, was only the most obvious symptom of the system’s ills. The commissioner estimated that the city spent $172,000 annually on “unqualified coroners, their mediocre physicians and their personal clerks, who spend most of their time on private affairs,” or on lining their pockets.
In addition to drawing their salaries, coroners worked on commission. They could—and usually did—bill the city for every body they examined; one assistant coroner “investigated” the same drowning victim more than a dozen times, claiming each time that it had bobbed up at a different location on the Hudson River. Coroners had been known to allow families to claim bodies only if they agreed to let a certain funeral home, which paid a kickback, handle the arrangements. Coroners had other sources of income as well. They sold fake death certificates and thereby covered up murders, criminal abortions, and suicides. One of Wallstein’s favorite examples involved a man who had been found dead in his bed, with a bullet wound in his mouth and a revolver in his right hand. The gun contained three loaded cartridges and one exploded one. The coroner gave the cause of death as “rupture of thoracic aneurism.”
The city required no medical background or training for coroners, even though they were charged with determining cause of death. The list of New York City coroners, from 1898 to 1915, included eight undertakers, seven politicians, six real estate dealers, two saloonkeepers, two plumbers, a lawyer, a printer, an auctioneer, a wood carver, a carpenter, a painter, a butcher, a marble cutter, a milkman, an insurance agent, a labor leader, and a musician. It also included seventeen physicians, but these, Wallstein pointed out, were men like Patrick Riordan, doctors who had lost their practice and turned to a political position. None of them were asked to pass a test in order to hold office, or exhibit any knowledge of the profession.
As a result, Wallstein found, death certificates were filled out with no effort at determining cause. Among the entries were “could be suicide or murder,” and “either assault or diabetes.” In one instance a coroner had attributed a death to “diabetes, tuberculosis or nervous indigestion.” A few death certificates simply read “act of God.” This was not, of course, a uniquely New York problem. A survey by the National Research Council concluded that the average coroner anywhere in the United States was an “untrained and unskilled individual, popularly elected to an obscure office for a short term, with a staff of mediocre ability and inadequate equipment.” The research council recommended that all coroner systems be abolished: “It is an anachronistic institution which has conclusively demonstrated its incapacity to perform the functions customarily required of it.”
In his own jurisdiction, Wallstein asked the health department to analyze eight hundred cases, randomly chosen from piles of coroner reports. The doctors there discovered that almost half the certificates were so random in their conclusions, or so wrong, that “there is a complete lack of evidence to justify the certified cause of death.” Some coroners didn’t bother to fill out death certificates at all, just signing them and turning them in. Even so, the health department reported it had waited three years for some certificates to be filed.
Not surprisingly, Wallstein discovered that the city’s district attorneys often tried to avoid working with coroners, since these “bungling” so-called experts could easily undermine a prosecution. No wonder, he wrote, that poisoners and other criminals had it so easy in the year 1915. One might expect to find poor equipment and poorly educated criminal investigators in a small village, he added, but “New York City is compelled to get along virtually without aid from the science of legal medicine, a situation which exists in no other great city of the world.”
IN RETROSPECT, the Mors case illustrated his points almost perfectly.
The suspect claimed that he’d been able to kill some of his chosen victims in just a few minutes. But the coroner had informed the prosecutor that that couldn’t be true, that it took at least ten minutes for chloroform to kill a person. Based on that information, the prosecutor hesitated to believe the confession.
Yet the scientific journals supported Mors’s confession. One study of 52 chloroform deaths, done only a few years earlier, found that four people had died in less than a minute, and 22 of them had died in less than five minutes.
The coroner also assured the prosecutor that there was no way to find chloroform in a corpse, especially after a burial. Based on this information, the district attorney had refused to exhume a single body. Instead, he declared that it was impossible to find even a full quart of chloroform in a dead body, that an autopsy was a waste of time since it would yield no evidence.
