Alexander Gettler Chris Bowers : Because bismuth is the primary ingredient in one of the medications the victim was taking. Alexander Gettler Chris Bowers : Those medications often contain traces of arsenic. Prosecutor Curtis Matthew : Exactly. Edel has testified that the victim's stomach contained four times the lethal dose of arsenic. And you're telling us that it was simply an impurity in her medication?
Defense Lawyer Daniel Brown : I will remind the court that the life of a young woman hangs in the balance today. Deborah Blum, Author The Poisoner's Handbook : Gettler would have felt great about this because, again, we're at a period where we're trying to persuade jurors that meticulous science matters in the courtroom.
Narrator : For the second time in two weeks, Fanny Creighton was found not guilty. Fanny's acquittal was a great victory for Gettler. He had doggedly pursued the truth, and made the chemistry so compelling that the jury had spared a young woman's life. But he had yet to plumb the depths of human nature: Alexander Gettler hadn't seen the last of Fanny Creighton.
In , New York was on the brink of becoming the biggest city in the world. Already, it was the most cosmopolitan.
Almost half of the city's population had been born abroad, and migration of African Americans from the South was fueling a spectacular cultural renaissance. The entire city pulsed with frenetic energy. He pursued his few pastimes with the same intensity he devoted to his work. He followed the Yankees, played in a regular poker game, and bowled competitively.
His real passion was horse racing; he spent endless hours at the racetrack, lost in recalculations of odds and stakes. Gettler had married an Irish Catholic schoolteacher, Alice Gorman, despite her family's objections to marrying a Jew. Gettler set about winning them over. He agreed to move in with his in-laws, and even attended church with them on Sundays.
When he proved himself a good husband and devoted father, the battle was won. Alexander Gettler was a stickler for the rules, but he never made a fuss about the illicit brewery his relatives operated on the second floor. His dedication to the law didn't extend to Prohibition.
Narrator : Since , "intoxicating liquors" had been banned throughout the United States. Prohibition was born of good intentions, but those were being overwhelmed by unintended consequences. Michael Lerner, Historian : There were plenty of people who predicted very positive outcomes from Prohibition. The Salvation Army opened buttermilk bars, thinking that that's what people would turn to for recreation. They will go to the theater more often. They will go to motion pictures.
But within the first minutes of Prohibition going into affect people are breaking the law. Narrator : Gettler and Norris had opposed Prohibition from the start. They had predicted that people would look for other sources of liquor, and that much of it would, to some degree, be poison. Marcella Fierro, Forensic Pathologist : Gettler and Norris recognized that people were not going to stop drinking simply because a law had been passed to stop drinking.
People who had money could get better quality alcohol. But poor people had to take what they could get.
You have your little home still. What are you gonna put in it? You can distill any organic material. So people were distilling sawdust. They were distilling their furniture. And when you are distilling wood you are making methanol. Narrator : As methanol breaks down inside the body, it produces formaldehyde, and then formic acid.
This destroys the optic nerve. Vision blurs, and blindness closes in. Meanwhile, the victim suffers acute nausea, then seizures, and descends into a coma. Deborah Blum, Author The Poisoner's Handbook : What's so awful about methanol poisoning, is that this doesn't happen instantly. This breakdown of methanol into formic acid can actually take up to five days. So while you think you're okay, your body is cooking up this very poisonous brew. Narrator : With the onset of Prohibition, methanol became one of Gettler's obsessions.
He worked wholeheartedly to stop the spread of the poison, even devising a portable test for Prohibition agents to use on the road. He confirmed that when red-hot copper was dunked in a methanol-heavy drink Narrator But nothing Gettler did could stem the slowly rising tide of poisoned alcohol.
Marcella Fierro, Forensic Pathologist : All over the city, more and more and more and more people were dying from drinking. But these were not natural deaths. These were due to a toxic substance. These were poisoning deaths. Narrator : Norris, for his part, did everything he could to publicize Prohibition's toll -- writing articles, giving interviews, and lecturing the authorities.
But the only remedy Norris held out was the repeal of Prohibition, and that was nowhere in sight. If you look at what mattered to them the most you see Gettler, he's building the science. And even when they don't win every case, even when they had things going wrong, he's still building that.
