The Poisoner's Handbook (20 page)
The new park was designed in a series of terraces, descending toward Broadway. A central stairway, constructed of stone, led to walking paths, which in turn meandered through shady sitting areas. Along one edge, Webb ordered the construction of a silvery stone wall. Embedded in the stone, he had placed a small plaque dedicating the park to Gertie A. Gorman. It was—and is—a beautiful little park. But it also stands for an end, a closure, and, most of all, a tribute to someone loved and lost.
SIX
CARBON MONOXIDE (CO), PART I 1926
I
N LATE JANUARY 1926, a snow-sprayed wind glittering around him, a reporter from the
New York Times
shivered on a certain street corner, the one an irate letter writer had described as the noisiest in Manhattan—“the nadir of quietness.” At the designated intersection, Sixth Avenue and 34th Street, the journalist attempted to interview a traffic cop about that complaint. But the reporter worried that his task might be impossible. As he later wrote, while he could see the officer’s lips moving, he couldn’t hear a word of the answer.
N LATE JANUARY 1926, a snow-sprayed wind glittering around him, a reporter from the
New York Times
shivered on a certain street corner, the one an irate letter writer had described as the noisiest in Manhattan—“the nadir of quietness.” At the designated intersection, Sixth Avenue and 34th Street, the journalist attempted to interview a traffic cop about that complaint. But the reporter worried that his task might be impossible. As he later wrote, while he could see the officer’s lips moving, he couldn’t hear a word of the answer.
“Bang, flop, bang, flop. A flat-wheeled surface car jolted its way over the tracks, with every nut and every bolt protesting. Blah! Blah! Blah!!! Went the semi-siren of a lumbering truck,” he wrote, trying to re-create the blast of sound around him. The vehicular rush ran so thickly here, the city had assigned six officers to the one corner. The reporter had simply picked the policeman he could see best, the tallest of traffic guardians. The two men surveyed the chaos of automobiles before them: Maxwell Traveling Sedans, Dodge Brothers limousines, Packard’s new six-cylinder touring sedans, Nash Specials, Chandler Metropolitans, the occasional Jordan Victoria, Willys Knight’s compact four-passenger coupe, stretched-out Cadillac Suburbans, sporty Buick Country Club Specials, and Ford Model Ts, a motorized stampede of mostly black, boxy vehicles, some in the old open design, many with the new flat roofs, all with blaring horns and round staring-eye headlamps.
“Hey,” the police officer shouted at a speeding driver. “He put his whistle between his lips and presumably blew it,” the reporter noted. Nine more motorized vehicles went by, sixty-nine pedestrians, two baby carriages, and three more surface cars—the name for streetcars, to distinguish them from the railcars screeching overhead on the elevated tracks.
The traffic cop leaned down and put his lips to the writer’s left ear: “It’s the noisiest place in the world.”
OTHER POLICEMEN might have argued for that honor, at other street corners, in countless other cities. Traffic jammed intersections across the country, bred by the automobile craze of the 1920s. Everyone wanted a car—for the speed, the independence, and yes, the status. Four million new cars had been sold nationwide in 1925, and automobile manufacturers predicted with absolute confidence that those numbers could only rise. The National Automobile Show, held at Manhattan’s Grand Central Palace, showcased more than five hundred new models in 1926—bigger cars, more powerful cars, cars riding on the new, cushier balloon tires. Cheaper cars. The Dodge brothers (Horace and John) had reduced the price of their luxury Type A sedan from $1,280 to $1,045, in an effort to lure more customers.
In New York City a personal automobile offered escape from standing on a snow-slushed sidewalk waiting for a surface car, and from risking one’s life in the rackety elevated trains. Reliable public transportation had yet to be realized; Mayor Hylan blamed strong resistance and political lobbying by private transportation companies: “Let the people know that selfishness is still rampant in this city.” At party headquarters these denunciations of lucrative donors were not appreciated. In 1926 he was replaced as mayor by Tammany Hall’s new favorite, the luxury- and limousine-loving James J. Walker.
Even Charles Norris had developed car fever.
His examiners had been taking taxis to death scenes. They’d wasted hours waiting for those city-chartered cabs, and more hours walking, after the cars failed to start. “I understand that the taxicabs at present time are in very poor condition” and are constantly breaking down, Norris wrote to the city’s transportation manager. Please, could some cars be permanently assigned to the medical examiner’s office? He could make do with a meager two.
