American Experience (1988–…): Season 26, Episode 6 - The Poisoner's Handbook - full transcript

NARRATOR: Tonight.

WOMAN: All over the city, more
and more people were dying.

These were poisoning deaths.

MAN: Norris and Gettler were
the forerunners of CSI.

POLICEMAN:
Multiple stab wounds.

Half a woman's body.

Pretty cut and dried.

She died from carbon
monoxide poisoning.

Sorry?

"The Poisoner's Handbook,"

on American Experience.



MAN: They have mass
casualties up here.

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¶

(vacuum whirring)

Housekeeping!

(door unlocking)

(draws a breath)

Mr. Jackson?

NARRATOR: In 1922, 101 New
Yorkers hanged themselves.

444 died in car accidents.



20 were crushed in elevators.

There were 237 fatal
shootings and 34 stabbings.

And that year, 997 New Yorkers
died of poisoning.

On April 25, 1922,

Fremont Jackson
and his wife Annie

took their place
among those grim statistics.

MARCELLA FIERRO:
This is a multiple death.

The multiple deaths,

they're a different class
of death.

When you look
at multiple deaths,

they're not usually accidents

and they're not
usually natural.

COLIN EVANS:
The initial suspicion was that

they had been the victims
of a dual suicide.

Then they looked around

and nobody could find any sign
of any poison anywhere.

DEBORAH BLUM: It's kind of a
classic locked-door mystery.

People are dead on the floor

with what they think is
a poison exposure,

but there's absolutely
no poison in the apartment.

Nothing.

NARRATOR: The Jackson mystery

seemed destined to become
just another cold case.

Instead, it would mark the
emergence of forensic science

and a new era in criminal
investigation.

¶

It is the body

of a well-nourished
elderly white male...

NARRATOR: Like many such mysteries,
the Jackson case found its way

to Charles Norris
at Bellevue Hospital.

Other than the usual
post-mortem changes,

there are no marks or bruises

on the scalp, face, or neck...

NARRATOR: As New York's
Chief Medical Examiner,

Norris was responsible
for investigating

every violent or suspicious
death in the city.

And he was taking
a radical approach to the job.

For four years now,
Norris had been studying

the bodies of victims
to find out how they died.

This was a far cry
from the way New York City

had dealt with suspicious
deaths in the past.

Traditionally, they had been
handled by city coroners.

Even in an era
of rampant corruption,

New York coroners stood out.

The job was handed out
by the mayor

like any other political plum.

Painters, milkmen,
undertakers, musicians;

Anyone could be a coroner.

And because they were paid
by the body,

coroners liked to process
as many as possible,

as quickly as possible.

DEBORAH BLUM:
Coroners had an incentive

to make money
from the families of the dead.

So you could find coroners

who wouldn't release the body
to a family

unless they went
to a funeral home

that was giving them kickbacks.

At the same time,

you could also make money
by selling cause of death.

"I don't want my best friend
to be found guilty of murder."

"I don't want my husband
to have committed suicide."

NARRATOR: If you had
the right connections,

you could get away with murder.

Even if you didn't,

the coroners' incompetence
meant that science

played virtually no part
in law enforcement.

"Numerous homicides
have undoubtedly failed

of detection,"
a study had concluded,

"and skillful poisoning
can be carried out

almost with impunity."

Charles Norris had been
an unlikely candidate

to reform this wretched system.

He came from one
of the wealthiest families

in Philadelphia.

He could have lived
a life of idle luxury,

but chose instead
to study medicine

at Columbia University.

DAVID KRAJICEK: After finishing his
medical training, Norris went to Europe,

studied in Berlin and Vienna,

and he was quite smitten
by the developing European use

of scientific evidence
in the criminal justice system.

And he brought that idea
back to the United States.

NARRATOR:
When Norris returned home,

he joined an alliance
of civic groups,

newspaper editors,
and state officials

that was trying to do away
with the coroners.

They wanted a medical
examiner's office,

staffed by professionals,

employing the latest techniques
in forensic science.

In 1918, over the bitter
opposition of the mayor,

they succeeded.

Norris was chosen
to lead the new department.

But from day one,

it was clear that he had made
a powerful enemy.

BLUM: The Mayor of New
York was Red Mike Hylan.

He was forced, really,
literally forced to hire Norris.

He wanted a medical
examiner's department

that would do favors for him.

You know, "My friend
got in trouble with this."

I'd like you to help me
cover up that."

But Norris was too much
of a purist

to ever play those games.

