With the discovery of a dead body, three questions must be answered: Who is the person? How long has he or she been dead? What killed him or her? Often this last question has aroused some of the most celebrated confrontations since science first started taking an interest in crime in the eighteenth century. Clearly how a person died is of paramount importance in determining whether there is a criminal case to pursue and ultimately whether charges are filed. For instance, if a husband says that his wife incurred her lethal injuries falling down the stairs, and it could be shown that those injuries were inconsistent with such a fall, then that husband would have some explaining to do.

This need for absolute accuracy makes the initial autopsy critical. The primary onus for establishing cause of death lies with the pathologist, and in the overwhelming number of cases the cause of death is readily apparent, often gruesomely so. But if nothing organic indicates how a particular person died, then samples of body tissue and fluids must be taken for analysis. Although the standard of modern-day analysis has reached quite spectacular levels, the ever-increasing range of synthetic substances that inhabit our daily lives makes vigilance the watchword in matters of detecting exotic poisons. In this section, all of the cases generated lengthy and often acrimonious debate as to what exactly the victim died of. None was straightforward; all are absorbing.

1. Norman Thorne

DATE: 1924

LOCATION: Crowborough, England

SIGNIFICANCE: This is the first case in which the opinion of Britain's foremost pathologist, Sir Bernard Spilsbury, was called into question.

Ever since 1922, Norman Thorne had struggled to eke out an existence from a run-down poultry farm on the outskirts of Crowborough in Sussex. He not only raised chickens but lived among them as well, in a squalid shed barely fit for human habitation. At twenty-four, he was perfunctorily engaged to a young typist from London, Elsie Cameron, a plain and neurotic girl with but one thought in life—to find a husband. Some idea of Elsie's desperation can be gauged from her willingness to bed down with Thorne in his filthy shack, which she did in hopes that it would lead to something more permanent. But Thorne had other plans. Each morning after she had stayed with him, he would shunt Elsie back to London on the first available train. By letter she pressed him to announce a wedding date. In November 1924, she changed tack, writing untruthfully that she was pregnant. Thorne was unmoved, announcing that he intended to marry another girl, a local beauty named Elizabeth Coldicott. In a fury, Elsie wrote Thorne that she would be arriving on the afternoon of December 5, at which time she expected him to do the decent thing. Fiercely determined, and with all her worldly possessions crammed into a single bag, she caught the train from London.

Five days later, her anxious father telegraphed Thorne to find out what had become of her. Thorne expressed bewilderment, saying that Elsie had not arrived. When Mr. Cameron contacted the Crowborough police, they interviewed Thorne and came away impressed by his concern and obvious desire to help. Soon Elsie's disappearance attracted reporters from Fleet Street. Thorne was good copy, as he enlarged on the plans that he and Elsie had made to marry and agonized over her welfare. An accompanying photograph taken of him in the chicken run, mournfully scattering seed to his flock of leghorns, only emphasized his isolation.

Walked to Her Death

However, two men who knew Elsie told the police they had seen her walking toward Thorne's farm on the night of December 5. Strangely, not until a month later, when a vacationing neighbor returned and told the same story, did Scotland Yard become involved. Thorne repeated his earlier story to the Yard detectives on January 14, unaware that digging had already begun at his farm. The following day, Elsie's bag was discovered. After some consideration, Thorne made a statement. Elsie had arrived, he said, telling him that she intended to stay until he married her. An argument broke out, and Thorne had stormed from the shed. Upon his return, he found Elsie swinging by a noose from the hut's main beam. In a blind panic, Thorne opted to chop his lover into quarters and bury her in the chicken run, at the very spot where his photograph had been taken.

Elsie's remains were dug up and taken to the local mortuary for examination by Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Naturally, he devoted close attention to the neck. In suicidal hanging, death is caused by rupture or obstruction of blood vessels in the brain due to pressure on the vessels of the neck, obstruction of the windpipe, or both. Usually the rope or ligature used leaves a deep bruise on the flesh at the point of pressure. Spilsbury found none of these features, nothing to suggest that Elsie Cameron had hanged herself. What he did find were bruises on her head, face, elbow, legs, and feet "sufficient to account for death from shock." In other words, she had been bludgeoned to death. On January 26, 1925, the remains were reburied, and Norman Thorne found himself facing a charge of murder.

Realizing that their sole hope lay with the suicide story, Thorne's defense team demanded a second autopsy, this time to be carried out by Dr. Robert Bronte, then pathologist at Harrow Hospital and a former Crown Analyst to the Irish government. Bronte loathed Spilsbury, so it was with some tension that in late February they met at Willesden Cemetery to preside over the second disinterment of Elsie Cameron's body. Spilsbury studied Bronte's autopsy with gimlet-eyed intensity.

At the subsequent trial, everything hinged on one question—how did Elsie Cameron die? Spilsbury insisted she had been battered to death. Bronte, while conceding that his examination had suffered because of the advanced state of decomposition, pointed to marks on the neck as proof that death had resulted from suicide through hanging. Spilsbury dismissed these as "natural creases" in the neck. Not so, arguedBronte; they were clearly "grooves" and, furthermore, displayed signs of bruising. He had taken slides of the grooves and passed sections of the bruised areas to Spilsbury so that he might make his own slides. Spilsbury testified that neither his slides nor those of Bronte showed any signs of bruising.

