The Plutonium Files (70 page)

The letter contained three clues: It identified the subject as a “Mr. Stephens,” disclosed that he was a housepainter, and that he owned property in 1945 in Healdsburg, California. But how was I to find a man with such a common last name who had owned property in a small town fifty years ago? On a whim, I contacted a local museum in Healdsburg to find out what historical records were available. An official there suggested that I call a genealogist named Lorlei Metke. I left a message on Metke’s answering machine, doubting that she would call me back or even be able to help me.

Late one Friday evening, as I was locking the door to the press room, the phone rang. It was Lorlei Metke. When I explained what I was looking for, she responded crisply, “I’ll see what I can do.” Metke proved to be an indefatigable and resourceful researcher. She plowed through city directories, phone books, marriage records, death records, voting records, and finally consulted some of her old friends.

She discovered there was indeed a housepainter who lived in Healdsburg in 1945. But his name was Albert
Stevens,
not
Stephens.
She also tracked down the whereabouts of Albert’s two children. His son, Thomas, was retired and living in Michigan, and his daughter, Evelyn, was still living in California. Metke was convinced Joseph Hamilton had misspelled the name of the man he had injected with plutonium. I hoped she was right but needed further corroboration.

One of my first calls was to Albert’s son, Thomas, who is now deceased. Briefly I described the plutonium experiment and explained why I thought his father might have been one of the subjects. Thomas was startled by the news, but offered to help me in any way he could. He confirmed that his father did undergo a serious stomach operation in San Francisco in 1945. He also remembered that following the procedure, his father kept urine and stool samples in the shed behind his house for some people who came up from Berkeley. And Thomas recalled one more strange thing. In the early 1970s, he said, he had received a phone call from someone inquiring about Albert’s cremated remains. He couldn’t remember much more about the inquiry or what happened after that.

Thomas’s recollections dovetailed closely with what I knew about CAL-1. But I still needed further proof that Albert Stevens and “Mr. Stephens” were one and the same person. I ordered a copy of Albert Stevens’s death certificate by mail from the state of California. When it arrived, the certificate indicated that Albert had been cremated by the Chapel of the Chimes in Santa Rosa, California. Thinking back to the mysterious phone call Thomas had received, I called the funeral home one afternoon and asked the woman who answered the telephone if Mr. Stevens’s cremated remains were still there. She put me on hold while she looked up the records. When she returned to the telephone, she said, They’re gone. Where? I asked her. They were shipped to Argonne National Laboratory in 1975, she responded.

I thanked her and slowly put down the receiver. Then I got up and walked around the newsroom several times to give myself a few moments to absorb what I had heard. Why would a national laboratory want the ashes of a California housepainter? It could only be because the plutonium they wanted to measure was still in those ashes. The pieces had fallen into place. Eventually I received a copy of the official permit releasing Albert’s remains to Argonne. At last I had incontrovertible, written proof that “Mr. Stephens” and Albert Stevens were indeed the same person.

As the story progressed, I kept in touch with Thomas Stevens. The surprise that he initially felt upon hearing that his father had been injected with plutonium had begun to turn into indignation—a reaction experienced by many relatives of the plutonium patients. “It’s inconceivable that anything like this could have occurred.
¹⁸
You think of something like this happening in other countries,” he said during one interview.

Gradually our conversation turned to Albert himself. One of
Thomas’s most vivid memories was the intoxicating year the family made their way from Ohio to California in the cramped Model-T. They had pitched their nine-by-twelve-foot tent in the snows of Colorado and under the shade of New Mexico’s cottonwood trees. Thomas sent me a photograph of his father that had been taken on the road. He is standing in the middle of the desert with his hands on his hips and smiling as if he owns the mountain behind him. Although he is miles from civilization, he is dressed like a gentleman, wearing a white shirt and tie beneath his old-fashioned driving suit.

