The Poisoner's Handbook (23 page)
FRANCESCO TRAVIA had come to New York with his children twenty-two years earlier, after his wife died in Italy. His parents had immigrated before him; they still lived in Coney Island. Once in New York, he’d decided on a new and solitary life. He took to calling himself Frank, left his children with his parents, found a job, and stayed alone in his little apartment. He preferred to drink alone as well, spending his Saturday nights with a pint of whatever bootleg whiskey was available.
As he told investigators—in a sudden, frightened confession—Anna Fredericksen had come by in search of some booze. They were out of alcohol at home, she complained. She was known as a heavy drinker in the neighborhood. Her husband admitted to police that she “frequently drank intoxicants” and that her usual bootlegger had been unable to deliver that weekend.
Travia said that he and Anna had finished his own supply of liquor, sitting at his kitchen table. When he tried to get her to leave, they’d fallen into an argument, and then, well, he’d felt incredibly sleepy and had fallen asleep at the table. He woke sometime later, he wasn’t sure, foggy-headed. She was still there, lying on the floor. He went to shake her awake. She was creepily cold to the touch, creepily stiff. He could only think, he told police, that he must have killed her while they’d argued, shaken her to death, strangled her, he didn’t know. But he did know there was a dead woman on the floor. And, he was absolutely sure that he’d be charged with murder once she was found.
So there in the dark of early morning, he decided that his only chance was to get rid of the body. But she was a big woman, tall and chunky, too large to simply haul away over a shoulder. Maybe the alcohol had confused him, he admitted, or maybe it was something else. But Travia decided that he’d have to cut her into smaller pieces and then get rid of her one part at a time.
He used his butcher knife to do the sawing and his chisel to splinter through the bones. Then he wrapped the lower half of her body in newspapers, burlap bags, and an old raincoat and carried it down to the river. He hadn’t figured out what to do with the upper half, but then he never got that chance. That was his story. He swore it was true. And whether one believed it depended on whether one believed in the scientific results from Bellevue.
NORRIS COULD talk all he wanted about the significance of pink faces; Gettler could discuss carboxyhemoglobin until he grew hoarse. But in Brooklyn the police found bloody knives and body parts more convincing.
Which meant that Francesco Travia was, after all, arraigned to stand trial on murder. And as Charles Norris saw it, the New York City medical examiner’s office would have a date in court, a chance to prove very publicly that scientific evidence was a tangible thing, as real, as convincing—and as influential—as any other evidence presented in a courtroom.
Some months later, in March 1927, a Kings County jury acquitted Frank Travia of murder. Norris had predicted that the gruesome nature of the case would make sure people paid attention. In fact, publicity surrounding his case had gained Travia an unusually well-connected young lawyer, Alfred E. Smith Jr., son of the governor of New York.
It was Smith Jr.’s first case, and it went perfectly for him. Unlike the police, he’d found the medical evidence very impressive, enough so that he built his whole case around it. Smith’s witness list was short: the building owner, to say that he’d discovered that a coffeepot on Travia’s stove had boiled over, putting out the burner flame, allowing gas to drift through the apartment; Alexander O. Gettler, to testify that carbon monoxide poisoning had caused the woman’s death; and Frank Travia, to describe his panicked reaction on finding her dead.
Travia was found not guilty of murder but guilty of illegally dismembering a dead body. The difference was enormous; it meant that he went to prison instead of the electric chair. When the trial concluded, Travia’s attorney returned home and found a telegram from Albany waiting for him. The governor wanted to congratulate him on his debut as a criminal lawyer, on proving that the cause of death was not a drunken Italian laborer but an all-too-common, all-too-lethal household gas.
THE GOVERNOR did not also congratulate the scientists of the medical examiner’s office, but they celebrated anyway. All that patient chemistry, all Gettler’s time-consuming experiments with carbon monoxide, had helped save a man from the electric chair, despite the doubts expressed by the police. As much as Norris’s lectures at the police academy, as much as those scheduled tours of Gettler’s laboratory, the Travia case illustrated that forensic toxicology was a powerful—and credible—tool.
The days when chemists killed cats in courtrooms, and medical experts waved chloroform vials in front of nervous jurors, were demonstrably over. They could make their points with sober testimony and charts of chemical analysis. They hadn’t entirely figured out carbon monoxide, true, and no one was sure how to contain the environmental hazards posed by the gas. But Norris and Gettler had saved one life this day, and they were confident that they could save others.
Call it a coming-of-age party for forensic toxicology—there in the third-floor laboratory at Bellevue the bubble and hiss of beakers sounded like victory music in the air around them.
SEVEN
METHYL ALCOHOL (CH
3
OH)
1927
3
OH)
1927
T
HE RUMORS BEGAN in the summer of 1926. Government chemists were developing a secret project in the aid of Prohibition, people whispered. Dry officials issued warnings that drinking was about to become more risky. The Great War had taught people that chemists could be more dangerous than other scientists. A new chemists’ war was brewing, it was said, pitting government scientists against those employed by the country’s powerful bootlegging empires.
HE RUMORS BEGAN in the summer of 1926. Government chemists were developing a secret project in the aid of Prohibition, people whispered. Dry officials issued warnings that drinking was about to become more risky. The Great War had taught people that chemists could be more dangerous than other scientists. A new chemists’ war was brewing, it was said, pitting government scientists against those employed by the country’s powerful bootlegging empires.
It was no secret that the federal government seethed with frustration over the flouting of anti-alcohol laws. When Prohibition went into effect, backed by a Constitutional amendment no less, its supporters had assumed citizens would, however reluctantly, obey the law. The succeeding years had proved them wrong. Many now drank more than ever, more recklessly, more adventurously. In Washington, D.C., where the Volstead Act—which provided for enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment—had been militantly approved, the police reported nearly a ten-fold increase in drunk driving arrests since the legislation was enacted.