Norris received an apologetic refusal; the city had no cars to spare at the moment. The new mayor’s office was using them all.
Frustrated, Norris turned his own private car, and chauffeur, over to department use. He did persuade Bellevue to pay the chauffeur’s $1,000-a-year salary. The driver was as necessary as the car itself, as most of Norris’s city-born employees didn’t know how to drive. For that matter, it seemed, neither did the people who were, at the moment, careening around Sixth Avenue in their newly purchased automobiles.
In 1920 the medical examiner’s office tallied 692 people killed by automobiles in New York City; five years later that number was 1,272, despite a state law, passed in 1922, that required drivers to be licensed. Both Norris and the Manhattan district attorney, Joshua Banton, had worked hard to get the licensing law passed. Their joint public position was brief and completely clear: “There are many persons driving automobiles in this city who ought not to drive.”
THE MOTORIZED STAMPEDE pressured the federal government to resolve the risk posed by lead additives to gasoline. In January 1926 the Public Health Service released its report on tetraethyl lead, concluding that there was “no danger” in adding the compound to gasoline, and no reason to prohibit the sale of leaded gasoline as long as workers were well protected during the manufacturing process.
The scientists who wrote the report had been recruited by both the government and industry. They’d studied the risks associated with everyday exposure by drivers, automobile attendants, and gas station operators and found it to be minimal. True, all the drivers tested showed trace amounts of lead in their blood. But a low level of lead could be tolerated, the scientists believed; none of the test subjects showed the extreme behaviors and breakdowns associated with the “looney gas building.”
Critics, even then, charged that the panel was biased, deliberately underestimating the risks. But, in fact, the conclusions weren’t entirely wrong: the extra protections recommended for industrial workers did make the factories safer. Workers exposed to TEL at lower levels did not drop to the ground or show immediate signs of ill health. Workers who were well buffered against the additive were not rushed to the hospital or strapped into straitjackets. There was no arguing with the report’s finding that safety precautions did the job.
The federal panel did issue one cautionary note however: exposure levels would probably rise as more and more people took to the road. Perhaps at a later point, the scientists suggested, the research should be taken up again. It was always possible that leaded gasoline might “constitute a menace to the general public after prolonged use or other conditions not foreseen at this time.”
But that was the future’s problem. In 1926, citing evidence from the TEL report, the federal government revoked all bans on the production and sale of leaded gasoline. The reaction of industry was jubilant; one Standard Oil spokesman likened the compound to a “gift of God,” so great was its potential to improve automobile performance.
TOXICOLOGISTS like Alexander Gettler had more urgent worries about risks in the age of the automobile: focusing on other chemicals released in engine exhaust. When gasoline or any other carbon-rich fuel burned in the modern engine, a cascade of reactions resulted, atoms separating and recombining, loose carbon bonding with circulating oxygen. Those carbon-and-oxygen connections, in particular, created two differently troublesome gases: carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
In general, when fuel combustion is highly efficient, the main by-product is carbon dioxide—a single carbon atom attached to two oxygen atoms. No scientist really considers carbon dioxide a poison, not in the routine sense of the word. It is a natural by-product of the human metabolic process, among other things. When people breathe, inhale air, they take in oxygen, then exhale back out carbon dioxide (created in the carbon-rich interior of humans and other animals).
Carbon dioxide (CO
2
) occasionally killed directly in the 1920s, but rarely. Such deaths occurred when CO
2
displaced oxygen in a tightly closed space. In transporting fruits and vegetables, for example, shippers often kept the produce cold with superchilled carbon dioxide. At about 103 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the gas freezes to a solid, turning into glassy-looking chunks of exceptionally cold material. As the chunks warm and “melt,” they return directly to a gaseous state, giving the material the nickname “dry ice.” In an unventilated space, this seeping release of carbon dioxide will gradually replace oxygen, suffocating anyone inside.
2
) occasionally killed directly in the 1920s, but rarely. Such deaths occurred when CO
2
displaced oxygen in a tightly closed space. In transporting fruits and vegetables, for example, shippers often kept the produce cold with superchilled carbon dioxide. At about 103 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the gas freezes to a solid, turning into glassy-looking chunks of exceptionally cold material. As the chunks warm and “melt,” they return directly to a gaseous state, giving the material the nickname “dry ice.” In an unventilated space, this seeping release of carbon dioxide will gradually replace oxygen, suffocating anyone inside.
