9UNP0449SD_Deborah_Blum

- 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.