He could retreat into the laboratory, you know, go back to all the beautiful elegance of chemistry and find comfort in that. Whereas Norris doesn't always have that comfort. He was always out there where the failures were public. He gave his life to this, and so those losses and failures and things that he didn't achieve wore him down. Narrator : For Norris, the battles were endless. Mayor Hylan had cut funding so sharply that he was personally bankrolling the department; subsidizing salaries, and buying new equipment.
And every case seemed to conjure up a new set of adversaries; the more lucrative the poison, the more powerful the opponent. In , Norris came up against one of the most lucrative poisons of all.
Marcella Fierro, Forensic Pathologist : The building began to be known as the loony gas building because the employees there began to do strange things. They had memory problems; they got irritable; they would develop, in retrospect, what we would call the signs of dementia. Narrator : On the 24th of October, Ernest Oelgert became delirious at work, dodging about in terror, shouting "there are three coming at me at once.
Nobody knew how long he lay on the ground before a passerby had him taken to the hospital. Twenty-four year old William McSweeney started acting so strangely that his sister-in-law called the police. It took four men to get him into a straightjacket. Pressed for a statement, a spokesman for their employer explained, "These men probably went insane because they worked too hard.
Engineers had recently found that if a small quantity of tetraethyl lead was added to gasoline, it made the fuel burn more efficiently. As a result, engines ran cooler, more quietly, and delivered more horsepower. They picked the name Ethyl because they didn't wanna use lead. People were a little weirded out by lead, and so they were pretending this was just some other magic, wonderful formula.
Seventeen hundred years before the introduction of Ethyl, a Greek physician had observed that lead caused 'the mind to give way. If the dangers of tetraethyl lead were well understood, so were the financial implications.
A vast infrastructure was taking form: assembly lines in Detroit, roads spreading across the landscape, filling stations dotting the countryside. Six billion gallons of gasoline were sold in the United States every year. If that gasoline was leaded, Standard Oil and GM would make a profit on every drop. But the headlines coming out of New Jersey were putting all of that in jeopardy.
He washed his hands in a bowl of tetraethyl lead to prove how safe it is. Narrator : Reporters were skeptical, and the authorities were spooked. New Jersey ordered Standard Oil to shut down the loony gas building. But the Ethyl Corporation insisted that its product was harmless.
Marcella Fierro, Forensic Pathologist : So his relationship to the dead body is that of, of a doctor to a patient. And he tells me what happens to him. He tells me if he has disease or injury. He often can tell me how he received it. He's asking me to tell a story. You have an obligation to the patient to get it right. Narrator : Norris had little doubt about the nature of the poison: everything pointed to tetraethyl lead. But he needed proof: proof that the men had absorbed the lead at work, and proof that it had killed them.
For Gettler that meant solving three separate problems. First, he had to confirm that there was, in fact, lead in the men's bodies. He processed a sample of brain tissue to isolate lead in a clear solution. Then he added chemicals to make any lead turn a bright red.
A deeper color indicated a higher concentration. Gettler had the answer to his first question: the brain was riddled with lead. Next, he needed to precisely measure the concentration. For this, he compared the shade of his solution with reference samples. We won't be able to get accurate readings with the colorimeter -- the levels are too high. So we start over. Instead of breaking down the tissue with acid, we'll dry it out on a steam bath, and then ash it in the electric muffle.
Alice, start by clearing this up, and then I'm going to need a dozen Narrator : In order to get a precise measurement, Gettler would have to isolate the lead, and then calculate its weight. Alexander Gettler Chris Bowers We'll make our way from there. Through an arduous process, Gettler arrived at a precise number. But the last question remained. He had to trace the lead's passage through the body by analyzing every place that it might have been deposited.
The only way to do that was to carry out the same grueling procedure on the men's bones, blood, brains, lungs, livers and kidneys. Marcella Fierro, Forensic Pathologist : This was pioneering work. And what Gettler found was that these gentlemen were having chronic tetraethyl lead poisoning.