Seriously undermining Bronte's argument was one critical fact. Along the main beam in Thorne's hut—the one he said that Elsie hanged herself from —was a thick layer of undisturbed dust. Had a rope been tied around that beam and then used to suspend a body, not only would it have dislodged the dust, but the beam itself would have shown traces of grooving. There were no such markings.

The judge, in summarizing, described Spilsbury's opinion as

"undoubtedly the very best . . . that can be obtained," and the jury agreed. Thorne was sentenced to death, an outcome that aroused considerable public outrage. But the appeal was unsuccessful, and on April 22, 1925, the failed farmer turned bungling murderer went to the hang-man's noose.

Conclusion

Over the years, Dr. Robert Bronte, irascible and garrulous, never missed an opportunity to castigate Spilsbury, often couching his criticisms in the most unprofessional of terms. Spilsbury, for his part, maintained the lofty dignity that so impressed judge and jury alike, all derived from the knowledge that not once in court was he ever bested by his excitable rival.

2. David Marshall

DATE: 1926

LOCATION: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

SIGNIFICANCE: As science extended the parameters of detection, it also raised the temperature of courtroom disputes.

Dusk had just fallen on downtown Philadelphia when Anna May Dietrich bid farewell to her sister after a shopping expedition, saying she was on her way to a dancing lesson and would be home for dinner that night. It was an appointment that the thirty-five-year-old milliner never kept. The next morning—January 19, 1926—her family alerted the police. They contacted the dance academy and were told that Anna had canceled her appointment because she had to see a friend. Anna's brother-in-law, Alexander Schuhl, wondered if that friend might be David Marshall, whom the missing woman had known for some years.

Marshall, an unregistered chiropractor, was helpfulness itself when officers called. No, he had not seen Anna for more than a week, but he did remember her being greatly distressed, something about a soured romance. . . . Police thanked Marshall for his assistance and left.

The following day, a woman on her way to catch a trolley in Media, a suburb of Philadelphia, noticed scraps of bloodstained newspaper lying alongside the road. Her eyes were drawn to some undergrowth and what appeared to be a bundle. Rather than look more closely, she ran for assistance in the form of William Rowson, a local blacksmith. Rowson gingerly opened up the parcel. Inside, wrapped in two newspapers, was the headless and legless torso of a young woman in a blue serge dress. Close by was another parcel containing the severed legs. Later that day, Schuhl identified the dress as one worn by his missing sister-in-law. A lack of blood, either in the body or on the clothing, suggested that the body had been drained by someone with obvious surgical knowledge before being dumped. Two days later, a human head, also wrapped in newspaper, was found some miles away. The frozen features were easily recognizable as those of Anna May Dietrich.

At this point a woman came forward, claiming that she had seen Anna in tears at Marshall's office on the night of her disappearance. But it was what chauffeur E. J. Barry had to say that really ignited a fire under the investigation. He told the head of Philadelphia's homicide division, William Belshaw, that on the night of January 20, Marshall had hired him to haul away some parcels from his surgery. As he lifted one of the packages, its paper wrapping broke and out fell a human leg. Barry stood aghast. Marshall frantically began thrusting fistfuls of dollars at him, begging him to get rid of the parcel. But Barry would have none of it and left.

Such a revelation convinced Belshaw that a second chat with the amiable chiropractor was in order. This time he escorted Marshall to the morgue and confronted him with the grisly remains. District Attorney William Taylor first made everyone bare their heads, then said to Marshall, "In the presence of God and this girl's body, didn't you do this?" Marshall stroked his mustache, lit a cigar, and smiled. "Why, certainly not."

Third Degree

After several hours of what newspapers referred to as a "severe grilling," Marshall said that Anna had committed suicide, using poison she had found in his surgery. He had cut up her body in order to dispose of it. Another night of questioning brought forth the full facts. Marshall confessed all. He told of having had a seven-year-long affair with Anna. He said that she had come to his surgery on January 19 determined to expose their relationship to his wife, demanding money and screaming, "You ruined me; I'll ruin you!" To stifle her yelling, he had stuffed a handkerchief into her mouth, at which point she had become faint and then collapsed, dead. At no time, he said, had he intended to kill her, which made his next course of action seem rather bizarre, to say the least—he cut her throat.

That night he left the body at his surgery and went home, but insomnia got the better of him. He returned at 8:30 A.M. and commenced reducing his former mistress to easily transportable pieces. The ghastly chore lasted until midday and was interrupted only once, by a phone call from Mr. Schuhl, anxious to learn his sister-in-law's whereabouts. That afternoon, Marshall drove around Delaware County, scattering segments of the body as he went. The next day, he disposed of the head beside some railroad tracks, where it was found by an inquisitive dog being exercised by its owner. To allay the memory of his grim labors, Marshall treated his wife to a night at the theater.

