It is a sobering thought that for most of recorded history, poisoners have been able to dispense their potions secure in the knowledge that they were impervious to detection. All that was needed was a modicum of care. If one enjoyed patronage, then even that little inconvenience could be overlooked. By the seventeenth century, professional poisoners were regularly engaged by the moneyed and occasionally by the royal families of Europe whenever domestic difficulties threatened to get out of hand.

Easily the most popular poison was arsenic. Not for nothing was it known as inheritance powder, precipitating, as it did, abrupt changes in fortune, not to mention the family tree. Of course, arsenic was never entirely reserved for the privileged; the working classes, too, knew of its efficacy. Lives lived in the grim shadow of plague and countless other ailments could be snuffed out in the twinkling of an eye with no one to say whether death had resulted from natural or unnatural causes. But all that was to change.

Around 1790, a chemist named Johann Metzger discovered that if substances containing arsenic were heated and a cold plate held over the vapors, a white layer of arsenious oxide would form on the plate. Although this "arsenic mirror" could prove that food had been doused with arsenic, it could not tell if a body had already absorbed arsenic.

This problem was solved by Dr. Valentine Rose of the Berlin Medical Faculty in 1806. He cut up a corpse's stomach and its contents and boiled them into a kind of stew. After filtering the stew to remove any remaining flesh, he treated the liquid with nitric acid. This converted any arsenic present into arsenic acid, which could then be subjected to Metzger's mirror in the usual way.

But by far the greatest toxicological leap forward came in 1836 when James Marsh, a middle-aged London chemist, invented a means of detecting even the smallest quantity of arsenic. It was similar to Metzger's method, but instead of allowing the vapors to rise up to the cold metal plate

—with most of the gases escaping into thin air—the whole process took place in a sealed U-shaped tube in which the vapors could exit only via a small nozzle. The suspect material was dropped onto a zinc plate covered with dilute sulfuric acid to produce hydrogen. Any arsine gas was then heated as it passed along a glass tube, condensing when it reached a cold part of the tube to form the arsenic mirror. In a refined form, the Marsh test is still used today.

How many people are murdered each year by poison is unknowable. Confirmed cases make up a minuscule percentage of the annual homicide rate. Data compiled by the FBI show that out of 15,517 homicides in 2000, just eight were poison victims. Given the extraordinary sophistication and range of modern detection techniques, one can only marvel that poisoners persist in their misguided attempts to fool the laboratory. But their advantage lies in the fact that before it can be detected, poison has to first be suspected; and while the symptoms remain so tricky to diagnose, it is safe to say that poisoning will remain with us.

The following is a list of the most common poisons and their typical symptoms:

Acids (nitric, hydrochloric, sulfuric)—burns around mouth, lips, nose

Aconite—numbness and tingling in extremities

Arsenic—acute, unexplained diarrhea

Atropine (belladonna)—dilated pupils

Carbolic acid—odor of disinfectant

Carbon monoxide—bright cherry-red skin

Cyanide—quick death, red skin, odor of almond

Metallic compounds—diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain

Nicotine—convulsions

Opiates—contracted pupils

Oxalic acid (phosphorous)—odor of garlic

Strychnine—convulsions, dark face and neck

Thallium—hair loss

Mary Blandy

DATE: 1751

LOCATION: Henley-on-Thames, England

SIGNIFICANCE: This case concluded with the first murder trial to feature toxicological testimony.

Despite bearing several of the qualities that Georgian men found desirable in a wife—she was sweet-natured, attractive, and rumored to bring a dowry of one thousand pounds (four thousand dollars)—Mary Blandy was, at twenty-six, still unmarried. Every fellow who set his sights on this young woman found himself deflected by her ambitious father, a prosperous lawyer with decided views on what he was looking for in a sonin-law. He wanted someone with wealth and position.

Captain William Cranstoun had plenty of the latter, being the son of a Scottish peer, but his pocketbook fell short of Francis Blandy's expectations, and there was the problem of the wife he already had back in Scotland. Never one to let such trivia jeopardize an opportunity for financial advancement, Cranstoun entirely neglected to mention either impediment when he took up residence with the Blandys in 1746 in their home in Henley, a picturesque village on the River Thames, west of London. The domestic arrangement delighted both the smitten Mary and her snobbish father.

For six months all went well. Then Cranstoun decided to dispense with his wife. He wrote her a letter saying that because his military prospects were being impaired by his marital status, would she mind jotting a line to the effect that she had never been his wife at all, merely a mistress? Mrs. Cranstoun clearly did mind and took her errant husband to court. The ensuing publicity infuriated Mr. Blandy, who for the first time realized that his future son-in-law was penniless. Cranstoun was banished not only from the house but from Mary's affections as well. Or so the outraged father thought.

The couple continued to meet in secret. They had an ally in Mary's mother, especially after Cranstoun had lent her forty pounds to repay a debt in London. When, in 1749, Mrs. Blandy contracted an illness and died, Cranstoun, under siege from creditors, pressed Mary for settlement of the loan. Without any capital of her own, she had to borrow money to repay him.