They were inhaling it in addition to absorbing it through their skin. And when you inhale that lead it gets carried into the blood stream, and deposited in the tissues, especially the brain tissues. Narrator : Norris didn't bother to conceal his anger when he issued the report. Deborah Blum, Author The Poisoner's Handbook : Norris said, "This is such a dangerous compound that we need to take it out of gasoline now.
Narrator : The authorities were listening. It looked like the trend might spread. He was a very small government, non-regulation kind of guy. So Coolidge appointed a panel of experts that only included industry scientists.
Narrator : Coolidge's panel reported its findings in January of It recommended gloves, masks, and other precautions for workers, which effectively controlled the dangers of production. But it concluded that the public's exposure was too low to be of concern, and dismissed Norris's plea for a ban. As a result, the federal government lifted all restrictions on the sale of leaded gas.
An overjoyed Standard Oil spokesman likened it to "a gift of God. Inventor Thomas Midgley was less effusive; he had had to take a leave of absence after being diagnosed with lead poisoning. The episode was a bitter defeat for Charles Norris. In July of , he traveled to Europe, where he spent six months being treated for exhaustion. Narrator : By the fall, Norris was back at work in a city that had grown faster, more vibrant, and more dangerous than ever.
Norris was relieved when his old nemesis Mayor Hylan left office, although he had doubts about his replacement. Gentleman Jimmy Walker flaunted his fast living, sported a show girl mistress, and was unruffled by frequent accusations of corruption. When the City Council voted to double his salary, he dismissed the critics by telling them: "Imagine what you'd have to pay me if I worked full time. It soon became apparent that Jimmy Walker wasn't going to solve Norris's budget troubles, but neither would he make trouble for him.
Norris took up his duties with renewed enthusiasm, and with a style that was a source of wonder to his toxicologist.
Colin Evans, Writer : Norris didn't do anything by half measures. He wouldn't shuffle up to a crime scene, you know, just sidle in. He would generally sweep out of a chauffeur-driven limousine. Saunter over to the body and have a look and say, "Yeah, yeah.
Okay, guys, I've seen enough. You can take him back to the office now. He was just larger than life. Narrator : Norris never knew what awaited him when he was called to a crime scene. He was well accustomed to death, but even so, some episodes were hard to forget. Pretty cut and dried. Patrolman sees a guy dumping something suspicious into the water off India Wharf. The guy takes off. The patrolman finally tackles him and finds he's been carrying half a woman's body. Brings him in, we get his address, come here, and we find this.
That's the other half of the body over there. This guy did not want to get caught. Charles Norris Don Sparks : He didn't kill her. She died from carbon monoxide poisoning. Krajicek, Writer : You have a man, with blood on his clothes, who's caught throwing the lady's limbs in the water and in his apartment on the kitchen floor is the torso. And the knife is lying there beside it. It truly seemed like an open and shut case.
Marcella Fierro, Forensic Pathologist : When the police went and they find a body in pieces, I mean your first thought has to be "something very bad has happened here. I mean normal people don't think that way. Narrator : Francesco Travia was, by luck and by design, very much an outcast. The newspapers called him a longshoreman, but he spent most days by himself in a cramped apartment near the Brooklyn waterfront. He spoke no English, had very little money, and no real friends.
And he wasn't telling the police, or anyone else, how Anna Fredericksen had died. But Charles Norris was sure he knew the answer. Deborah Blum, Author The Poisoner's Handbook : If you die of carbon monoxide poisoning the skin flushes this very notable cherry pink.
And carbon monoxide stains the blood such a brilliant red that weeks later you can take blood from a corpse, months sometimes even, and still find that profound effect. Narrator : For Norris, it was a tragically familiar sight. As the main ingredient in illuminating gas, carbon monoxide killed more New Yorkers every year than tuberculosis, measles, and typhoid combined.
It was deadly, and it was everywhere -- piped into countless homes for lighting, cooking, and refrigeration. The police assumed that the gas had leached into Fredericksen's body after she died. Norris thought that was impossible. Even so, Travia was charged with murder. The police were not trained in forensic science. So they didn't understand it and they didn't have any respect for it. And you had Norris saying, "We're gonna prove to you that science really matters in understanding these cases and solving them.