At his trial, which opened on March 8, 1926, Marshall recanted the confession, claiming it had been beaten out of him by overzealous investigators. He reiterated his claim that Anna had swallowed poison and that he had panicked and cut up the body to conceal his illicit relationship with her. It soon became apparent that this case would hinge on whichever side managed to win the forensic battle. Prosecution witness Dr. Clarke Stull, who conducted the autopsy, would not be deflected from his belief that Anna May Dietrich had been strangled, a view shared by Dr. Henry Wadsworth. For the defense, Dr. Henry Cattell maintained that nothing in the autopsy results was inconsistent with Marshall's version of events. Had Miss Dietrich been strangled, Cattell said, then marks would have been left on her neck; he could find none. Neither did he rule out Marshall's claim that the victim had taken poison. In rebuttal, the state commissioned Dr. J. Atlee Dean, chemist and bacteriologist, to examine the dead woman's organs. He testified that there was nothing to suggest poisoning.

During these exchanges, the defendant was often reduced to the status of a mere bystander. But steadily the prosecution made headway. When the case went to the jury on March 24, the result never seemed in doubt. Some five hours later, as an indication to the tipstaff that their labors were complete, the jury burst into an impromptu chorus of "Show Me the Way to Go Home." They convicted Marshall of second-degree murder.

Ten years later Marshall was paroled and moved to Florida, where he died soon after.

Conclusion

In all probability, courtroom disapproval of Anna Dietrich's unconventional social life kept Marshall out of the electric chair; indeed, had he not dismembered her body, in all probability he would have been tried on charges of manslaughter. While the glib chiropractor's adultery was glossed over with barely a mention, Anna Dietrich's morals drew condemnation from every quarter. 

3. James Camb

DATE: 1947

LOCATION: West Africa

SIGNIFICANCE: Had the victim died from a fit or had she been strangled? Ordinarily such facts are not in dispute, but this was far from an ordinary case.

Eight days after setting out from Cape Town on October 10, 1947, the ocean liner SS Durban Castle was steaming steadily northward through the tropical night, some ninety miles off the West African coast, when galley steward Frederick Steer was summoned by a bell from cabin 126 on B deck. The time was just a few minutes before 3 A.M. Arriving at the cabin, he noticed that both the steward and stewardess lights above the door were illuminated, which struck him as odd, because passengers normally called one or the other. When Steer knocked, the door was opened a few inches and then slammed shut in his face by a half-dressed man who mumbled, "It's all right." Although the incident lasted only a split second, Steer instantly recognized the man as fellow crew member James Camb, a thirty-one-yearold deck steward and something of a nautical gigolo.

Still puzzled, Steer contacted the senior steward on duty, James Murray, and together they returned to the cabin. They listened outside for a few minutes, but all seemed quiet, so they left. Murray thought it just as well to report the incident to the bridge, but without mentioning that Camb had been in the cabin because such a flagrant breach of regulations could result in the steward's dismissal. The bridge officer, well used to the nocturnal shenanigans of liner passengers, decided to take no action.

Just a few hours later, at 7:30 A.M., the stewardess who regularly cleaned cabin 126 was surprised to find the door open. Normally the occupant, Gay Gibson, an attractive twenty-one-year-old actress returning to London after a brief stint on the South African stage, kept the door locked. Hesitantly, the stewardess knocked and entered. Miss Gibson was nowhere to be seen. Her bed looked unusually disheveled, and the stewardess noticed stains on the sheet and pillowcase. As time wore on, with no sign of Miss Gibson, the stewardess reported her absence to the bridge. After a thorough but fruitless search of the ship, the captain ordered that the Durban Castle be put about in case the missing passenger had fallen overboard. In such a vast expanse of ocean, hopes of recovering anyone alive from the shark-infested waters soon faded, and the ship resumed its northerly route.

As rumors surrounding the disappearance rocked the ship from stem to stern, inevitably the name of James Camb arose. Summoned to the bridge and asked to account for his actions the previous night, he admitted talking to Gay Gibson on deck but vehemently denied entering her cabin. At the ship surgeon's suggestion, he submitted to a physical examination that revealed scratches on his shoulders and wrists, the result, Camb claimed, of heat rash.

Because news of Miss Gibson's disappearance had been radioed ahead to England, when the Durban Castle docked in Southampton, Camb was held for questioning. At first he persisted in his story, but then he admitted that he had been in the missing woman's cabin. The assignation had been arranged, he said, and Miss Gibson had greeted him wearing only her dressing gown. Underneath she was naked. During intercourse, Camb claimed she had suddenly started gasping for breath, then fell limp. "Her mouth was a little open . . . there was a faint line of bubbles . . . just on the edges of the lips. It . . . appeared to be blood-flecked."

Pushed Body Through Porthole

According to Camb, he had attempted artificial respiration, but when this failed he had lost his head and pushed the dead woman through the porthole. He could not explain how the bell pushes in the cabin had been pressed. The officers interviewing Camb thought they knew. Far from being a willing partner, Gay Gibson had tried to fight off the sex-crazed steward and had sought to summon help by calling both stewards. Overcome with lust, Camb had either strangled or smothered Miss Gibson, then got rid of the evidence, believing that without a body it would be impossible to prove murder.