Thinking how much simpler life would be if he could get his hands on Mary's dowry, Cranstoun reapplied himself to the task of winning over Mr. Blandy. Perhaps, he said to Mary, a "magic potion" might improve the old man's disposition? Quite by chance, he knew of a Scottish herbalist with just such a nostrum. Having managed to worm his way back into the Blandy household in 1750, Cranstoun apparently slipped some of the powder into Blandy's tea. A quite remarkable transformation took place. Blandy became personable, almost benevolent. But whatever Cranstoun had used, its effects were temporary; the next morning, Francis Blandy was his usual truculent self. So Cranstoun suggested that Mary continue the treatment, and in April of the following year, he sent her some of the powder with instructions that she administer it to her father in small doses.

Violently Ill

At once, Blandy began to suffer acute nausea and stomach pains, and when a servant, Susan Gunnel, suspicious and puzzled by the old man's decline, tasted some of the gruel that Mary had prepared for him, she, too, became ill. In the bottom of the pan she found a gritty white powder, which she scraped up and showed to a neighbor, who in turn sent it to an apothecary. Because there was not yet a reliable test for arsenic, scientific analysis was impossible. Nevertheless, Gunnel took her suspicions to Mr. Blandy, warning that he was being poisoned by his own daughter. Blandy called Mary to his bedside and asked her if she had tampered with his food. Mary, panic-stricken, turned pale and bolted from the room.

Inexplicably, Blandy allowed Mary to continue preparing his food, a decision that did nothing to arrest his deterioration. On the contrary, he became much worse. When the cook saw Mary throwing letters and a white powder onto the kitchen fire, she waited until Mary had gone and then rescued the powder. But it was too late to save the stricken Blandy. On August 14, 1751, he slipped into a coma and died.

That night, Mary offered the footman five hundred pounds if he would help her escape to France. His refusal forced her to make a run for it the next morning. An angry crowd gave chase—by now the circumstances of Francis Blandy's death were common knowledge—and captured her.

Cranstoun, told of his fiancée's predicament, fled to Europe.

Mary Blandy's trial at Oxford Assizes on March 3, 1752, was over in a single day. The main prosecution witnesses, four doctors, all agreed that the well-preserved nature of Mr. Blandy's internal organs suggested arsenical poisoning and that the white powder they had analyzed was arsenic. But the experiment they used was dangerously rudimentary: One of the doctors told of applying a red-hot iron to the powder and smelling the vapor. The odor, he said, was clearly that of arsenic. More damaging was the testimony of Susan Gunnel and the cook, both of whom testified to seeing Mary put strange powders in her father's food.

Mary did nothing to deny to deny the allegation, other than to insist that the potions were to improve her father's temperament. Then why, asked the prosecutor, had she rushed to destroy the powder once she was aware of being under suspicion? Mary had no answer. The jury thought they knew. After just five minutes of deliberation, they found her guilty of murder.

At nine o'clock on the morning of April 6, 1752, dressed in black bombazine, her hands bound with black ribbon, she mounted the gallows, still maintaining her innocence. Her final words were to the executioner: "Do not hang me too high, for the sake of decency."

While Cranstoun must be considered fortunate to have escaped Mary's fate, it was a fleeting reprieve. Just a few months later, he died in conditions of great poverty and considerable suffering in France.

Conclusion

By modern standards, the medical testimony in this trial smacks of quackery, but it should be remembered that if science is a struggle of intellect over ignorance, the struggle had to begin somewhere.

Charles Hall

DATE: 1871

LOCATION: Greenland

SIGNIFICANCE: For almost a century, the mysterious death of arctic explorer Charles Hall puzzled criminologists and seafarers alike. In 1968, forensic scientists finally answered the enduring question— was Captain Hall poisoned?

In 1871, President Ulysses S. Grant authorized an expedition in search of the North Pole. On July 3, financed by a fifty-thousand-dollar grant from Congress, the 387-ton steam tug Polaris set sail from New London, Connecticut, under the command of Charles Francis Hall, an explorer with considerable arctic experience. Right from the start, the mission was blighted. Hall clashed repeatedly with the chief scientist, Dr. Emil Bessels, a haughty twenty-four-year-old German who also served as the ship's physician.

By September, the Polaris had reached the northwestern coast of Greenland, and Hall decided to anchor for the winter in an inlet that he named Thank God Harbor, some five hundred miles south of the Pole. Bessels and fellow officer Sidney Budington were furious; both wanted to head south for safer waters.

On the afternoon of October 24, Hall returned from a scouting trip and called for hot coffee. After drinking just half a cup, he pushed the coffee aside, complaining of its sweet taste. Half an hour later, he was doubled over in agony and vomiting, afflictions that Dr. Bessels attributed to apoplexy. That evening, the assistant navigator, George Tyson, wrote in his diary: "Captain Hall is sick; it is strange, and he looked so well . . . this sickness came on immediately after drinking a cup of coffee."