Narrator : Norris asked Gettler to determine whether a dead body could absorb carbon monoxide. Gettler came up with a simple experiment. He retrieved three unclaimed bodies from the morgue, enclosed them in sealed metal boxes, and piped the boxes full of illuminating gas. Narrator : After the bodies had been soaking in the gas for several days, Gettler looked for the telltale pink flush, and tested the blood for carbon monoxide.
Narrator : When Francesco Travia went to trial in the spring of , he finally told his side of the story. Once in a while a neighbor, Anna Fredericksen, would come around looking for a drink. That's how the evening of November 29th began. Over the next few hours, Travia and Fredericksen polished off a bottle together, and then he asked her to leave.
She refused. The next thing Travia remembered was waking up on the floor with Anna Fredericksen's body lying nearby. Marcella Fierro, Forensic Pathologist : He thinks he's killed her.
So his major preoccupation becomes what? Getting rid of the body. Well she is described as a large woman. So how's he gonna get rid of this large woman? Well, obviously make her a small woman. Narrator : Alexander Gettler then testified that Anna Fredericksen's body couldn't have absorbed carbon monoxide after she died.
The gas had killed her, not Francesco Travia. Then, the source of the poison was revealed: during their argument a coffee pot had been tipped over on the stove, extinguishing the flame, causing a massive leak. Travia, either through lower exposure or higher tolerance, had awoken. Fredericksen had not. The jury found Francesco Travia not guilty of murder. Although he served time for illegally disposing of a body, Norris and Gettler had saved him from the electric chair.
For them, the Travia case was a long-awaited vindication. You need to make that hostility go away if forensic science is gonna work. And you see, post the Travia case, everyone wanting to move in that direction. Krajicek, Writer : Norris and Gettler were elated. Justice was done because of science. These guys were all about getting it right. And in this case they did.
Narrator : On Christmas Eve, , hospitals all over New York were flooded with patients hallucinating, blinded, comatose, and dying. Michael Lerner, Historian : For a year or two after Prohibition went into effect, people were drinking the same old stuff -- commercial liquor the bootleggers were selling. But as Prohibition progresses, as the liquor supply becomes more and more unreliable, people start adulterating the product, they'd start diluting the product.
And then the biggest threat comes from the diversion of industrial alcohol. Narrator : For decades, the federal government had required that any alcohol not intended for drinking be poisoned. That way alcohol used in cosmetics, medicines, or manufacturing could be kept out of the liquor supply.
It was called "denaturing," and under normal circumstances it simply allowed the government to regulate the market. But once Prohibition took effect, denatured alcohol became an attractive source of bootleg liquor.
In Bowery dives denatured alcohol was served straight up. It was called "smoke," and it cost a few cents a glass. The great majority of drinkers weren't quite so desperate. Michael Lerner, Historian : Bootleggers didn't wanna kill their customers off so they would do things like redistill denatured alcohol to distill out the poison. And you could do this to come degree, but virtually every time you would leave trace elements of the poison in it.
Narrator : Norris asked Gettler to analyze samples of liquor that had been found near the victims. He identified a bewildering array of poisons: methanol, gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, ether, formaldehyde, and more.
Most of them were there by order of the federal government. Michael Lerner, Historian : They adjusted the denaturing formulas and they tinkered, you know, they always were looking for better ways to poison alcohol. It reaches a point where no one can be sure of what they're drinking. Whether you're in the most exclusive nightclub, or whether you're in the seediest dive, you really had no idea what was in the glass. Narrator : Prohibition was becoming a contest between chemists working for the government, and others working for the bootleggers.
Norris used Gettler's findings as the centerpiece of a national campaign against Prohibition. The campaign resonated across the country. More and more Americans were coming to see Prohibition as a failure, and Norris helped cement that impression. Michael Lerner, Historian : Instead of people stepping back and saying "this isn't working," the drys push the federal government to basically double down and say, "Let's literally double the amount of poison in the alcohol.
