The Poisoner's Handbook (39 page)
The money, the commissioner’s report concluded, had never been shared with Norris or any member of the scientific staff. The investigators found that Norris “had no connection with the alleged illegal practices.” The chief medical examiner had, instead, “paid substantial amounts [out] of his own pocket for the expenses of his office.”
Norris accepted the findings with dignity, but he was incensed. When he was asked to join in a tribute to Mayor La Guardia, he wrote back that he was afraid he just couldn’t do that. He didn’t know the mayor well enough to comment on his good qualities.
Then Dr. Norris went on another, too-rare vacation. He was tired, damn tired, of all of it.
NORRIS RETURNED from his vacation in late August, having enjoyed a leisurely cruise to the tropical climate of South America. He was still curiously weary though, moving slowly at the office. He laughed about it a little. He was sixty-seven years old, after all. Maybe he was just getting too old for the job.
On the morning of September 11, he woke up acutely nauseated. His doctor thought he had brought back a case of dysentery from his travels, but Norris grew steadily weaker all day. He died in his bed at eight-thirty that night. The cause was given as heart failure, although many of his friends considered that he had, most probably, worked himself to death.
More than three hundred people attended his funeral at St. Thomas Episcopal Church, at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street. Thirty uniformed policemen, including five on horseback, formed an honor guard around the entrance. His coffin lay at the front of the church, covered with ferns and banked with red roses, and as the choir sang “Onward Christian Soldiers,” policemen carried it down the aisle, followed by his wife, Eugenie, his sister, his niece, and her husband. His daughter, vacationing in Europe at the time of his death, was still trying to get home.
The chairman of the state liquor authority was there, as were the assistant chief inspector of police, the commissioner of hospitals, the president of the Academy of Medicine, the director of the Bellevue laboratories, the dean of the NYU medical school, the chief medical examiner of Boston, and the head of the New York Medical Association. Harrison Martland was there. So was Thomas Gonzales, who had taken over as acting medical examiner. So were physicians, chemists, clerks, and stenographers from the medical examiner’s offices. Alexander Gettler, city toxicologist, sat quietly in one of the front pews.
The New York papers listed every dignitary at the funeral. The list did not include Mayor La Guardia. But Norris, the constant gadfly, would undoubtedly have laughed about that.
AND HE would surely have been touched by the respect and affection shown by those who worked closely with him.
The staff took up a collection to have a portrait of him painted and hung in the main office. Everyone donated: stenographers and clerks, pathologists and chemists, his longtime chauffeur, and the cleaning woman. Gonzales organized a fund for a Charles Norris Fellowship in Forensic Medicine, to support promising students in the new NYU program. As Gonzales wrote to one contributor, no one was surprised by the generous response, “because of the great friendship and admiration of so many, like yourself, for Doctor Norris.” Tributes came from around the world, across the country, but the most fervent came from those who’d worked alongside him.
A letter from the medical examiner on Staten Island was typical. It began on a stately note, praising Norris’s skills as a pathologist and his pioneering work in making forensic medicine a respected science. And it closed on a personal one: “In sending my small contribution I am expressing my gratitude to the Chief for his friendship, for the many personal acts of assistance, for his extremely generous and whole-hearted support when most I needed it in my early days in the office, for his stimulating and encouraging words and cheery smile specially at moments when the difficulties of the office made all the world seem rather bleak.”
BUT perhaps the best way to appreciate Charles Norris and what he had accomplished was to observe the New York City medical examiner’s office at work. Norris’s carefully built team of forensic detectives—with their hard-earned reputation for excellence, and their insistence on training and scientific procedure—would be well challenged in the days following his funeral.
They found much of it predictable—the auto accidents, the alcoholic collapses, the shootings and beatings, the familiar backbeat of life in the way it too often goes wrong. In the autumn following Norris’s death, the department would work with police in investigating a butler who had stirred lead acetate into his mean-spirited employer’s soup; a paintbrush salesman who slashed a friend’s throat in a Broadway cafeteria because he suspected him of sleeping with his wife; a subway porter in Queens who stabbed a man who refused to tip; and a night watchman who killed a seventy-one-year-old baker for his payroll money. The deaths continued in that seemingly inevitable rhythm that Norris had known, fought, and sometimes simply mourned.
Still, there was one case, less than two weeks after his funeral, that would stand out from the steady patter of death—a killing made memorable by its chilly calculation, its sexually twisted motives, and by the fact that one of the suspects had an uncomfortably recognizable face, at least to Alexander Gettler.
THE CASE BEGAN in mid-September, when a thirty-six-year-old Long Island housewife suddenly fell desperately sick, vomiting constantly, doubled over with abdominal pains. Her doctor, suspecting a gallbladder attack, sent Ada Appelgate to the hospital. She returned home after a week, still a little shaky on her feet, and went straight to her bed, still wretched enough that she refused food, drinking only milk, sometimes with a little egg and sugar mixed into it.
Two days later, on September 27, she woke up again violently ill, falling rapidly into unconsciousness. Her husband, Everett, called the doctor and the police, begging for someone to bring oxygen. When the doctor arrived, the police were still trying to coax breath from a dead woman. The doctor had been treating Ada for obesity for some time. She weighed almost 270 pounds—and he decided that her overtaxed heart must have finally failed. He wrote “coronary occlusion” on the death certificate and had the body sent to a funeral home.
That might have been that, except that the Appelgates shared their home with a rather notorious couple who had once been tried for arsenic murder: John and Mary Frances Creighton.