If this was Camb's thinking, he was grievously mistaken. When his trial opened on March 18, 1948, the charge read "murder," and the prosecution felt confident that they could prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. The circumstantial evidence weighed heavily against the accused. If, as he claimed, Gay Gibson had been naked beneath her dressing gown, then why were her pajamas missing from the cabin? And had she been expecting to engage in sexual activity, then surely she would have used the diaphragm contraceptive that was found in her suitcase. Then there were the two bedsheets from cabin 126. Both showed clear traces of blood group O, as well as smears of lipstick and

Porthole in cabin 126 through which James Camb pushed Gay Gibson.

saliva. Because Camb's blood group was A, it was reasonable to assume that it had come from the missing woman. Pathologist Dr. Donald Teare testified that while the bloodstains were consistent with manual strangulation, he would have expected to find traces of urine on the sheet, because in cases of strangulation the bladder commonly discharges its contents. On this occasion Dr. Teare had been ill served by his analysts. There was urine on the sheet, but it took a defense witness to find it!

Dr. Frederick Hocking and Professor James Webster both opined that Camb's version of events was not wholly impossible, but with impeccable fairness Hocking told how his tests had discovered the presence of urine on the top sheet; and within this sample he had also isolated human cells of the type that line the external female sex organs. Had the events unfolded in accordance with Camb's story, he would have been covered in urine as the dying woman thrashed beneath him. Yet he made no mention of this. All of which tended to substantiate the prosecution's view that Gay Gibson had been strangled and dumped overboard because she rejected Camb's sexual advances.

This was clearly the version the jury believed, and after only forty-five minutes of deliberation, they found Camb guilty of murder. Sentenced to death, he was later reprieved because capital punishment had been temporarily suspended while its future was being debated.

Conclusion

In becoming the first British defendant to be convicted of murder without a body being found, Camb made legal history. Only after the trial was it revealed that he had a history of attacking female passengers, though none had ever pressed charges. Paroled in 1959, he was convicted eight years later of molesting a thirteen-year-old girl. Inexplicably, he received only probation. Two years later, he was again convicted of sexual offenses against schoolgirls and returned to prison to serve out the remainder of his life sentence. He died on July 7, 1979.

4. Kenneth Barlow

DATE: 1957

LOCATION: Bradford, England

SIGNIFICANCE: In this landmark case, a panel of doctors, chemists, and forensic experts sought to prove that willful murder had been done.

At around midnight on May 3, 1957, a doctor was summoned to the Yorkshire home of thirty-eight-year-old Kenneth Barlow. When the doctor arrived, Barlow had a tragic tale to tell. All night long, his wife, Elizabeth, had been ill. At 9:20 P.M., while in bed, she had vomited. Barlow had changed the sheets, then joined his wife in bed. Sometime later, she had complained of "feeling too warm" and got up to take a bath. Barlow dozed off to sleep. When he awoke at 11 P.M., he found that Elizabeth was not beside him and hurried to the bathroom. There he had found her submerged in the water. At first he had tried to pull her out, but she was too heavy for him. So he had removed the plug and tried to revive her with artificial respiration.

Elizabeth still lay in the empty bath on her right side. Although there were no signs of violence on the body, the pupils were strangely dilated, a feature that the doctor thought worthy of investigation. For this reason, he contacted the police. Barlow smoothly repeated his story to them. They listened with interest, all the while wondering how someone who claimed to have made "frantic efforts" to haul his wife from the bath had managed to keep his pajamas so dry and avoid splashing the bathroom floor. Another incongruity was spotted by Dr. David Price, the medical examiner— Elizabeth Barlow still had water in the crooks of her elbows, hardly likely if she had received artificial respiration.

Two hypodermic syringes were found in the kitchen, which Barlow, a nurse, explained by saying that he had been giving himself injections of penicillin to treat a carbuncle. He denied giving his wife any injections. Traces of penicillin in the needles seemed to bear out Barlow's story.

An autopsy revealed that Elizabeth Barlow had been a normal, healthy woman, and there were no visible injection marks on the skin. She was two months pregnant, but Price could find nothing to account for the sudden onset of fainting in the bath. Analysis of the bodily organs told much the same tale: no trace of poison or any other metabolic weakness likely to result in loss of consciousness.

Murder Marks

On May 8, still dissatisfied, Price went over every inch of the dead woman's skin with a magnifying glass, looking for injection marks of a hypodermic needle. Mrs. Barlow's freckly complexion made this an arduous task, but after two hours of painstaking inspection, Price found two tiny puncture marks on the left buttock and another two in a fold of skin under the right buttock. Cutting into the skin and tissue around the marks, Price saw the minute inflammation consistent with recent injections.

But what substance had been injected? A council of doctors and scientists from around the country, headed by Dr. Alan S. Curry of the Home Office Forensic Science Service, was convened to consider the baffling facts. Barlow, the nurse, had efficiently described his wife's symptoms— vomiting, sweating, weakness, and pupil dilation. After much debate the panel agreed that everything pointed to hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar, a disorder that can, in extreme cases, lead to death. Had Barlow injected his wife with a massive overdose of insulin, then her blood sugar could have plummeted to a lethal level. All of which sounded plausible, except that Elizabeth Barlow's heart blood had registered a sugar level way above average—completely opposite what might have been expected.