And that will stop people from drinking. Narrator : On New Year's Eve , the Treasury Department announced that denatured alcohol would be made still more deadly. Michael Lerner, Historian : It's just stunning to see really what you could only describe as mass poisoning brought about by government policy. If prohibition, if its intent was to stop people from drinking, you know, the evidence is right there in front of you know, something has gone drastically wrong. Narrator : By New Years, the refrigerators in the morgue at Bellevue were full, and corpses lined the hallways.
Norris spent the day chronicling the epidemic. Unidentified Man, about 28 years old, 5 feet 8 inches, lbs. Charles Norris Don Sparks, audio : Nearly 10, in this city will die this year from strong drink.
Our national casualty list for the year from this one cause will outstrip the toll of the Great War. These are the first fruits of Prohibition. This is the price of our national experiment -- in extermination. Narrator : In the fall of , New Jersey authorities asked Norris and Gettler to investigate the case of a woman who had been dead for five years. It was their first encounter with a terrifying new poison. The story began in , when Amelia Magia got her first job. Her parents were struggling to make ends meet, and she wanted to help.
Amelia and her two sisters spent their days in a New Jersey factory decorating watch faces with paint that emitted a beautiful blue-green light. The country was at war, and soldiers in the trenches had found that these luminous watches were just bright enough to read at night without being seen by the enemy. Narrator : The paint was made with radium less than a millionth of a gram per watch.
That was enough to give it a magical glow. Narrator : Amelia and her friends liked to play with it: sprinkling it in their hair or painting their fingernails. Amelia Maggia Dominika Haskova : Yeah, but my brother and his friends still love it. Deborah Blum, Author The Poisoner's Handbook : When radium was discovered in the late 19th century by Marie Currie and her husband, Pierre, they named it radium because of its radio activity.
And it was thought to be a wonderful thing. Radium was almost immediately put into medical practice for shrinking tumors. So the idea was it has nothing but health-giving properties. Narrator : Within no time radium was being used to treat everything from acne to insanity. Children were fed radium-laced candies and sodas, women bought radium-based facial creams, and radium clinics offered free injections of the new wonder drug.
It was understood that like most medicines, radium could be hazardous. But everyone assumed that any danger was fleeting, that radium would pass through the body without leaving a trace. Deborah Blum, Author The Poisoner's Handbook : So when you are a dial painter, and you're painting watches with radium paint, then you're just thinking you're doing something good for yourself, right? You just have a little extra exposure to this wonderful healthy element.
Narrator : In , after four years at the factory, Magia had to quit her job. She had been losing weight, and her joints ached terribly.
She developed anemia, and bled constantly from the mouth. Within months Amelia's lower jaw had disintegrated so badly that her dentist remove it by lifting it out with his fingers. Amelia Magia died on September 12th , at the age of The death of a young immigrant wasn't news.
But Amelia was only the first. The next year another dial painter died a similar death, and then another, and another. By , five were dead, and several others -- including Amelia's two sisters -- were showing the same terrifying symptoms: anemias, ulcers, tumors, and decaying bones.
Marcella Fierro, Forensic Pathologist : It was a miserable death. And it didn't occur quickly. And, of course, the radium company said radium was not the problem. I mean they were not acknowledging any responsibility. Narrator : Many of the victims hadn't shown any symptoms until long after they had left their jobs.
No one had ever seen a poison that took effect after months or even years. Despite the company's denials, the local medical examiner, Harrison Martland, was convinced that radium was the killer. If that was true, he was up against an entirely new poison. In the fall of he asked Norris and Gettler for help. Gettler devised a test to find radium in a set of human remains, and on October 15th the body of the first known victim was delivered to Bellevue: Amelia Magia.
Marcella Fierro, Forensic Pathologist : They exhumed her bones and they cleaned them. And then Gettler, he did his tests.
He covered some sheets of x-ray paper, so that light could not expose them. Then he placed the bones on them and left them in the dark for a couple of days. And when he returned and removed the paper, he saw where the bones had been placed.
Gamma rays were beating on that x-ray paper, just as if we were in the doctor's office getting an x-ray.