The following day, Hall seemed to rally a little, but later he suffered further attacks, despite, as Tyson noted, Dr. Bessels giving him "frequent medication." Tyson also noted that when Bessels was not around, the sickly captain showed definite signs of improvement. By November 3, Hall had gone into serious decline, his mouth surrounded by sores, talking wildly about being poisoned, excoriating Bessels as "that little German dancing master." A subsequent inquiry learned that Bessels treated Hall with injections of a liquid, ostensibly quinine, distilled from "white crystals."

"How Do You Spell Murder?"

In his more lucid moments, Hall was seen scribbling notes in his private journals. (Locked in a wooden case, these were later thrown overboard when all unnecessary items were jettisoned to lighten the ship because it was in danger of sinking.) On one occasion, he turned to Budington and asked, "Tell me, Sidney, how do you spell murder?" Eventually, Hall rejected all medication prescribed by Bessels, convinced it was poisoned. When Budington approached the doctor with an offer to taste the medicine first and thereby allay the captain's fears, Bessels angrily refused.

Late in the evening of November 7, 1871, Hall lapsed into a final coma. The next morning he died. Crew members could not help noticing that Bessels, and his assistant Frederick Meyer, who had also fallen foul of Hall, took the bereavement with sunny indifference. Three days later, Hall was wrapped in the American flag, placed in a coffin, and buried on the frozen shores of Thank God Harbor.

He left behind him a hellish situation. Trapped by ice, the Polaris was slowly crushed to splinters. Thirty crew members set out to trek overland. Over the next eighteen months, they suffered every extreme of hunger and hardship until, after one of the most heroic sagas of survival in the history of exploration, they were rescued on April 30, 1873. That summer, they told their story to a Washington inquiry, which ruled that Captain Hall had died "from natural causes, viz. apoplexy."

For almost a century, doubts lingered. Finally, in August 1968, Professor

Chauncey C. Loomis of Dartmouth College and pathologist Dr. Franklin Paddock of Lenox, Massachusetts, flew to Thank God Harbor, determined to settle the mystery once and for all. The site had been marked by a tablet of oak and brass. After a few minutes of digging, they uncovered the coffin in its shallow grave and pried off the lid. Body and coffin alike were frozen into the permafrost, and Paddock had to perform his autopsy squatting astride the hole.

The corpse was remarkably well preserved, covered by a thin veneer of ice from the waist down. Apart from empty eye sockets and a shriveled nose tip, the face was intact and the rust-red beard and hair had lost none of their coloring. Although moisture had converted the trunk and limbs into adipocere, the internal organs were intact.

In what must have been one of the most awkward autopsies ever performed, Paddock carefully removed sections from the skull and what remained of the brain and heart, together with samples from the hair, beard, and a fingernail. He also gathered soil samples from the grave area. This material was sent first to the Public Safety Laboratory in Boston and then to the Toronto Center of Forensic Sciences, where it was subjected to neutron activation analysis (see the John Vollman case on page 313).

Poison Found

Dr. A. K. Perkons, director of the Toronto laboratory, found widely varying amounts of arsenic in the fingernail. At the tip, the nail contained 24.6 parts per million (ppm) of arsenic; at the base, it registered 76.7. Assuming a normal growth rate of 0.7 millimeters a week, Perkons concluded that in the last two weeks of his life, Hall had received a massive dose of arsenic.

Because the soil near the grave contained high quantities of arsenic (22.0 ppm), it was necessary to exclude the chance that some may have migrated from the soil to the body. Yet, said Perkons, "such migration would not explain the differentially increased arsenic in the sections of both hair and nails toward the root end." Every sample was washed before irradiation. Had arsenic come from the soil, it would have been distributed uniformly, yet "in neither fingernail nor hair was this the case." Taking into consideration the symptoms attending Hall's death, which Perkons considered to be of paramount importance, he felt that "arsenic poisoning is a fair diagnosis." Paddock agreed, saying that the results confirmed that Hall had ingested "tremendous doses of arsenic in the last two weeks of his life."

Conclusion

So was it murder, or was it suicide? Given what we know of Hall's nature and the circumstances of his death, there is little reason to suspect the latter, which leads inexorably to the question of who the killer was. Clearly, Emil Bessels emerges as the likeliest candidate; he made his loathing of Hall plain. But did that loathing lead him to murder? At this distance in time, the answer will forever remain conjecture.

An interesting anomaly is that Hall complained of the coffee being sweet. For centuries, poisoners have favored arsenic precisely because it has no taste; yet, according to Gleason, Gosselin, Hodge, and Smith in Clinical Toxicology of Commercial Products, this is by no means certain. They cite cases in which people ingesting arsenic have noticed a sweetish metallic aftertaste. In every other respect, the symptoms they quote for arsenical poisoning—vomiting, delirium, coma, paralysis, skin eruptions—parallel those that Hall exhibited. 