The illegal alcohol trade had not only flourished but grown more sophisticated. In the mid-1920s much of the available spirits came from stolen industrial alcohol, which was famously poisonous. Since 1906 the U.S. government had required that manufacturers denature (poison) industrial alcohol or else pay liquor taxes. By the 1920s some seventy denaturing formulas existed. The simplest formulas just added extra methyl, or wood, alcohol into the mix. Others mixed a cocktail of bitter-tasting but less lethal compounds, designed to make the alcohol taste so awful that it became undrinkable.
With the use of such tainted supplies the liquor syndicates needed chemists to help them clean up industrial alcohol. By paying well enough, the bootleggers secured some very able scientists. The chemists had quickly neutralized the simplest of the denaturing additives. Formula 39b, used in production of alcohol for perfume and cosmetics, was a favorite of the illegal alcohol trade because it was not particularly dangerous and thus “renatured” nicely. The heavy-duty industrial versions were deadlier and more difficult to make safe. But recently the bootleggers’ chemists claimed to have found a way to renature even the most lethal versions. They’d found—or so they claimed—a process that caused the methyl alcohol to precipitate to the bottom of a container where it could mostly be filtered out. The resulting spirits were more poisonous than traditional grain alcohol but not so much that the consumers dropped dead in the street.
Amid indications that the bootlegger chemists were gaining on the denaturing front, dry advocates in Congress demanded tougher measures and better poisons. Their position was that if Americans persisted in flouting the law, if they continued to evade the hardworking law enforcement agents, then perhaps the best way to enforce Prohibition was to make alcohol so deadly that even the sellout chemists working for the crime syndicates couldn’t rescue it. If alcohol was truly undrinkable, the argument went, even the most devoted boozer would have to give it up.
And those summer 1926 rumors? They were absolutely true. The government was experimenting with new denaturing agents, planning to require much greater amounts of methyl alcohol in the denaturing process. Other poisons were under review as well, including benzene, kerosene, and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine). Federal chemists defended this practice as simple law enforcement: “ignorance, politics and bootlegging” were the real problem, according to a report by the American Chemical Society, which complained that “the continual controversy for and against Prohibition and over the methods for the enforcement” of the law was starting to create public hostility against hardworking scientists.
By 1926 federal chemists had devised ten new formulas dedicated to deterring bootleggers and their customers. But the black market chemists proved able in countering these moves. In the spring, formula number six, which included mercury bichloride, was overcome. In September, numbers three and four had to be discarded. Formulas one and five—which contained the most methyl alcohol (plus some benzene and pyridine)—remained dangerous, but that was mostly because, as one government chemist told reporters, no one had ever figured out how to completely detoxify wood alcohol.
It was hard to miss the conclusion. Prohibition chemists didn’t have to create exotic formulas. Wood alcohol, methyl alcohol, whatever you chose to call it, was still the best poison at hand.
AS THE YEAR pulled toward its close, on a festively lit Christmas Eve, a man came running—make that weaving—into Bellevue’s emergency room, claiming that Santa Claus had chased him from Fifth Avenue with a baseball bat. He was among the sixty-five people who came to the hospital in two days, all sickened by holiday celebrations.
The problem, Charles Norris reported, was primarily poisoned liquor. The latest round of hooch available in the city had not cleaned up well. It remained an unusually nasty soup of government-added impurities and methyl alcohol. Eight people died at Bellevue, and fifteen others were admitted. Two days after Christmas twenty-three were dead and eighty-nine hospitalized. Most of them later were packed into the alcoholic ward at Bellevue, hallucinating, vomiting, blinded by wood alcohol, bundled onto cots like so many sticks of kindling.
On December 28 a furious Norris issued a public statement:
The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol. It knows what the bootleggers are doing with it and yet it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States Government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible.
The equally furious response came from Wayne Wheeler, general counsel of the Anti-Saloon League of America. He accused Norris, and the newspapers that had quoted the medical examiner, of being in league with bootleggers. The fact was that these so-called victims had violated the law, Wheeler said, and deserved no sympathy for their illegal, and also idiotic, behavior.
A speakeasy patron was “in the same category as the man who walks into a drug store, buys a bottle of carbolic acid with a label on it marked ‘poisonous,’ and drinks the contents,” Wheeler asserted. If these individuals chose to engage in suicidal actions, he added, that was their choice and no reason to change an important and righteous national policy.
It became obvious on the next day, the last day of 1926, that Wheeler’s position was also the federal government’s position. The Treasury Department announced that it had decided to require that denatured alcohol be more poisonous. The amount of methyl alcohol in all formulas would be doubled at a minimum. Mostly that meant going from the traditional 2 percent to 4 percent of contents. But if that didn’t serve, then the Prohibition chemists had developed a Special Formula One, which called for 5 to 10 percent methyl alcohol.
The chances of bootleggers distilling that out were slim; some stills might actually concentrate the poison. But as Wheeler had made so clear, that was the drinker’s problem.
THE PRESIDENT of Columbia University was fed up with all of it.
Nicholas Murray Butler had opposed the Eighteenth Amendment from the start. He didn’t oppose regulation of saloons, but doing so by constitutional amendment, he said, was overkill. And by 1927, Seven years into the social experiment, any idiot could see that Prohibition had been an enormous mistake, Butler said, one that could be remedied only by replacing the country’s leaders.
Butler announced in February that he would himself run for president, seeking to become the Republican Party candidate on an anti-Prohibition platform, which would call for repealing the Eighteenth Amendment and returning the power to regulate alcohol to the individual states. Butler’s declaration, though, received less attention than the vituperative answers it generated.
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