KRAJICEK: Norris was driven
by the desire to create

what he called a medical legal
justice system in America

that was science based,

where convictions and acquittals
weren't based upon who you knew

but were based upon science
and fact.

That was his mission.

That was his personal mission.

NARRATOR: Hylan was looking
for any opportunity

to undermine
this well-heeled reformer.

Norris couldn't afford
any mistakes,

especially when the whole
country was watching.

Norris needed answers.

NARRATOR:
He turned to Alexander Gettler,

the brilliant young chemist
who ran his toxicology lab,

the first of its kind
in the country.

MICHAEL BADEN:
When I first met Dr. Gettler,

as a medical student coming over
to see autopsies,

he was very nice.

A small man
compared to Norris, for example.

Very polite,
but very shy in a way.

Okay, set up a steam
distillation for cyanide.

Okay.

Good morning, Alice.

Good morning.

Tartaric acid,
sodium hydroxide,

hydrochloric acid,

and I think we're out
of ferric chloride...

you'll need to make some up.

Okay.

BADEN: I never heard him speak

about anything else in his life
other than toxicology.

Not family, not friends.

I had the impression
that he was a guy

who was thinking of chemical
formulas all the time.

NARRATOR: Norris had
hired Alexander Gettler

as soon as he took office,

and the young man had become
his closest ally.

Gettler had built
the toxicology lab from scratch,

and trained his staff
in the emerging science.

In this case, Gettler's
first challenge was deciding

which poison to look for.

Sorry I'm late.

Cyanide.

Let's start with this one.

BLUM: There were signs that this
was possibly a cyanide poisoning.

There's this weird reddening
of the skin

because of the way
it chemically interacts

with the blood stream.

There's bluing around the lips,

which would normally say to you,

someone was having a problem
getting oxygen.

Cyanide interferes
with your body's ability

to process oxygen,

so that you have
a chemical suffocation.

MARCELLA FIERRO: The police report
said they went down like a shot.

Now, very few things
drop people like a shot:

Heart, rarely brain,
and some toxins.

Now, of the toxins
that will drop you like a shot,

cyanide has to be
right up there.

GETTLER: About 200 grams.

Okay:

NARRATOR: If the Jacksons
had swallowed cyanide,

there would be traces
in their stomachs.

That is where
Gettler's search began.

NARRATOR:
Gettler's life work boiled down

to one fiendishly
difficult task:

Finding trace amounts of poison

in an overwhelming matrix
of human tissue.

He started by grinding a chunk
of the stomach wall.

He then slowly distilled
the resulting sludge.

Any cyanide
in the Jacksons' stomachs

would be concentrated
in the distillate

collected at the end
of the process.

NARRATOR:
Gettler was most at home

finding his way
through intricate mazes

of compounds and formulas.

The deeper the mystery,
the more obsessive he became.

Nothing had ever come easily
to Alexander Gettler.

He had grown up poor,

one of the multitude
of immigrants

struggling to free themselves

from the troubles
of Manhattan's Lower East Side.

Even then, he had been
obsessed with chemistry.

He had put himself
through school

by working the graveyard shift
at the Brooklyn/Battery ferry,

doing homework through the night

and attending classes
during the day.

He understood then
that chemistry could unravel

the mysteries of nature.

Now he hoped that
it could illuminate

the messy and confusing
circumstances

that all too often
separated life from death.

Abraham!

Any word on the Jacksons?

Dr. Gettler's
about to start that now.

Excellent.

The Jacksons?

Yeah, Fremont.

I'll just be a minute.

NARRATOR:
The hunt was almost over.

The last step was to unmask
the poison in the distillate.

All poisons have
indelible signatures.

The trick is to reveal them.

Cyanide can be unmasked
by adding chemicals

to turn it a deep,
Prussian blue.

Okay, here we go.

(sighs)

Damn.

BLUM: There was nothing.

There was not a trace
of cyanide in the stomach.

And so now you have
this impossible problem.

You've got people who look like
they died of cyanide poisoning,

you've run all your tests,
and there's nothing there.

I'll call the D.A.

FIERRO: Gettler examed the
stomach wall, didn't find it.

Examined the gastric contents,
didn't find it.

The police brought
in substances,

every substance they could find
apparently from the apartment.

Gettler dutifully tested
all of them.

Negative.

Well, by this time,
he knows what?

Since the stomach is empty,

the gastric contents
is negative,

then it has to be an inhalatn.

BLUM: Cyanide was a very popular
rat killer of the time.

And the gas they used to use
to fumigate then

was hydrogen cyanide, which is
a phenomenally poisonous gas.