Robert Buchanan

DATE: 1892

LOCATION: New York, New York

SIGNIFICANCE: Often overlooked in the history of criminology is the role played by American newspaper reporters, especially those in New York City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This case highlights one of the best.

Dr. Robert Buchanan was a man in a hurry. Born in Nova Scotia, he moved to Scotland, qualified in Edinburgh, married in Nova Scotia, and moved to New York in 1886 to set up practice. By day, he was a respectedmedical man; by night, he caroused in low-life bars and bordellos, ordering drinks and women with equal frequency. This lifestyle drove his wife, Helen, to obtain a divorce and return to the sanctuary of Nova Scotia. Buchanan took the split well. For some time, he had been eyeing the beefy charms of Anna Sutherland, a wealthy brothel madam some twenty years his senior. On November 28, 1890, one day after she had changed her will in his favor, Anna wed her best client.

Unfortunately for Buchanan, Anna demanded that she be treated like a proper wife, insisting that he stay home at night with her, which wasn't what the ambitious doctor had in mind at all. Although he thoroughly approved of Anna's money, he found her vulgar and embarrassing, especially now that he was amassing a roster of well-to-do patients. Matters came to a head in early April 1892 with Buchanan's announcement that he intended to sail to Edinburgh—alone—to further his medical studies. Anna told him straight: either she went with him or she would cut him out of her will. Buchanan didn't hesitate; the passage was canceled forthwith. Within days, on April 22, Anna suddenly fell ill. Less than twenty-four hours later, she was dead. The physician who attended her in that final brief illness certified the cause of death as a brain hemorrhage. Buchanan was too busy counting his inheritance—fifty thousand dollars—even to attend her funeral.

And there the matter might have lain had not the redoubtable Ike White, a reporter for the New York World, happened to visit the coroner's office, looking to rustle up some good copy. While there, he overheard an elderly man demanding that an investigation be opened into Anna Sutherland's death. Buchanan, he thundered, was a scheming fiend who had murdered Anna for her money. The man, who introduced himself to White as Anna's ex-partner, admitted that his concerns were not wholly altruistic—Buchanan had cost him a share of Anna's fortune—but he was adamant that justice, not money, was fueling his campaign. He had already taken his suspicions to the police, but they had refused to heed the word of a pimp. White, less moralistic, put out a few tentative feelers and learned that Buchanan was nowhere to be found. A call to Nova Scotia revealed that he was back in Halifax. What White heard next stunned him—only three weeks after Anna's death, Buchanan had remarried his first wife, Helen!

Studied Fellow Killer

Smelling the makings of a sensational story, White tracked down other employees of the late brothel madam. They confirmed the general perception of Buchanan as a mountebank. One recalled something else:

During the trial of Carlyle Harris,4 Buchanan had followed the proceedings

with great interest, frequently referring to the accused as a "bungling fool" and a "stupid amateur." He had boasted of knowing how to avoid the telltale pinpoint pupils but refused to elaborate.

White took this knowledge to the doctor who had signed Anna

Sutherland's death certificate. He flatly refused to consider the possibility that she had died from anything other than brain hemorrhage. As for the suggestion of morphine poisoning, he singled out the Harris case as proof that pinpointing of the pupils was always present and that Anna had displayed no such symptom.

Showing the indefatigability that was to hallmark his career, White refused to accept the doctor's findings. At the back of his mind was the memory of a friend who had suffered from an eye ailment that necessitated frequent trips to the oculist. On each occasion, White recalled, his friend had returned with unnaturally dilated pupils, the result of being treated with atropine drops. Was it possible, the reporter wondered, that Buchanan had put a few drops of atropine in his wife's eyes just before death, in order to counteract the contraction of her pupils? White rushed to the home of the nurse who had tended Anna in her final days. Her recollection was clear: On several occasions she had seen Dr. Buchanan stooped over his ailing wife, dropping some medicine in her eyes.

This was all White needed to mount a major newspaper campaign, urging the New York coroner to issue an exhumation order for the body of Anna Sutherland. On May 22, her body was disinterred from Greenwood Cemetery and dispatched to the Carnegie Institute for autopsy. The results were unequivocal: death from an overdose of morphine. Professor Rudolph Witthaus, an eminent toxicologist, found that the body contained one-tenth of a grain of morphine in the remains, which he estimated was the residue of a fatal dose of five or six grains. He also recorded his belief that atropine would have disguised the distinctive contractions of the pupils. These results coincided with Buchanan's return to New York. On the basis of Witthaus's report, he was arrested and charged with murder.

Bizarre Experiment

His trial began on March 20, 1893. In a grotesque interlude, the prosecution sought to strengthen its hand by actually killing a cat in court with morphine, then dropping atropine in the poor creature's eyes. It was callous but effective. The pinpoint reaction was retarded. Not to be outdone, the defense countered with a full-scale attack designed to show that the color reaction tests used by Dr. Witthaus to identify the presence of morphine were not infallible. Witthaus watched in disbelief as Professor Victor C. Vaughan produced results that seemed to wholly undermine the integrity of the Pellagri test, previously thought to be the surest method of distinguishing between morphine and the deceptive alkaloids produced by decaying cadavers. In dual experiments, Vaughan obtained the distinctive red reaction not only when morphine was present but also when the drug was absent. The court gasped.