Gettler showed that the radium was in fact in the bones. Narrator : Confronted with Gettler's findings, Amelia Magia's former employer was forced to offer compensation to some of the survivors. But he still insisted that the whole affair was a fraud.
What was then considered an act of kindness on our part has since been turned against us. Marcella Fierro, Forensic Pathologist : Business could run wild with worker's safety in those days.
Whether it was lead or whether it was radium or all sorts of other toxic substances in the work place there was no serious agency to protect workers. Narrator : Amelia's suffering was over, but for other Radium Girls the ordeal was just beginning.
The tragedy would continue to unfold for decades, as over a hundred Dial Painters were slowly poisoned by the radium in their bones. Marcella Fierro, Forensic Pathologist : These ladies were doomed. They would take that brush and bring it to their lips to get a fine point on it.
Radium was going right into their blood stream through their mucous membrane. You have this wonderful system that the body uses to deliver calcium to the bones to make them stronger.
The body sees radium, thinks it's calcium, and takes it right to the bone. And it stays there. It literally starts to break the bones apart. Their spines would crumble. Their bones would break as they walked across the room. None of these girls could be saved. Nothing the doctors could do would bring them back. Narrator : The world's enchantment with radioactivity was ending.
Within a few years the market for radium tonics, patent medicines, and health products had collapsed. But there was no agency with the power to ban radium outright. The Dial Painters tragedy marked the beginning of a profound shift in public opinion. Faith in scientific progress was being undermined by fear of its consequences.
Norris and Gettler had been sounding that warning for years, urging the government to protect its citizens. Finally, that message was being heard. In the early s almost half of the city is out of work. The party atmosphere of the s is gone. Sort of a dark tone takes over the city. There's a fear that the Depression was something so drastic that, that we would never recover from it. That this really was the end. Narrator : By , New York had become a landscape of breadlines, soup kitchens, and homeless encampments.
The Roaring 20s were a distant memory, except for one thing: Prohibition. Michael Lerner, Historian : Nothing the Prohibitionists had promised had come to happen. They promised a safer society and we had a more violent society.
They promised the ends to the public health problems and instead we got more public health problems; they promised prosperity and here we were in a depression; they promised that this would clean up the cities, that didn't happen; they promised it would clean up politics, that didn't happen. Everyone's saying just set it aside. Let's be done with this.
It's over. It doesn't work. It's never going to work. Narrator : Congress voted to overturn the 18th Amendment in February of But Prohibition would remain in force until three quarters of the states had voted for repeal. Until then, the smoke joints would continue to ply their trade; places like the Mermaid Tavern in the Bronx, the hideaway of a man who would become known as Mike the Durable.
Deborah Blum, Author The Poisoner's Handbook : Mike is this Irish drifter who has, you know, a tab longer than his arm and doesn't pay it. And one night the owner and his friends were sort of bemoaning the bad times and wishing they knew someone who would conveniently die and leave them some money.
And they all look at Mike Malloy passed out again and think, "here's our guy. In short order the conspirators bought three insurance policies on Mike Malloy's life. We'll just dose him up with major amounts of alcohol and he'll keel over. But he loved it. So after a week they said, "Okay. Well we'll try a little poison alcohol," which was killing people across the city. He loved that too, right. Kept coming back. So then they thought, "Okay, "we'll, we'll try poison food. There was one sandwich that had rotten sardines, ground glass, metal shavings.
He loves it, comes back for more. So they took him out to a park. It's February, pour ice water on him, figuring he'll die of pneumonia.
No, the ice water just wakes him up. He goes back to the bar and sleeps it off. And so finally, they wait until he's unconsciousness, lie him down in the street and then persuade a taxi driver to hit him with the car. But does he die? He does not. He is knocked to the sidewalk where some very helpful policemen rescue him.
And about a week later he comes back, you know, he has a broken arm and a bad headache. He and Kriesberg rented a room, liquored Malloy up until he passed out, and then rigged a rubber tube from a gas jet to his mouth. It took just an hour for the carbon monoxide to finally kill him. The conspirators got their payoff, and set about enjoying the fruits of their labors By this time Gettler has built this phenomenal groundwork on carbon monoxide really going back to the Travia case.