COLIN EVANS: They then
contacted the hotel manager

and asked him if there had
been any fumigation of the hotel

to get rid of pests.

And he assured them that

no, there had been
no such fumigation.

And he was as much in the dark
as to how the couple had died

as the examiners.

FIERRO:
So then they have to go back

and they do
what all good policemen do:

They start talking to people

and they talk to people
and they talk to people.

There's no substitute
for a good homicide detective.

Believe me, there isn't.

And they find a maid
who finally, she fesses up

and says yes, she knows
that they were fumigating.

NARRATOR: The mystery was
beginning to unfold.

The next step
was to determine how cyanide gas

could have seeped
into the Jacksons' apartment.

The police came up
with a simple test,

setting off smoke bombs
in the hotel's basement rooms,

where the fumigation
had taken place.

Another piece of the puzzle
fell into place.

But there was still no proof

that the Jacksons had inhaled
the cyanide gas.

For that, Gettler would have
to examine their lungs.

Unfortunately, those were
six feet underground

in a New Jersey cemetery.

The D.A. reluctantly
gave permission

to exhume
Fremont Jackson's body,

a request that would have been
unthinkable

when coroners were in charge.

Two weeks after his death,

Fremont Jackson's lungs were
delivered to Gettler's lab,

where they were ground up
and distilled

in preparation
for the Prussian Blue test.

The hotel manager
had lied to the police,

and the fumigator had been
negligent.

Both men were charged
with first degree manslaughter.

The penalty was ten years.

NARRATOR: As Norris and Gettler
made their way into court,

they were apprehensive.

Judges, juries and lawyers

were unacquainted
with forensic science,

and furthermore,
anyone resembling a coroner

was assumed to be
a political hack.

DEFENSE LAWYER: Doctor Gettler,

are you licensed and authorized
to practice medicine?

No.

I am toxicologist to the Chief
Medical Examiner's Office.

But you are not licensed
to practice medicine.

No.

You have testified that
you found traces of cyanide

in Fremont Jackson's lungs.

I assume that
you did this analysis

soon after Mr. Jackson's death?

Well, he had been buried
for five days.

We had it exhumed
in order to remove the lungs.

You exhumed the body?

How extraordinary!

By the time
you finally got around

to examining
Mr. Jackson's lungs,

I assume the body
had begun to decompose?

Yes.

Well, how do you know
that the cyanide you found

wasn't just
a natural by-product

of the body's decomposition?

Cyanide is not a by-product
of decomposition.

Really? Never?

All right,
let me correct myself:

While it's possible
that small amounts of cyanide

might be produced
during decomposition,

that would never account
for the concentrations

in Mr. Jackson's lungs.

Based on what?

Based on my own experience.

Why don't you just
tell us the truth.

You had no way of knowing
what to expect

in Mr. Jackson's lungs.

You just had a hunch
that what you saw

was the result of a crime.

And on the strength
of that hunch,

the jury is supposed to send
this man away for ten years?

You have a lot of faith
in your hunches, sir.

Thank you, "Doctor" Gettler.

NARRATOR: The prosecution's
case collapsed.

Both men got off.

Gettler was stunned.

He had been made
to look a fool,

and worse still, he had
undermined Norris's campaign

to legitimize forensic science.

BLUM: After the Jackson
case, Gettler says,

"I'm going back
to the laboratory

"and I'm gonna nail
this science so precisely

that no one
will ever do that again."

He did hundreds of tests
on cyanide.

His work was so good
that they still cite it today.

NARRATOR: Alone in the lab,
Gettler answered the question

he had been unable to answer
in court.

A decomposing body produces only
the faintest hint of cyanide,

nothing like the levels
in the Jacksons' lungs.

He had been right all along.

Gettler couldn't undo
the outcome of the Jackson case.

But his paper on cyanide

became part of something
much larger.

Together, Norris and Gettler

were beginning to reinvent
criminal investigation.

In the end,

they would transform the way
science deals with death.

NARRATOR: In the 1920s,
Americans lived in a world

that had been remade
by chemistry.

Since the dawn of time,

mankind had been dependent
on materials from nature.

But over the last century,

chemistry had fundamentally
changed that relationship.

Now, artificial materials were
being created from scratch:

Plastics, cellophane,
nylon, polyester.

And just as important,

old materials were being
altered for new uses.

Automobiles and airplanes used
steel that had been hardened,

rubber that had been vulcanized,

and petroleum that
had been refined,

all through chemical processes,
on an ever-increasing scale.

Crops were fed
with chemical fertilizers

and protected
with chemical pesticides.