Again, the existing science said almost exactly the opposite. “Chloroform not only withstands but also impedes putrefaction,” said a leading toxicology book. In animals killed with chloroform, the compound could be detected in their tissues at least four weeks after death; in the brain, where it tended to concentrate, it could be found months after death. Further, the burying of a body tended to prevent the volatile compound from evaporating.
Contrary to the confusion created by the Rice trial, toxicologists were clear that chloroform was definitely an irritant. People who swallowed chloroform—and lived to tell the tale—were shocked by the burn in the mouth. Autopsies showed that chloroform left the mucous membranes of the mouth, stomach, and intestines reddened and inflamed. The poison was caustic enough that the skin lining the throat and pharynx was visibly softened, easily peeling loose at just a light touch of a pathologist’s gloved fingers.
And whether chloroform was inhaled or swallowed, it left a betraying signature: it darkened the blood and caused it to gather in the brain, lungs, liver, and kidneys, producing clumps of bulbous, overfull blood vessels. Chloroform victims could be slightly yellow in color, showing signs of jaundice, due to the poison’s ability to wreak havoc in the liver. Alcoholics, with their often damaged livers, were among those most quickly killed by chloroform; they had been among the most frequent deaths under surgical anesthesia.
Reasonable tests for chloroform in human tissue existed even at the time of Rice’s death and had been even better established by 1915. The following directions were available in the 1890s: a chemist should mince tissue, distill it with steam, then boil the resulting “syrup” with a mix of lye and benzene. If chloroform existed in the hot chemical soup, the liquid turned yellowish-red, fluorescing—according to the textbooks—to a “beautiful” yellowish-green if exposed to ultraviolet light.
Other chemical tests could separate the poison into its basic constituents. A basic chloroform molecule consists of five atoms—one of carbon, one of hydrogen, and three of chlorine—clustered neatly together. If a chemist heated some minced tissue and added a destructive element—say, a strong acid—he could gradually break the poison apart, separating the chlorine from the rest of the solution, a process that would confirm the presence of chloroform.
The Bronx coroner obviously didn’t know this science, and if he sought advice from colleagues elsewhere in New York City, they were uninformed as well. But the possibility of chemical detection did actually exist in that frozen February when Frederic Mors walked into a police station to boast of murder. If anyone had bothered to look for it.
THE POLICE found these scientific excuses infuriating. They believed that Mors was the murderer he claimed to be.
The sheriff had said so publicly, infuriating the district attorney. In a press conference the prosecutor conceded that it was “probable” that Mors had “hurried the deaths” of eight people, maybe more—the police had discovered that another nine deaths at
the home appeared suspicious. But probability wasn’t proof, and as they had no eyewitnesses, a suspect with diagnosed paranoid tendencies, and absolutely no evidence of poison in any of the bodies, the prosecutor decided that he could not justify taking the case to court.
The Bronx district attorney stated: “Mors’ fellow employees and others have given circumstantial evidence, they have told of deaths under suspicious circumstances, they have even told of smelling the odor of chloroform about Mors’ person, but nothing they have said would be accepted by a judge or jury as proof of the fact that a crime had been committed in the manner described by Mors.”
The prosecutor’s office had released the Odd Fellows home superintendent from custody, citing lack of evidence that he conspired to eliminate residents in his care. But officials couldn’t quite bring themselves to let go of Mors. The district attorney made some calls, pulled some strings, and—ignoring the report from Bellevue that found him less than certifiable—had the suspected killer committed to an asylum, hoping to use the fact that he had been institutionalized as just cause to deport him back to Austria.
Mors was sent to the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane in Poughkeepsie. He had been there about three months when he learned of the deportation plan. A week before his scheduled removal, in May 1915, Mors walked away from the asylum—simply disappeared on a warm spring day. In response to an angry complaint, the director of the hospital pointed out that the asylum wasn’t a home for the criminally insane and that he’d been given no warnings about Mors when he’d admitted him. The staff hadn’t considered him dangerous. His behavior had been what it was at Bellevue—polite, quiet, and maybe a little “paranoically inclined,” as Gregory had put it. But no one at the asylum had thought that he might be someone to keep locked away.