Despite this setback, the panel would not be dissuaded from its belief that insulin—for the first time—had been used as a murder agent. They knew that Barlow frequently injected insulin at work and that he had once joked to a patient: "If anybody ever gets a real dose of this, he's on his way to the next world." Another comment was even more enlightening. Barlow had confidentially advised a fellow nurse that insulin was the ideal choice for a "perfect murder," because it dissolved in the blood and could not be traced.

He was right—there were no prescribed tests for detecting insulin in the body—but eventually the panel solved the conundrum of Elizabeth Barlow's high sugar level. In several cases of violent death, biochemical research had shown that the liver often floods the bloodstream with sugar in the last few moments before death as a survival aid. If this reaches the heart before circulation stops, then the blood there registers an unusually high blood sugar level. Which meant that Mrs. Barlow could have been given an insulin overdose.

Historic Experiment

To confirm their hypothesis, the team conducted an unusual experiment. First, a number of mice were injected with insulin. They trembled, made feeble noises, became comatose, and died. Then other mice were injected with extracts of the tissue surrounding the injection marks on Mrs. Barlow's body. Exactly the same reactions were observed. It was noted that mice injected with matter from the left buttock died more rapidly than those given tissue from the right, suggesting that the left injection had been administered last. The data gathered from this experiment confirmed that the quantity of the insulin remaining in the body was eighty-four units, although the actual dosage must have been much higher.

But what of the commonly held belief among doctors—and Barlow—that insulin disappeared very quickly from the body? Once again, new research came to the aid of the examiners. It was known that acidic conditions preserve insulin, and it now appeared that formation of lactic acid in Mrs. Barlow's muscles after death had prevented its breakdown.

Bradford police had already discovered that Barlow was no stranger to sudden death: just a year earlier, his first wife had died in mysterious circumstances at the age of thirty-three. The cause of death was never satisfactorily explained, and he had married Elizabeth soon afterward.

On July 29, 1957, Barlow was arrested and charged with murder. At first he persisted in denying that he had injected his wife at any time, until presented with the evidence. Then he admitted injecting her with ergonovine to induce an abortion. In fact, the forensic experts had already anticipated that very defense—no abortifacient drugs were found.

At Barlow's trial, the defense suggested that as Mrs. Barlow fainted and slid under the bathwater, her body had reacted by releasing a massive dose of insulin into the bloodstream, causing coma and death. This theory was briskly dealt with by Dr. Price. He reckoned that to account for the eightyfour units of insulin found in Mrs. Barlow's body, her pancreas would have had to secrete an incredible—and unheard of—fifteen thousand units!

Barlow was found guilty and imprisoned for life.

Conclusion

In his summing up, the judge paid particular tribute to the forensic team. It was a well-deserved commendation. Their employment of the section analysis had added another facet to modern forensic science. 

5. Carl Coppolino

DATE: 1965

LOCATION: Longboat Key, Florida

SIGNIFICANCE: Prisons are full of people who committed the "perfect murder," as this particular killer found to his cost.

Just after dawn on August 28, 1965, Dr. Juliette Karow was roused from her sleep by a phone call. She listened as one of her patients, Carl Coppolino, himself a doctor, explained that he had just found his wife, Carmela, dead, ostensibly the victim of a heart attack. Karow frowned— young women in their thirties rarely suffer coronary failure, and Carmela had always seemed in perfect health—but she had no reason to disbelieve Coppolino, especially when he said that Carmela had been complaining of chest pains the night before. Karow drove the short distance to Coppolino's home on ritzy Longboat Key, just across the bay from Sarasota, Florida. Not long before, the Coppolinos had moved from New Jersey, where Carl, thirty-four, had been an anesthesiologist until ill health forced a premature retirement. Carmela, too, had been a doctor.

When Dr. Karow arrived, she found Carmela Coppolino beyond medical assistance. But she was deeply troubled. The position of the body seemed unnatural; Carmela lay on her right side, with her right arm tucked beneath her. Karow would have expected to find the hand swollen. It was not. Also, lividity did not seem consistent. Neither was the bedding rumpled. On the contrary, it seemed remarkably neat, staged almost. Despite her misgivings, Dr. Karow signed a death certificate, citing "coronary occlusion," then passed her findings to the Sarasota County Medical Examiner, who decided that there were no grounds for an autopsy. Just forty-one days later, Coppolino married wealthy socialite Mary Gibson, whom he had met at a local bridge club.

This development did not please fellow Longboat Key resident Marjorie Farber, a glamorous fifty-year-old widow who had migrated to Florida to be near Coppolino. Finally, after weeks of indecision, Mrs. Farber approached the only person she felt she could trust, Dr. Karow. She wanted to unburden her soul, she said. The story she told would keep newspapers across the nation in headlines for months to come.