Had the defense decided to leave well enough alone, Buchanan would likely have been acquitted, but some in the New York legal community felt that in the Harris trial, the defendant's decision not to testify had militated heavily against him. Unwilling to repeat the mistake, Buchanan's lawyers put their client on the stand. It was a disaster. Buchanan had a carping manner that only became more exaggerated under cross-examination. The prosecution trapped him in so many lies and contradictions that all of the doubt created by the scientific dispute was entirely canceled out. Buchanan limped from the stand in tatters. Nevertheless, the jury still took more than twenty-eight hours to declare him guilty of murder.

While Buchanan languished on death row, his lawyers launched an appeal based on the tainted scientific evidence. But Witthaus was ready for them. He had taken his courtroom humiliation badly and set out to reestablish his reputation by proving that Vaughan's methodology had been flawed. He eventually tracked the source of the error to impurities in the chemicals used by the other scientists.

Buchanan's appeal failed, and on July 2, 1895, he took his seat in the same chair at Sing Sing that Carlyle Harris had occupied just two years earlier.

Conclusion

Modern toxicological methods are fortunately much more sensitive than those available to Buchanan's prosecutors, and a ruse such as using atropine drops would not go undetected for long in a modern laboratory. Also, new methods of color reaction (updated from those used by Dr. Witthaus), thinlayer chromatography, and gas chromatography can identify the presence of most poisons down to amounts as small as one five-thousandth of a grain.

Eva Rablen

DATE: 1929

LOCATION: Tuttletown, California

SIGNIFICANCE: A combination of brilliant reasoning and meticulous forensic analysis produced headlines all across the United States.

By any stretch of the imagination, Carroll Rablen was a considerate husband. Unable to appreciate music himself—a war wound had left him deaf—he willingly ferried his fun-loving young wife, Eva, to the local square dances in Tuttletown, California, so that she might enjoy herself. For the wounded veteran, this meant silently watching as Eva, attractive and outgoing, reveled in the attentions of her numerous dance partners.

April 29, 1929, was just such an occasion. Rablen remained outside in the car while Eva danced the night away inside the town's schoolhouse. Later on, as promised, Eva took Carroll a tray of coffee and sandwiches, weaving her way cautiously across the tumultuous floor. Near the door, she accidentally bumped into another woman. The dancer laughingly shrugged off Eva's apologies, saying that it was nothing, and the moment was forgotten. Outside, Carroll took the refreshments from his wife. He and Eva exchanged a few words as he ate and drank; then she returned to the hoedown. A few minutes later, the bluegrass fiddles were drowned out by a howling scream. Puzzled dancers ran outside to find Carroll writhing in agony on the floor of his car. Between convulsions he gasped that the coffee had a bitter taste. Before medical help could arrive, Carroll Rablen was dead.

A tearful Eva could offer little in the way of illumination to investigators probing the strange death, other than to dismiss suggestions that her notoriously moody husband might have committed suicide. Most residents of Tuttletown, as well as the medical examiner, believed that Rablen had died from natural causes. His autopsy revealed nothing untoward, and analysis of the organs was also negative. But one person refused to accept these findings.

It was no secret that Steve Rablen had always regarded his daughter-inlawas a gold digger, only after Carroll's money, although some felt that it was more a case of the old man resenting Eva's influence over his boy, a sense that she had stolen him away. Whatever the reason, Rablen continually pestered the police with his suspicions that Eva had poisoned Carroll for a three-thousand-dollar insurance payout. More to get the cantankerous old man off his back than anything else, Sheriff Dampacher reluctantly agreed to once again search the schoolhouse.

Poison Found

After an hour's fruitless rummaging, Dampacher noticed that beneath the steps was a dark space made accessible by a broken plank. He thrust in a speculative arm and a few seconds later withdrew a small bottle. On the label, in bold type, was written "STRYCHNINE." Dampacher read on and saw that it had been prepared by the Bigelow Drug Store in Tuolumne, half a dozen miles away.

When Dampacher called at Bigelow's, drugstore clerk Warren Sahey produced the poison register. There was only one recent transaction involving strychnine, a bottle sold just three days before Rablen's death to a woman calling herself Mrs. Joe Williams. She needed the poison to kill gophers, or so she had said. When Sahey later identified Eva Rablen as "Mrs. Williams," it was enough for Dampacher to arrest the widow and charge her with murder. Eva, screaming that she had been set up by her father-in-law, insisted that she was innocent.

In arresting Eva Rablen, Dampacher was taking a bold step; after all, the medical examiner had not found any poison in the victim's body. Aware that their entire case hinged on this single purchase, the authorities ordered a reexamination of the bodily organs. The original analyst had been a person of little experience; this time prosecutors enlisted the aid of California's premier forensic scientist, Dr. Edward O. Heinrich.