While I was trying to obtain more information on Elmer Allen and Albert Stevens, documents began trickling in from the DOE in response to the newspaper’s Freedom of Information Act request. Clues in those documents helped me uncover the identity of several more patients. One was Eda Schultz Charlton, HP-3, the misdiagnosed housewife.

One afternoon I received a thick manila envelope of documents from the Energy Department. My response to these packages was nearly always the same: a sense of anticipation followed by sharp disappointment as I skimmed the contents and realized the envelope contained mostly duplicate and triplicate copies of scientific reports and press releases that I already had. This thick package promised to be no different. Nevertheless, I took it home that night and dumped the contents onto the floor of my living room. Carefully I sorted through the papers. Mixed in with the official reports were a few records I hadn’t seen before. Perhaps something on one of those papers—a word or a phrase—might yield information that would lead to more names. I examined each page carefully, looking at the dates, signatures, even the declassification stamps. From the stack, I pulled out one document. It was an unsigned and undated note on which the following words were scrawled: “Charlton—died 198?”

My mind immediately leapt to the two unidentified Rochester patients, a man and a woman, who had participated in the follow-up studies and died in the 1980s. Could “Charlton” be the last name of one of those patients? From my reporting, I knew that Christine Waterhouse had cared for those two patients. She was retired and living in Maine and I had spoken to her on the phone several times. Although she was pleasant enough, she couldn’t remember much about the study. “This was war,” she said during one of our first interviews.
¹⁹
“There were a lot of things condoned for the good of the many.”

I put the scrap of paper in my notepad and went to bed. When I arrived in the newsroom the following morning, I dialed Christine Water
house’s number again. Was “Charlton” the name of one of your patients, I asked her, slowing spelling out the last name.

“Edith Charlton. That’s the first time I remembered it.
²⁰
Edith Charlton. Now that you bring that up, I do remember her better. I did take care of her for a long time, too.” Of course, her first name was Eda, not Edith. Although Waterhouse said she didn’t think Eda had any close relatives, I began calling funeral homes in Canandaigua, New York, where Eda had died. If she did have any relatives, the funeral home that handled her burial arrangements would have their names. From one of those funeral homes, I eventually discovered that she indeed had a son, Luther Fred Schultz, and that he was living in Geneva, New York.

Soon I was talking on the telephone with Fred and his wife, Helen. In a matter-of-fact voice, Helen volunteered in the first few minutes of our conversation that her mother-in-law had once told her that she had been injected with plutonium. “We didn’t know what to think about that,” Helen said.
²¹
Although the comment clearly indicated that Eda had been informed of the plutonium injection at some point in her life, Helen said that her mother-in-law really didn’t understand what plutonium was or what it meant to her health. “She couldn’t understand why they were always checking her for radiation and why she was having to go in and stay in the hospital and be on a special diet and have her specimens collected and all that.”
²²

Eventually I met Fred and Helen during one of two research trips to upstate New York. They were a lovely, trusting couple who welcomed me into their home. Both are now dead. As Eda grew older, Helen often prepared soups and stews for her mother-in-law and drove her to her doctor’s appointments at Christine Waterhouse’s office.

During Eda’s final days in the nursing home, when senility was moving across her mind like an eraser and bananas had become her chief delight, Helen put together a photograph album of Eda’s life, hoping the images would lessen her mental confusion. As I sat on their couch, Helen pulled the thick photo album down from a shelf and placed it in my lap. Suddenly the life story of Eda, HP-3 as she was referred to in all the study documents, opened before me—the shy, pensive daughter, the young wife, the mother, and finally the grandmother, an old woman struggling to corral the fleeing memories.

Dr. Waterhouse herself volunteered the identity of the other Rochester patient during one of our conversations. His name was John Mousso. “I took care of him for a long time.
²³
I can even visualize him,” she said.
Waterhouse said she had no idea where Mousso lived or if he had any children.

I enlisted the aid of a second genealogist, named Richard Halsey, to help me in that search. He was an easygoing man of forty-three who worked on the shipping docks at Kodak and had been doing genealogy research as a hobby for nearly twenty years. Halsey sent me a list of all the Moussos in the Rochester telephone book. Slowly, I began working my way down the list.