It began when she and her husband, retired army colonel William Farber, had befriended the Coppolinos in New Jersey. In time, her association with Carl passed well beyond the usual bounds of good neighborliness, until by the evening of July 30, 1963, they were in the midst of a full-blown affair. That was the night William Farber was found unconscious in bed. Panicstricken, Marjorie had pleaded on the phone for Carl to come over right away. Coppolino, who was drawing disability benefits for a supposed heart condition and therefore was not allowed to practice, sent Carmela over alone with the information that Farber had suffered convulsions the day before, the kind that often precede a heart attack.

First Body

Carmela found William Farber dead in the bedroom. Apart from being "all blue down one side," there was no outward sign of distress to the body. At Coppolino's urging, she dutifully signed the death certificate, listing "coronary thrombosis" as the cause.

That was the official version. Now, in Dr. Karow's surgery, Marjorie Farber insisted that every word had been a lie. The truth, she swore, was that Coppolino had given her a syringe filled with some solution and instructions to inject Farber when he was asleep. At the last moment her nerve had failed, but not before she had injected a minute amount of the fluid into Farber's leg. She summoned Coppolino to the house, and he finished off the job by strangling him. Dr. Karow immediately passed this story on to the proper authorities. Ordinarily, the claims of spurned lovers receive a skeptical hearing, but when it was learned that shortly before her death, Coppolino had increased the life insurance on Carmela to sixty-five thousand dollars, a discreet inquiry was launched.

Authorities in New Jersey and Florida obtained exhumation orders for both William Farber and Carmela Coppolino. The autopsies were carried out by Dr. Milton Helpern, New York's celebrated chief medical examiner. He examined the remains of William Farber and found no sign of heart disease but clear evidence of strangulation—the cricoid cartilage in the neck was fractured in two places.

Next, Helpern examined the body of Carmela Coppolino. Once again, he ruled out any coronary disease; Carmela's heart was in fine shape. Unfortunately for Helpern, so was everything else. Even an almost invisible hypodermic puncture mark on Carmela's left buttock didn't help. A battery of forensic tests revealed nothing. Helpern, veteran of more than twenty thousand autopsies, was baffled—until he considered Coppolino's former profession and asked himself this question: What drug would an anesthesiologist have access to that might cause untraceable death? The likeliest agent, he concluded, was an artificial form of curare called succinylcholine chloride.

Succinylcholine chloride causes complete muscular paralysis but does not induce unconsciousness, which meant that as Carmela's lungs refused to function, she would have been fully aware that she was suffocating but totally incapable of doing anything about it. Every textbook said that the drug was undetectable. Experts knew that it degraded to other chemicals in the body, but what those chemicals were no one had yet been able to establish.

Dr. Charles Umberger, chief of the medical examiner's toxicological department, listened to Helpern's problem and promised to work on it. In order to replicate as closely as possible the condition of Carmela's body at the time of autopsy, Umberger injected rabbits and frogs with a solution of succinylcholine chloride, then buried the carcasses and waited to see what would happen. Six months of patient experimentation enabled him to positively identify the chemicals that succinylcholine chloride degrades to in the body and their quantities.

He found an excessive amount of succinic acid in Carmela's brain— definite proof that she had received an intravenous injection of succinylcholine chloride sometime before her death. Significantly, just before Carmela's death, Coppolino had obtained considerable amounts of succinylcholine chloride from a colleague, explaining that he wished to conduct some experiments on cats.

Coppolino was at his home on Longboat Key when the police showed up to arrest him. Later, New Jersey announced that Coppolino would also be charged in the death of William Farber.

A Woman Scorned

Authorities decided to try him first in New Jersey, and after much legal fencing, Coppolino faced his accusers on December 5, 1966, in the Monmouth County courthouse. When Marjorie Farber testified,

Coppolino's attorney, F. Lee Bailey, barreled in. There had been no murder, he roared; the entire episode had been a figment of this woman's malicious imagination, initiated by an evil desire for revenge on the man who had ditched her.

Bailey's attacks on Dr. Milton Helpern were more reasoned, less forthright. The main points of contention were whether William Farber had suffered from heart disease and whether the cricoid fracture had occurred before or after death. Helpern was emphatic on both counts, although Bailey drew from him the grudging admission that there was no bruising about the neck, as would normally have been present if strangulation had taken place.

Bailey attributed the cricoid fracture to rough handling of the body during disinterment, in particular a clumsy grave digger's shovel. Helpern dismissed such an idea. But Bailey had his own expert witnesses, and they thought otherwise. Doctors Joseph Spelman and Richard Ford, both experienced medical examiners, expressed the view that not only was the cricoid fracture caused after death but that Farber's heart showed clear signs of advanced coronary disease, certainly enough to have killed him.

Trial judge Elvin R. Simmill, in his final statement, commented on the vast array of conflicting medical evidence and stressed to the jury that they must be satisfied of Coppolino's guilt "beyond a reasonable doubt." It was an admonition that the jury took to heart. After deliberating for less than five hours, they returned a verdict of not guilty.