Prosecutors, not wanting to tip their hand, decided to keep Heinrich's intervention under wraps. At this point in his career, the "Wizard of Berkeley," as Heinrich was sometimes called, had achieved the kind of celebrity that gave defense lawyers fits. And Eva's team was already hard at work, rounding up witnesses who would testify to Rablen's manicdepressive state and repeated suicide threats. And they had also uncovered a woman ready to provide Eva with an alibi at the time the poison was purchased in Tuolumne.

Besides the stomach contents, Heinrich analyzed the poison bottle, some of Rablen's clothing, and other items, including the dead man's car. After days in the laboratory, he isolated strychnine in the dead man's stomach.

Also, there were traces of poison on the car's upholstery and in the cup that Rablen had drunk from. Employing yet another talent— that of a handwriting expert—Heinrich studied the poison register signed in the name "Mrs. Joe Williams" and compared it with known examples of Eva Rablen's handwriting. A week's worth of painstaking comparison convinced him that Eva had penned the false signature.

And then Heinrich produced his masterstroke.

Brilliant Inspiration

He had heard about the crowded dance floor and Eva's circuitous journey across it. The thought struck him that she might have collided with someone and possibly have spilled coffee on them. Sheriff Dampacher respected Heinrich's reputation enough to realize that it was an avenue of inquiry worth pursuing. Everyone who attended the dance was asked to search their memories. One young woman, Alice Shea, distinctly remembered Eva bumping into her, because the collision had resulted in a few drops of coffee being spilled on her dress. Furthermore, she had not yet washed the dress. Would they like to see it? Immediately, the dress was dispatched to Heinrich for examination.

So many people wanted to attend the trial of Eva Rablen, whom the arrow points to, that it was held outdoors.

The coffee stains showed clear traces of strychnine, irrefutably linking Eva Rablen to the poison.

At a pretrial hearing, local interest ran so high that the judge decided to hold the proceedings in an open-air dance pavilion. Hundreds of spectators craned to hear Eva Rablen plead not guilty. The trial was set for June 10, 1929, and promised to be a spellbinder. From all accounts, Eva's lawyers were mounting a creditable defense. They had found Carroll Rablen's first wife, and she was ready to confirm her ex-husband's suicidal tendencies. Once, she claimed, he had spoken of throwing himself into the machinery at the lumber mill where he worked.

Just before the trial, news of Heinrich's intervention leaked out, and the word was that the master had solved the case. So pervasive was this rumor that Eva's defense team requested a special court session at which they announced that their client now wished to plead guilty. By this means, Eva Rablen avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Conclusion

In a career spanning five decades, Edward Heinrich solved hundreds of cases. Today, many of his pronouncements, although often brilliant, would be deemed inadmissible in court, but that takes nothing away from his triumphs. In stature, he assumed a role somewhat akin to that of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, his transatlantic contemporary. Both were held in awe by the public, and both repeatedly demonstrated their ability to sway juries. In 1953, Heinrich died suddenly at seventy-two. 

John Armstrong

DATE: 1955

LOCATION: Gosport, England

SIGNIFICANCE: Although advances in pharmacology bring tremendous societal benefits, progress often has its darker side as well.

Early on the morning of July 22, 1955, a twenty-six-year-old nurse named John Armstrong of Gosport, near Portsmouth, called the family doctor, Bernard Johnson, to say that his five-month-old son, Terence, was very ill. Dr. Johnson knew Armstrong and his wife Janet, nineteen, well. They seemed to be an ill-starred couple. Their oldest child, Stephen, had died in March 1954, and just two months later their two-year-old daughter, Pamela, had suffered a sudden illness but fortunately had recovered. Now this.

When Dr. Johnson arrived at the house, the baby was already dead. Although he did not suspect foul play, Johnson was unable to identify the cause of death and accordingly notified the coroner. The body, the baby's bottle, and a pillow he had vomited on the previous evening were sent for examination by local pathologist Dr. Harold Miller.

In the larynx, Dr. Miller found a shriveled red shell similar to the skin of a daphne berry, a highly toxic fruit. Further shells were recovered from the stomach. Miller placed the berry shell in a jar of formaldehyde and the rest of the reddish-colored stomach contents in another bottle and stored both containers in a refrigerator. He asked the coroner to check whether the child had been exposed to daphne berries. An officer who visited the Armstrongs was shocked by their seeming indifference to the tragedy; they appeared to be more interested in watching TV. Nevertheless, there was a daphne tree in the garden, and it was bearing fruit, and Armstrong confirmed that the baby carriage had stood under it.

All of this seemed to bear out Miller's theory—until he went back to the refrigerator. The single shell was gone. It had dissolved in the now redcolored formaldehyde. The shells in the other bottle had also dissolved, deepening the already reddish hue of the stomach contents. Had these been the shells of daphne berries, as he had originally thought, they would not have dissolved as they did. Puzzled by this baffling turn of events, Miller sent both flasks, along with the pillow and feeding bottle, to a local laboratory that regularly performed toxicological investigations for the coroner. Their report did not include any mention of poison or traces of the daphne berry skin; the only unusual features were a small quantity of cornstarch and a red dye, eosin.