So it's a piece of cake over at the Bellevue lab. He finds this lethal level of carbon monoxide and that was it. Narrator : The conspirators had made one critical mistake. In his haste to finally put Mike Malloy in the ground, undertaker Frank Pasqua neglected to embalm the body. Had he done so, the embalming fluids would have destroyed all traces of carbon monoxide.
But as it was, Gettler was able to provide the evidence that sent all four men to the electric chair. They were soon forgotten, but Durable Mike Malloy would live on in memory, as the subject of songs, plays, novels, and movies. Smoke joints like Tony Marino's finally disappeared when Prohibition ended in December of Poisoned alcohol almost disappeared as well: in the first full year after Prohibition Norris counted only two methanol deaths.
But the Depression had triggered a spike in violent deaths, driven by soaring rates of suicide. On average, three New Yorkers were killing themselves every day. It was easy to lose sight of the suffering behind those numbers, but in the spring of , one story made it all too real. Krajicek, Writer : By all accounts Frederick Gross was a very pleasant and polite fellow.
He lived in Bushwick, Brooklyn. In Bushwick was sort of the hinterlands, a neighborhood of immigrants, cold water tenements; and it was a neighborhood of poverty.
In order to keep him on the payroll, the company said, "Look, we've got to cut your salary. He had five kids. They went to bed hungry most nights. There was no coal in the cellar to keep the flat warm. He wore a suit that he owed money on.
He was in dire straits. Narrator : One evening, Gross's wife Katherine told him that one of the boys wasn't feeling well.
Gross put him into pajamas and tucked him into bed. By morning he was dead. Colin Evans, Writer : The first to die was Frederick, age nine. He was followed by his younger brother, Leo. And then, Katherine, the wife, died.
And then after a passage of three weeks his two daughters died. And eventually rumors reached the police and they started to investigate. So, of course, the police are thinking, "This guy is really doing a number on his family.
Narrator : Gross was arrested; the police questioned him for 28 hours, and for 28 hours, he insisted he was innocent. Finally Gross was delivered to his cell, where he collapsed onto his cot, still wearing his one good suit. The police were left with five bodies, and one dramatic clue. Deborah Blum, Author The Poisoner's Handbook : His month-old daughter before she died, a neighbor described her, you know, as bald as an egg. All of her beautiful hair had fallen out.
His son in the hospital was bald. Narrator : Investigators suspected poison, and the hair loss pointed to a highly toxic heavy metal that was widely used in pesticides: thallium. Their suspicions were corroborated by a local pathologist, who confirmed that all of the bodies contained thallium. And they weren't long in figuring out how it got there.
Krajicek, Writer : It turned out that Frederick Gross' employer sold thallium as a pesticide against rodents and bugs and whatnot. They also sold cocoa. And Fredrick Gross had brought home a couple-pound tin of it one week and then brought home another two-pound tin of it a week later. The Brooklyn prosecutor said, "That's a lot of cocoa. Deborah Blum, Author The Poisoner's Handbook : So, you know, if you're a police officer and you're connecting all these dots, dying family, amazingly untouched dad, access to poison, the poison, and access to what appears to be the method of delivery, it looks like a perfect case.
Narrator : When the same pathologist confirmed the presence of thallium in the cocoa, the Brooklyn DA had everything he needed to go to trial. But the case troubled him: why had Gross done it, and why did he keep insisting he was innocent? He's, he's not wealthier.
And they are discovering that no one believes he did it. Narrator : Hoping to dispel his doubts, the D. The heart of the mystery was the alleged murder weapon: the cocoa Gross had fed to his children.
Gettler devised a procedure to remove any thallium from the cocoa and isolate it in a clear solution. Narrator : But that was just the beginning. Gettler's procedure also isolated other elements that could be mistaken for thallium. He needed to confirm beyond a shadow of doubt whether the solution actually contained the poison. The theory of spectroscopy had been around for almost a century.
It was based on a peculiar phenomenon: when any element is heated to the point that it glows, it emits a characteristic color. Alexander Gettler Chris Bowers : So if we do have thallium we should see some green. Narrator : But this color is visible only for the brief moment it takes a sample to evaporate, so precise identification is impossible with the naked eye.