Coppolino's second trial—for the murder of his wife—began in early April 1967, and it was soon clear that the Florida prosecutors intended to make a much stronger case on the question of motive. State attorney Frank Schaub depicted the defendant as a money-grabbing philanderer, hell-bent on marrying Mary Gibson for her sizable fortune. Carmela's refusal to grant him a divorce had blown that idea sky-high. Instead, Coppolino began eyeing the insurance money, all sixty-five thousand dollars. With that, and Mary's bank account, he would be set for life.

This time, Marjorie Farber's testimony was of limited significance; everything hinged on the medical evidence. The jury listened closely as Helpern and Umberger described their unique experiments that had led to the discovery of poison in Carmela's body. It was a compelling, unanswerable performance. Significantly, unlike in the first trial, Coppolino opted not to testify on his own behalf.

Convicted of second-degree murder, Coppolino served twelve years of his life sentence before gaining parole in 1979.

Conclusion

In choosing succinylcholine chloride as an instrument of murder, Coppolino knew that his chances of detection were virtually nil. But he didn't take into account that science is always seeking—and finding—new ways to eradicate its own ignorance.

6. Richard Kuklinski

DATE: 1983

LOCATION: Orangeburg, New York

SIGNIFICANCE: Experts were sure that Kuklinski had poisoned several business partners. But how to prove it?

In September 1983 a man's body was found, trussed with tape and wrapped in plastic bags, in a wooded area of Rockland County, New York, just three miles north of the New Jersey border. There was a single bullet wound to the head. First indications were that the man had met his death recently, but when county medical examiner Dr. Frederick Zugibe began the autopsy, he noticed two peculiarities: the organs were fresh, and decomposition had started from the outside, which is the reverse of the normal process. Checking the heart, he discovered ice crystals, which supported his immediate suspicion that the body had been frozen, probably by a killer whose intention was to disguise the true time of death. (Had the body been thawed out before dumping, this might never have been established.)

Soaking the hands in water and glycerin made it possible to rehydrate the fingers and take prints. They were identified as belonging to Louis Masgay, a fifty-year-old Pennsylvania store owner who had disappeared on July 1, 1981. When found, he was still in the same clothes he had been wearing on the day he was last seen. This indicated that Masgay had been murdered that same day, and then his body had been kept, literally, on ice for two years before being dumped. Such callousness horrified investigators; clearly this was no ordinary killer.

They found out that on the day of his disappearance, Masgay had arranged to meet a New Jersey businessman to buy a batch of blank videos. Masgay, a cautious man, had hidden the ninety-five thousand dollars needed to complete the transaction behind a secret door panel in his Ford van. The van was later found abandoned, the secret panel ripped out, the money gone. Through phone records, investigators learned the name of Masgay's erstwhile business partner: Richard Kuklinski.

Kuklinski, a bearded, hulking bear of a man in his late forties, liked to portray himself as a currency speculator, but his true stock-in-trade was something altogether more sinister. Beneath a thin veneer of sophisticated respectability lurked one of the worst killers America has ever produced.

He murdered for the mob, for himself, and always for money.

One Hundred Murders

Nobody knows how many people died at Kuklinski's hands, except Kuklinski himself. Some put the figure at more than a hundred. Although stories abound of him killing as early as high school, his first recorded victim was George Mallibrand, a three-hundred-pound wheeler-dealer from Pennsylvania. On February 1, 1980, Mallibrand made the mistake of arguing with Kuklinski over debts totaling fifty thousand dollars. Four days later, his bullet-riddled corpse was found stuffed into a fifty-five-gallon drum in Jersey City.

Anyone who dealt with Kuklinski was dicing with death. In 1982, he tempted Paul Hoffman, a New Jersey pharmacist, with an offer of some cutrate hijacked ulcer medication. A shrewd judge of character, Kuklinski kept Hoffman dangling until the latter was practically begging him to finalize the deal. When the two men finally met on April 29, 1982, Hoffman was carrying twenty-five thousand dollars in cash—Kuklinski was carrying a gun. Neither Hoffman nor the money has been seen since. Kuklinski has hinted that the pharmacist also wound up in a concrete-filled oil drum.

Although by instinct a loner, Kuklinski occasionally teamed up with other thugs to run auto theft scams. In partners Daniel Deppner and Gary Smith, he chose badly. Neither was especially bright and both soon attracted the kind of police attention that Kuklinski went to great lengths to avoid. His reaction was typical. After sharing his concerns with the gullible Deppner, they agreed that Smith had to go. In a Bergen County motel where he had been holed up, Smith hungrily wolfed down the burger that Kuklinski had brought him. After a few mouthfuls the room began to spin. Kuklinski and Deppner roared with laughter as Smith choked on the cyanide burger. In the end, Kuklinski tired of waiting and strangled the hapless Smith, stuffing his body under the bed, where it was found four days later on December 27, 1982. During that time the room had been rented each night. Guests had wrinkled their noses at the smell, but none thought to look under the bed.