Five longshoremen were once found dead in the cargo hold of a steamer docked in Brooklyn on the East River. The boat had been carrying cherries from Michigan, preserved in a chamber kept chilled with dry ice; the boat workers had been bunking in the room where the fruit was stored. Norris’s office found that the men’s blood was “saturated with carbon dioxide and the men had obviously died from asphyxia.” Hastily taken air samples had confirmed that the room was saturated with the gas.
But as the pathologists emphasized, they’d had to move quickly before the gas was diluted. Carbon dioxide is always found in human blood; and it rises to unusually high levels with other forms of suffocation as well. So carbon-dioxide-rich air samples were essential to determining the method of suffocation. “Exactly the same autopsy picture would have been found if the men had died from being smothered by holding, say, a pillow over their mouths,” one of the medical examiners noted later in his memoir.
“This brings up a rather interesting possibility for a method of murder that would be extremely difficult to detect,” the doctor, Edward Marten, continued. “I pass this on, for what it is worth, to writers of detective stories.” In his scenario, a sleeping or heavily intoxicated person slumbers in bed. The killer places a bucket, packed with dry ice, on the floor and carefully shuts the windows and door as he leaves. Within a few hours the victim suffocates. When someone opens the door, normal air refills the room, whisking away all trace of the murder weapon: “The trick is that when dry ice evaporates it leaves absolutely no trace behind, so that the investigating detectives would find nothing except a dry and completely empty pail.” Still, Marten considered that a better tip for fiction writers than for real-life killers. The purchase of dry ice was easy to track, the material was tricky to handle, and the gas was rarely and unreliably deadly.
ON THE other hand, carbon monoxide proved an exceptionally reliable killer.
Carbon monoxide (CO) is also largely an industrial by-product. When fuel does not burn cleanly away, the process is called incomplete combustion. This less efficient use of fuel makes less oxygen available, creating a situation where, frequently, each atom of carbon bonds with only one atom of oxygen, a connection multiplied millions of times over.
CO is relatively rare in nature—it forms in the wake of lightning strikes, forest and grass fires, and any event that causes a carbon-rich fuel to burn. Once in the atmosphere, it tends to attach to other free oxygen, converting to carbon dioxide and dispersing. Still, as a 1923 toxicology text noted, it is always present “to a more or less extent wherever man lives and works.”
The gas was first synthesized by a French chemist, who in 1776 heated zinc oxide with coke (a concentrated form of coal). He’d watched the coke ignite with a beautiful blue-violet flame, a color that scientists would later realize was a signature of carbon monoxide as it burned.
Carbon monoxide drifted out of lime kilns, brick kilns, charcoal kilns, burning buildings, stoves, grates, braziers, salamanders (broilers), coal-stoked furnaces, gas-water heaters, gas lighting, the smokestacks of trains, and of course, the tailpipes of automobiles. Auto exhaust contained up to 25 percent carbon monoxide, according to tests done in 1926. An even more concentrated source, though, was illuminating gas. This fuel, produced from coal processing, consisted mostly of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Illuminating gas was preferred for lighting because it produced a particularly bright flame, but it was also used to power stoves, heaters, and even refrigerators. Some of these appliances had registered gas leaks containing more than 40 percent carbon monoxide.
The risks associated with inhaling high levels of carbon monoxide had been realized quickly, mostly because they made themselves so apparent. Consider the effect of even a small car, a 22-horsepower Model T, left running in a closed garage. An engine that size generated twenty-eight liters of carbon monoxide a minute. Some toxicologists calculated that “this is sufficient to render the atmosphere of a single car garage deadly within five minutes, if the engine is run with the door closed.” The federal government issued a more conservative estimate of ten minutes.
Charles Norris estimated that carbon monoxide killed nearly a thousand residents of New York City every year. Breaking Norris’s numbers down further—say, for the single year 1925—his records showed 618 accidental carbon monoxide deaths, 388 Suicides, and three homicides. The most inventive of the murders involved a man killed by having a gas tube forced into his mouth until the carbon monoxide killed him. The killer then put the dead man into a water-filled bathtub and reported his death as an accidental drowning.
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