Poison?

Miller read this with some apprehension; such a combination was likeliest to occur in the red gelatin capsules that contained Seconal, a powerful barbiturate. This could mean deliberate poisoning. Already rumors had surfaced regarding the Armstrongs' perilous financial state. Was it conceivable that two parents would deliberately kill their own baby just to ease the family's financial burden? While no precedent existed for murder by barbiturates, Miller knew that a few grains of Seconal would certainly kill an infant. To satisfy his own curiosity, he dissolved three Seconal capsules in gastric juices. As anticipated, they reduced to cornstarch and eosin.

At this juncture, Miller passed the pillow and the other specimens to the police for more thorough analysis. Superintendent L. C. Nickolls, director of Scotland Yard's Forensic Laboratory, was assigned to the case. In the past, Nickolls had often expressed concerns about the burgeoning numbers of potentially lethal drugs—especially the soporifics—that were now in almost every home. In his experience, only the most sophisticated facilities were capable of detecting them. Nickolls's own laboratory was state of the art; even so, it still took five days of rigorous testing to establish that vomit traces on the pillow contained one-fiftieth of a grain of Seconal. He also isolated one-third of a grain in the stomach contents. When detectives called at the naval hospital where Armstrong worked and asked if any Seconal was missing, a nurse recalled the mysterious disappearance of fifty Seconal capsules from a cupboard to which Armstrong had access.

Meanwhile, inquiries began into the circumstances of Stephen's death the previous year, especially when it was discovered that the certificate had been signed by an eighty-two-year-old doctor who had never previously treated the child. The symptoms mirrored those suffered by Terence— drowsiness, blue-tinged face, breathing difficulty, and death. Two-year-old Pamela's sudden illness had taken the same course and might have reached a similar conclusion had it not been for prompt medical attention.

Nickolls's report concluded that the amount of Seconal extracted from the baby's organs indicated an original dose of between three and five capsules, absolutely lethal for a child that age. Concerns that they might be dealing with a serial killer led the police to exhume Stephen's body. John Armstrong watched the process without any undue distress. His only comment, "There won't be much left of him by this time, will there?" proved frustratingly accurate. Decomposition had destroyed all traces of any relevant chemical in the remains.

One Killer or Two?

All those who interviewed the Armstrongs felt they had planned the killing jointly. To clarify possible discrepancies in alibis, Nickolls needed to know how long a Seconal capsule of the type administered to baby Terence would take to burst in the stomach. He found that as the methyl cellulose capsule absorbed stomach fluids, it caused the cornstarch inside to swell. This in turn caused the capsule to erupt and discharge its contents into the stomach. Sometimes they opened swiftly, but it could take as long as ninety minutes.

This was of little help to those investigating the Armstrongs. Without any firm evidence to suggest that they were in possession of Seconal on the day of the murder, no charges could be brought against them. All they could do was wait.

A year passed. On July 24, 1956, Janet Armstrong applied for a separation and maintenance order against her husband, citing his repeated physical abuse. When the order was refused, officers lent a sympathetic ear to the disappointed plaintiff. Clearly embittered by the experience, she now turned viciously on her husband. Yes, he had brought Seconal capsules home from work, and they were in the house on the day of the murder. Three days after the baby's death, he had ordered her to throw all the capsules away. She claimed to have asked him, "Did you give the baby any?" to which he replied, "How do I know you haven't?" Fearful of his retribution, she had kept silent. Until now.

Janet Armstrong's bilious denunciation did nothing to dampen official suspicions of her complicity, and four months later she and her husband stood side by side in court, jointly charged with murder. What degenerated into an acrimonious verbal battle between the two ended with a split verdict. John Armstrong was sentenced to death; his wife walked away from the court a free woman. One month later, and beyond the reach of the law, she admitted giving Terence a single Seconal capsule. By this time, her husband's sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment.

Conclusion

The fact that Seconal had gone unrecognized in the local toxicological investigation—and would very likely have escaped notice in most other laboratories—emphasized the need for toxicological vigilance everywhere, because one never knew where the next poison was coming from. 

Georgi Markov

DATE: 1978

LOCATION: London, England

SIGNIFICANCE: Everything pointed to murder, but proving foul play would lead scientists into the murky world of international espionage.

After defecting from Bulgaria in 1971, writer Georgi Markov took his antigovernment stance to London and began broadcasting programs to his homeland via the BBC World Service. His blend of satire and criticism infuriated Bulgaria's communist regime, and it was no secret that certain government departments desperately wanted him silenced for good.