The following May, a bicyclist riding along Clinton Road in West Milford, New Jersey, noticed a huge turkey buzzard perched high in a tree. He went closer and saw a plastic garbage bag with a human head sticking out of it. Dr. Geetha Natarajan, the New Jersey medical examiner, performed the autopsy. A ligature mark around the neck revealed the apparent cause of death, although Dr. Natarajan noticed a pinkish lividity around the shoulder and chest that might have been caused by carbon monoxide poisoning. In the pocket of the man's jeans Dr. Natarajan found a wallet containing motel receipts and family photographs. Through these photos investigators identified the body as that of Kuklinski's other partner, Daniel Deppner.

As the body count mounted, the authorities were certain that Richard Kuklinski was a one-man killing machine, but they did not have a single scrap of evidence that would stand up in court. To remedy this deficiency, beginning in September 1986 an agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, Dominick Polifrone, went undercover and contacted Kuklinski in a sting that became known as Operation Iceman. After some initial sparring, Polifrone convinced Kuklinski that he could provide him with ten kilos of cocaine at $31,500 per kilo. At the same time he solicited suggestions on how to get rid of a "rich kid" who was proving troublesome. Unaware that every word was being taped, Kuklinski waxed lyrical on the merits of cyanide. "It's quiet, it's not messy, it's not noisy . . . there are even spray mists around . . . you spray it in somebody's face and they go to sleep . . ." He even described a test murder he had committed on the street, just walking along in a crowd with a handkerchief over his nose and spraying a man. The man collapsed and died, and everyone thought he'd had a heart attack. "The best way is to hit 'im right in the nose with a spray so he inhales it," Kuklinski said. "Once he inhales it, he's gone."

The Sting

Because Kuklinski was unable to get his hands on any cyanide at the moment—his supply had dried up—Polifrone agreed to provide the deadly poison. On December 17, 1986, the two met at a truck stop off the New Jersey Turnpike. As arranged, Polifrone brought with him three scrambled egg sandwiches and a jar of what was supposedly cyanide—actually quinine—to put on them. The plan was to meet the so-called rich kid at a motel and poison him.

Kuklinski took the sandwiches away to prepare them. The watching agents had not anticipated this, and, fearful for Polifrone's safety, decided to make the arrest early. Just minutes later, Kuklinski was taken into custody. Sure enough, the toxicology department at the New Jersey crime laboratory found "cyanide" (quinine) applied to the sandwiches. Kuklinski was charged with five murders.

His trial began on January 25, 1988. While the prosecution had a powerful case, it was entirely circumstantial. Defense claims that Kuklinski had been merely bragging were supported by the fact that neither of the supposed poisoning victims, Smith and Deppner, showed any traces of cyanide during autopsy.

To counter this argument the prosecution put New York medical examiner Dr. Michael Baden on the stand. He explained how cyanide quickly degrades to carbon and nitrogen in the body, until after a few days you can't find it at all, which is why it's such a good murder weapon. Also, the distinctive smell of bitter almonds is discernible only on a fresh body; it vanishes with decomposition. But the cyanide didn't become entirely invisible—it showed up in the lividity. Fully conversant with the case history and autopsy photographs, Baden pointed out that the patches of red lividity present on both Smith and Deppner were consistent with cyanide poisoning.

Baden's testimony stressed only that the lividity could have been caused by cyanide; without the toxicology no one could say for certain. Even so, Kuklinski was convicted of murdering Deppner and Smith, and on May 25, 1988, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. In return for immunity for the rest of his family, he also admitted killing Mallibrand, Masgay, and Hoffman.

Conclusion

The assassin called The Iceman employed poison, guns, ligatures, crossbows, iron bars—anything that came to hand—in his extraordinary one-man killing business. After he disappeared into Trenton State Prison, most assumed that they had heard the last of this psychopath. But Richard Kuklinski was as hungry for publicity as he had been for money. And he was great copy. Twice he appeared in TV documentaries, and his alleged activities regularly lit up newspaper columns around the globe. Every appearance on either screen or page was calculated to promote the image of Kuklinski as the ultimate killing machine. As the years passed, his claims became ever more lavish. They reached their zenith in a recently published book.1 In it, Kuklinski inflated his reported celebrity hit list to include Mafia boss Carmine Galante, shot to death in 1979, and another mob bigshot, Paul "Big Paul" Castellano, gunned down outside a steakhouse six years later. But nothing could top his controversial—and much disputed— claim that he had been among a five-man gang of killers hired to get rid of Jimmy Hoffa. When the boss of the Teamsters Union went missing on July 30, 1975, it made for a sensational story. To date, his whereabouts remain a mystery. Enter Richard Kuklinski. In his version, Hoffa was lured from a Detroit restaurant, and after a short drive, Kuklinski knocked Hoffa unconscious with a blackjack, then plunged a hunting knife into the back of his head. Rather than dispose of the body locally, Kuklinski opted to drive it more than six hundred miles to a junkyard in Kearny, New Jersey, where it was placed in a fifty-gallon drum and set on fire. The drum, he claims, was later dug up and crushed. FBI sources scoff at Kuklinski's claims, dismissing them as the ravings of a swaggering solipsist. Others aren't so sure.

Unfortunately, Richard Kuklinski can no longer be questioned about any of these claims. On March 5, 2006, at seventy, the Iceman died at St. Francis Hospital in Trenton—of nothing more controversial than a cardiac arrest.