Bountiful harvests, along
with chemical disinfectants,

antiseptics
and chlorinated water

had helped cut the infant
mortality rate by half,

and extended the average
American life by ten years.

But that same chemical
revolution had paved the way

for the most destructive
conflict in history.

The Great War was fought
with hardened steel,

high explosives,
flame throwers and poison gas.

It had been called
"The Chemists' War,"

and by the time it ended,

the revulsion over chemical
weapons was so deep

that they were being banned
by the Great Powers.

But while chemicals were
being regulated in warfare,

there were no limits at all
in civilian life.

BLUM: A lot of things that we think
of today as dangerous poisons

were just on your grocery store
shelves or in the pharmacy.

They were in medications,

they were in pesticides,

they were in cosmetics.

Pharmaceutical companies
were not required

to test their products.

Companies didn't have
to properly label things.

So you're living in this world

that's sort of aslosh
with really dangerous compounds

that people did not
entirely understand.

¶

NARRATOR: All winter long, Fanny Creighton
had been desperate for company.

She and her husband John
had moved in with his parents

when they got married,

but the older couple
had since passed away.

John was away at work
much of the time,

leaving Fanny alone
in the house.

So she was relieved
when her brother Charles

arranged to move in.

What?

Can't a person look?

NARRATOR: They had grown
up together as orphans

and quickly fell into
lifelong habits.

(coughing)

Jesus...

You want some water?

NARRATOR: Charles had been
unwell for a few weeks,

but nothing serious.

Then he started having seizures,
vomiting,

his limbs stiffening
and shaking.

(coughing loudly)

NARRATOR: Fanny summoned a
doctor, but it was too late.

What the hell?

NARRATOR: Her brother passed
away later that night.

And there the story
may have died,

except that the police
received an anonymous letter

saying, "You really should look
into Mary Francis Creighton."

We think there's something
extremely suspicious about her."

And this set
investigative minds to work.

NARRATOR: The police started
interviewing neighbors and friends.

Charles's doctor admitted that

he had found the boy's
death mysterious.

Then they dug up the body

and found it shot through
with arsenic.

With that,
the prosecutor charged Fanny

and her husband with murder.

He seemed to have
a formidable case.

BLUM: She had invited her
brother to live with them.

She had gotten him a job
at a corner store.

She had, without his knowing it,

taken out an insurance policy
on his life.

NARRATOR: Most damaging
of all, in Fanny's home,

detectives had found a bottle
of Fowler's Solution,

a popular cosmetic tonic.

The active ingredient
was arsenic.

The penalty for murder
was death.

It looked like Fanny was heading
to the electric chair.

But on the last day
of the trial,

she was finally able
to explain what had happened.

Charles had been heartbroken
over an unrequited love;

He had shared his secret
only with her.

She had been unable to stop
his slide into depression.

Her little brother
must have poisoned himself

to escape from his misery.

Her story was so persuasive that
the jury found her not guilty.

But Fanny's troubles
weren't over.

Even as she was celebrating
her acquittal,

the prosecutor was lining up
another case against her.

EVANS: The police had
heard from neighbors

that a few years previously,

the in-laws had died under very,
you know, unusual circumstances.

And so at that point,

it was decided to exhume
their bodies.

Lo and behold,

they found arsenic in the body
of her mother-in-law.

NARRATOR: The county physician
declared that the body

contained four times
the lethal dose of arsenic.

The prosecutor had no doubt
about how it got there.

The day after Fanny's
acquittal,

he accused her of killing
her mother-in-law.

BLUM: Alexander Gettler
would have been reading

about this lovely young mother

who seemed to be caught

in the evil machinations of a
prosecutor who's out to get her.

NARRATOR: Gettler wondered whether
the county physician had it right.

Soon, he'd have the chance
to find out.

Fanny's lawyers called,

asking him to examine
her mother-in-law's remains.

I'm set for the Reinsch test.

NARRATOR: Gettler started by
overseeing the same procedure

the county physician had used.

It was a well-known test
that isolated arsenic

in the form of a dark residue

on the surface
of a copper plate.

The timing of the reaction
was critical:

If the residue formed quickly,

the tissue was loaded
with arsenic.

Okay.

You think she's guilty?

NARRATOR: The prosecution
had used this result

to charge Fanny with murder.

But Gettler wasn't satisfied.

Where's the paperwork?

Was she taking any medications?

Dionin, magnesium,
sodium bicarbonate,

and bismuth subcarbonate.

Ah, bismuth.

Let me show you something.

Where's the arsenic?

So this is the problem
with the Reinsch test.