Narrator : But if the flame is viewed through a prism, the resulting color spectrum is like an element's fingerprint. Each element has its own spectrum; no two are alike. And if that spectrum was projected onto a sheet of photo paper, it could be preserved for careful analysis. The spectrograph had been designed to do just that. It had never before been used in a criminal investigation. Gettler lit a gas flame inside the spectrograph, and tuned it so that it emitted no visible light.
Alexander Gettler Chris Bowers : And expose. And that's it. Let's see what we've got. Narrator : The last step was to compare the photo paper with a chart of known color patterns. Alexander Gettler Chris Bowers : Well, we know that the cocoa wasn't the murder weapon. Ok, we've got to move quickly.
Narrator : Gettler proved that the cocoa hadn't been poisoned at all; rather, copper from the tin had leached into the powder. The pathologist who first tested the cocoa had mistaken one for the other. The case against Frederick Gross was starting to fall apart. And Gettler discovers that thallium is in the bodies of all these dead children but not in the mom. That she had coincidentally died of encephalitis.
Colin Evans, Writer : So the police were left with five bodies, no motive, and no means of establishing exactly how the thallium had gotten into the victims. But when they started talking to neighbors, it emerged that the mother, Katherine, was so depressed with her current situation, she'd recently found out she was pregnant again, and she said, "things just, you know, just cannot go on this way. Life for Frederick, he doesn't deserve this. And she'd done it as an act of kindness to her husband.
Although Gross had suffered terrible loss, he had been spared an even greater injustice. Had he been condemned to die, it's unlikely that anyone would have questioned the verdict.
What was left of Gross's life he owed to Alexander Gettler. Gross went straight from the court to the hospital where his only surviving son was recovering. 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.
Gross replied, "Son, I was busy. You see this pain and suffering every day. You're working to bring something positive out of it. Whether it's answers to families, insurers and courts or if it's a public health issue can you inspire the political people to change things? But it's physically wearing as well, okay. Physically wearing. Narrator : By , Charles Norris had been on the job for 17 years, fighting one uphill battle after another.
And that spring, he was drawn in to one of the most dispiriting battles of all. Once again, the adversary was City Hall. Gentleman Jimmy Walker was gone now. His tenure ended in spectacular fashion when he fled the country to avoid being prosecuted for corruption. Norris had been hopeful when Fiorello LaGuardia moved into the mayor's office. LaGuardia shared Norris's dislike of plutocrats and Prohibition. But Prohibition aside, the new mayor was a law and order man, and he set about cleaning up the city government with boundless energy.
Unfortunately for Norris, that energy wasn't always matched by discernment. I mean Norris acted like a guy with money. He had a chauffeur. He wore really good clothes. If you were a suspicious mayor, which LaGuardia was, you'd say to yourself, "Never mind his private income. This is a guy on the take. Narrator : In May of LaGuardia accused Norris and his staff of embezzling almost two hundred thousand dollars.
Norris's public humiliation went on for almost a month, before investigators finally acknowledged that not only had he not stolen anything, but that he had, in fact, "spent substantial amounts of his own money" to sustain the department. Norris had had enough. In June he left the country for a long delayed vacation.
But when he returned to work in the fall, he hardly seemed rejuvenated. New Book. Shipped from UK. Established seller since Seller Inventory FT Book Description Hardcover.
Condition: Brand New. In Stock. Publisher: Informa Healthcare , This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. View all copies of this ISBN edition:. Synopsis About this title A unique reference containing detailed reviews of more than drugs and poisons, the Poisoning and Toxicology Handbook, Fourth Edition provides the latest information on medicinal, biological, herbal, and non-medicinal agents, and antidotes.
Buy New Learn more about this copy. Customers who bought this item also bought. Stock Image. Published by Informa Healthcare New Hardcover Quantity: 3. Seller Rating:. Seller Image. New Hardcover Quantity: 4. New Hardcover Quantity: 1. GF Books, Inc. Hawthorne, CA, U. Poisoning and Toxicology Handbook Jerrold B. Published by CRC Press
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