Late one evening I reached Jerry Mousso, a retired school administrator in Rochester. When I explained who I was looking for, he said, “You know, that sounds a lot like my uncle.”
²⁴

Jerry gave me the name and telephone number of his uncle’s son, Robert Mousso, who lives in a small town outside Rochester (and wasn’t on my list). When I contacted Robert, he confirmed that Waterhouse was indeed his father’s physician and that his father suffered from Addison’s disease. The fact that he had the same doctor and suffered from the same disease as HP-6 convinced me I’d found the right John Mousso.

Robert talked at length about his father and about the severe hardship the family had endured as a result of his long illness. “Before he was sick, he was always working.
²⁵
When he was sick, he was always in hospitals.” After his mother died, Robert drew closer to his father. One summer he put in a garden for him. On warm summer nights, with the water running on the vegetable plants, they would sit on apple crates and talk. The elder Mousso often reminisced about his youth, the time before the sickness set in. He came from a tribe of French Canadians who had worked in the Adirondacks as miners and lumberjacks and then moved to East Rochester in the early 1920s to work in the “carshops,” the railroad yards where refrigerator cars were built.

I sent Robert some documents about the experiment. A few days later I called him again and asked him what he thought of it. “It’s unbelievable.
²⁶
It’s unbelievable. It’s here in black and white, but I say to myself, my God, where is the humanity to do something like that?” Robert was disturbed by the information but subsequently decided that he didn’t want to cooperate further in the story. “He’s gone. It happened years ago. I want my father to have his privacy.”

But John Mousso’s nephew, Jerry Mousso, disagreed. “I just have a gut feeling my uncle would want to fight this.
²⁷
This guy was a fighter. He had a lot of self-respect and I think he would be indignant, just like I’m indignant.” Jerry Mousso subsequently became deeply involved in the
controversy, testifying before Congress and acting as a spokesman for the Rochester families.

I uncovered the identity of a fifth patient, Fred Sours, HP-9, the politician from Gates, New York, with another document that we had received under the Freedom of Information Act. That document was a summary memo containing statistical data on the eighteen patients. Included were the exhumation dates of three of the patients. Although the document did not disclose where the exhumations had taken place, I figured at least one may have occurred in Rochester, since that’s where most of the injectees lived.

I got a list of the largest cemeteries in Rochester from genealogist Richard Halsey and began another round of phone calls. Using the exhumation dates together with the birth and death dates, I thought I might be able to work backward and find the names of the patients. Exhumations, after all, aren’t everyday affairs. But most of the cemetery officials I contacted said they couldn’t help me without a name. Rochester’s Holy Sepulchre Cemetery was the last number on my list. I dialed the cemetery halfheartedly and for the umpteenth time explained to the employee who answered the phone, John Moore, what I was looking for. Instead of giving me the usual negative response, Moore sounded interested. He put me on hold while he looked up some records. Then he came back on the line and said, “Yup, we got one.”

Moore had found a person buried in Holy Sepulchre Cemetery who had the same birth date, death date, and exhumation date as one of the plutonium patients I was looking for. But the clincher came when he told me the remains of the man had been shipped to Argonne National Laboratory.

What’s his name? I asked, trying to tamp down the excitement in my voice.

Fred C. Sours, he responded.

Richard Halsey retrieved an obituary of Sours from the microfilm archives of a Rochester newspaper. Sours had no children, and I was unable to locate any living relatives. His life would have to be reconstructed from official records only. (Some relatives eventually were found after my series was published.)

Halsey also went through reel after reel of microfilmed newspaper obituaries at the Rochester public library, hoping to find some of the unidentified plutonium patients by matching their birth and death dates with the published notices. I soon learned that obituaries are often inaccurate and that not everybody who dies has one. Halsey came up with
some promising names, but none of them panned out. We had reached a dead end as far as obits went.