THE CREIGHTONS had been living quietly since their acquittals some twelve years earlier. They’d sold their house in New Jersey and bought a small bungalow in the Long Island town of Baldwin. John had taken a job in the county engineer’s office. Their children, Ruth, now fifteen, and Jack, twelve, attended the local schools.
During this time John had joined the American Legion. His friends in the lodge included Everett Appelgate, who was a local officer in the organization. Appelgate worked as an investigator in the Veterans’ Relief Bureau, and he and his wife and daughter lived with her parents. After the Appelgates quarreled with Ada’s father, Creighton offered to let them live in the bungalow for a share of the costs. The home had only two bedrooms on its ground floor. The adults took those; Ruth and the Appelgates’ daughter, Agnes, slept in the attic; and Jackie Creighton slept on a cot set out on the porch.
It was crowded, too cozy maybe, but “the Great Depression was with us,” wrote the journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who would cover the murder trial on Long Island, “and the idea of two families sharing so small a home was not likely to startle anyone.”
None of the neighbors particularly liked Ada. She had a habit of criticizing people who annoyed her, which seemed to be almost everyone. But the two families seemed to get along just fine; no one knew of any trouble in the home on Bryant Place.
After her death, given the Creightons’ history, the police asked Appelgate if they could order an autopsy on his wife. To their surprise, he refused. The district attorney called Appelgate to tell him that his office could compel an autopsy, but it would look better if the husband agreed.
After Appelgate reluctantly consented, pathologists removed the dead woman’s organs and sent them to Gettler’s laboratory. He reported back that he’d found arsenic in every organ; he calculated that Ada must have received more than three times the lethal dose. After a few more days of investigation, on October 6, the Nassau County police charged Mary Frances Creighton—currently calling herself Fran—and Everett Appelgate with murder.
THE REAPPEARANCE of Mary Frances Creighton gave Gettler a jolt.
As Kilgallen pointed out in her account of the trial, he’d been a defense witness in one of her earlier arsenic murder trials. His own chemical analysis had helped clear her of the accusation that she’d murdered her mother-in-law.
The new investigation—to his very probable relief—found no evidence that he’d been wrong in that case. But it strongly suggested that she’d outwitted detection in the other charge, the murder of her brother. During interviews with a psychologist hired by the police department, Mary Frances confided that she had actually killed her teenage sibling; she’d wanted the insurance money. Her poison of choice at the time had been not the dilute Fowler’s Solution (which the police had found) but the pesticide Rough on Rats, which she’d managed to throw away.
That arsenic-rich formula was also the poison that Gettler found in Ada Appelgate’s body, right down to the other ingredients mixed into the rat bait. It followed the pattern that forensic scientists had observed even in the nineteenth century. Arsenic killers were often so successful with their first murder that they tended to believe they could get away with it again.
CREIGHTON HAD not aged well in the years since the 1923 murder trials. Her dark Madonna looks were gone. She appeared older than her thirty-six years, squat and triple-chinned; in photographs, she had an oddly froglike look. Her alleged co-conspirator, Everett Appelgate, was exactly her age but looked much younger. He was trim, brown-haired, and blue-eyed, proud of his looks. When detectives asked him if his relationship with Fran Creighton could be a motive for murder, he hurriedly denied it. They were housemates and friends, he said, and that was all there was to it.
The police were only slightly off target, though. And the correct answer explained why a top-dog journalist like Kilgallen, of Hearst’s
New York Journal American
, would cover a seedy suburban murder case. And why she would title her account of the trial “Poison and Pedophilia.”
New York Journal American
, would cover a seedy suburban murder case. And why she would title her account of the trial “Poison and Pedophilia.”
Appelgate wasn’t having an affair with Mary Frances Creighton. He was enjoying one with her rather beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter.
Q. You had intercourse with Ruth in the very bed where your wife lay?A. Yes.Q. What did your wife say to that?A. She didn’t know anything about the intercourse.Q. You were nude?A. Yes.Q. Was your wife nude?A. Yes.Q. And Ruth slept nude?A. She came in clothed.Q. But she soon stripped.A. Yes.Q. So we have a picture of your wife and Ruth and you in this bed, nude?A. Yes.
The trial began on January 13, 1936.
Appelgate testified that he’d wanted to marry Ruth Creighton. Although he denied that Ada had known about the affair, witnesses said differently.
Ruth testified that Appelgate had once asked her if she would like him better if he were single. She also recounted an incident in which she was riding home in the Appelgates’ car. The couple was quarreling. When they got to the house, Ada slammed out of the car. Her husband came after her, knocking her to the ground. She got up, screaming at him, “If it was Ruth, you wouldn’t have done that.”
John Creighton was also called as a witness. He told of a Labor Day party when the Appelgates again quarreled and Everett slapped his wife in the face and shoved her down into a chair. She snapped at him, “If you ever do that again, I will tell something that will put you where you belong.”
Creighton admitted to being puzzled at the time. Later Appelgate told him he wished he could put Ruth in an apartment “and keep her there and not have her around the house, and if she got in trouble, I could get a doctor to fix her up.” He said, “What do you think of that?”
Other books
The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron by McLean, Bethany, Elkind, Peter
Grace by Deneane Clark
Echoes of Silence by Marjorie Eccles
Last Grave (9781101593172) by Viguie, Debbie
Orphan of Angel Street by Annie Murray
Strangers by Rosie Thomas
Safe Landing by Oliver, Tess
From Butt to Booty by Amber Kizer
Murder Offstage by Hathaway, L. B.
Rules of War by Iain Gale