On Thursday, September 7, 1978, their wish was realized. As the fortynine-year-old Markov was waiting for a bus on London's Waterloo Bridge, he felt a sharp jab in his right thigh. He turned quickly to see a man behind him, brandishing a furled umbrella. The stranger mumbled an apology in a thick accent, then hurried off to catch a taxi. Markov thought little of it until reaching home that night. He told his wife of the mysterious encounter and then rolled up his trouser leg to show her a red puncture mark on his thigh.

The next morning he was admitted to a hospital with a high fever and vomiting. An X-ray of his thigh failed to reveal anything, although an area of circular inflammation now surrounded the puncture wound. Both temperature and blood pressure plummeted, while his pulse soared to 160 beats per minute. To their astonishment, hospital staff found that Markov's white blood count had risen to more than three times the normal level. Septicemia was diagnosed. Over the weekend, the patient became violent and confused. Massive amounts of antibiotics failed to arrest the decline, and on the following Monday he died.

Following an autopsy, the section of skin containing the puncture wound was sent to the government's top secret Chemical Defense Establishment at Porton Down, where Dr. David Gall, one of the country's leading experts on poisons and nerve agents, led the investigation. While examining the tissue, he found what first appeared to be a pinhead but later turned out to be a minute metal pellet, 1.5 millimeters in diameter, skillfully engineered, with two tiny holes drilled at right angles to each other. One of the holes was clear; the other was clogged with congealed tissue. Thoroughly bemused, Gall sent it to Dr. Ray Williams at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory in London for further tests, while he got on with the job of identifying what had killed Markov.

Poison Pellet

Under a scanning electron microscope, the pellet was found to be made of 90 percent platinum and 10 percent iridium, an alloy stronger than steel and impervious to corrosion, and with the additional bonus of being radiopaque, almost invisible on an X-ray. Experts could think only that the pellet had been designed to carry a tiny amount of poison—no more than 2 milligrams—and that the lethal ball had then been fired into Markov's thigh by some kind of gas gun hidden in an umbrella. No other conclusion made sense.

And yet Gall's team was unable to detect any trace of poison in the body, which left them only with Markov's symptoms. What substance, they asked, would produce those kind of deleterious effects on a healthy and husky six-foot male? They soon rejected bacterial and viral infections, as well as most chemical poisons, because the amounts needed to cause death were greater than the pellet could have administered. One by one, the various toxins were eliminated, until they were left with a single substance that not only would induce all the right symptoms, but was sufficiently lethal to be transported in the minuscule metal ball.

Ricin, a derivative of the castor bean, is roughly five hundred times as toxic as arsenic or cyanide. It causes red blood cells to agglutinate before going on to attack other body cells with devastating effect. Death comes from an electrolyte imbalance. In order to test their theory, scientists at Porton Down injected a live pig with the amount of ricin the pellet could have contained. The unfortunate beast died within twenty-four hours. When examined, its organs revealed virtually identical damage to that found in the body of Georgi Markov.

Although compelling, the evidence was still circumstantial—for no trace of ricin itself could be found in Markov's body. Yet that factor alone provided even more reason to suspect that ricin was the culpable agent. Eventually, the body's natural protein-making cells break ricin down, so that having done its damage, the toxin disappears without a trace.

Having succeeded in finding out what had killed Markov, investigators fared less well in uncovering whose hand was behind the umbrella. Diplomats at the Bulgarian Embassy in London described allegations that their secret police had been involved as "absurd." But the evidence indicated otherwise. Just one year earlier, in an incident outside a metro station in Paris, another Bulgarian émigré, Vladimir Kostov, had been mysteriously jabbed, had then fallen sick, but subsequently had recovered. After some persuasion, he was visited by a surgeon, who extracted a small metallic object from his flesh. This was taken to the Forensic Laboratory in London, eagerly awaited by Ray Williams. The pellet was identical to the one that killed Markov. By chance, Kostov's pellet had lodged in muscle in his upper back, away from major blood vessels, and he had lived.

Conclusion

Not until 1991 and the collapse of communism did Bulgaria's new government reluctantly admit that their predecessors had carried out several assassinations of Bulgarian defectors, including Georgi Markov. A slow drip of information over the next decade revealed that the Bulgarian intelligence service (KDS) had actually sought permission from Moscow to eliminate the troublesome Markov. Not only had the Soviet KGB sanctioned this request, but they had also supplied the ricin. The name most often mentioned as the probable assassin is that of Francesco Guillino, a Dane of Italian extraction, who had reputedly worked for the KDS since 1972. Under the code name Piccadilly, this former drug smuggler made regular visits to London, and records show that one day after the attack on Markov he flew out of Britain for Italy. Guillino was interviewed in connection with the Markov killing as early as 1993, only to be released for a lack of evidence. The last reported sighting of him was in Copenhagen in 2004. Under pressure from both Western and homegrown journalists, on May 2, 2006, the Bulgarian Interior Ministry announced that it had started a procedure to open millions of secret files, creating the possibility that the mystery of who killed Georgi Markov might be cleared up once and for all.

They'd better hurry, because in Bulgaria the statute of limitations for murder expires after thirty years. After September 2008, it will all become academic.