Any arsenic will show up
on our plate,

but so will a couple
of other heavy metals,

including bismuth,

which is what I think
we might be looking at.

Pass the clamp.

It evaporates.

Right.

But bismuth won't;

At least not at these
temperatures.

So let's heat our plate
and see what happens.

(crowd chattering)

NARRATOR: Two weeks after
Fanny's first trial ended,

the crowds returned to the same
courtroom for a second round.

BAILIFF: Do you swear to tell
the truth, the whole truth,

and nothing but the truth,
so help you god?

I do.

JUDGE: You may proceed.

NARRATOR: When it came
Gettler's turn to testify,

everyone understood that
Fanny's life was in his hands.

Dr. Gettler, why was Dr. Edel's
result so different from yours?

Dr. Edel assumed the residue
was pure arsenic.

And how did you reach
your result?

GETTLER: I started by performing
the same test as Dr. Edel,

which yielded the same residue.

But rather than stop there,

we processed the residue
by heating it

to see whether it was
arsenic or bismuth.

Arsenic vaporizes at a much
lower temperature than bismuth,

so as you heat the residue,
any arsenic will melt first...

you can see it clearly...

but bismuth will remain
unchanged.

If you have no evaporation,
no arsenic.

DEFENSE LAWYER: Thank you.

JUDGE: Your witness.

PROSECUTOR: Why are you talking

about bismuth?

Because bismuth
is the primary ingredient

in one of the medications
the victim was taking.

And?

Those medications often
contain traces of arsenic.

Exactly... traces.

Now, Dr. Edel has testified
that the victim's stomach

contained four times
the lethal dose of arsenic.

And you're telling us

it was simply an impurity
in her medication?

Yes.

Ridiculous.

JUDGE: Your witness.

Dr. Gettler, how much arsenic
did you find?

An infinitesimal amount.

Enough to kill?

Certainly not.

(crowd murmuring)

I will remind the court

that the life of a young woman
hangs in the balance today.

Dr. Gettler, did this woman
or anyone else

murder Mrs. Creighton
with arsenic?

No.

Absolutely not.

BLUM: Gettler would have felt
great about this because again,

we're at a period where
we're trying to persuade jurors

that meticulous science matters
in the courtroom.

Thank you, Dr. Gettler.

BLUM: It's a case study in good
science saving someone's life.

NARRATOR: For the second
time in two weeks,

Fanny Creighton was found
not guilty.

Fanny's acquittal was a great
victory for Gettler.

He had doggedly pursued
the truth

and made the chemistry
so compelling

that the jury had spared
a young woman's life.

But he had yet to plumb
the depths of human nature.

Alexander Gettler hadn't seen
the last of Fanny Creighton.

NARRATOR: In the spring of 1923,
New York was on the brink

of becoming the biggest city
in the world.

Already, it was the most
cosmopolitan.

Almost half of the city's
population had been born abroad,

and migration of African
Americans from the South

was fueling a spectacular
cultural renaissance.

The entire city pulsed
with frenetic energy.

Like many immigrants,
Alexander Gettler

had left the teeming streets
of the Lower East Side

for Brooklyn.

He pursued his few pastimes

with the same intensity
he devoted to his work.

He followed the Yankees,
played in a regular poker game

and bowled competitively.

His real passion
was horse racing.

He spent endless hours
at the racetrack,

lost in recalculations
of odds and stakes.

Gettler had married
an Irish Catholic schoolteacher,

Alice Gorman,

despite her family's objections
to marrying a Jew.

Gettler set about
winning them over.

He agreed to move in
with his in-laws,

and even attended church
with them on Sundays.

When he proved himself
a good husband

and devoted father,
the battle was won.

Gettler was a stickler
for the rules,

but he never made a fuss
about the illicit brewery

his relatives operated
on the second floor.

His dedication to the law
didn't extend to Prohibition.

NARRATOR: Since 1920,
"intoxicating liquors"

had been banned
throughout the United States.

Prohibition was born
of good intentions,

but those were being overwhelmed
by unintended consequences.

MICHAEL LERNER:
There were plenty of people

who predicted very positive
outcomes from Prohibition.

The Salvation Army
opened buttermilk bars,

thinking that that's what people
would turn to for recreation.

"They will go to the theater
more often.

They will go
to motion pictures."

But within the first minutes

of Prohibition
going into effect,

people are breaking the law.

NARRATOR: Gettler and Norris had
opposed Prohibition from the start.

They had predicted that people

would look for other
sources of liquor,

and that much of it would,
to some degree, be poison.

Gettler and Norris
recognized that people

were not going to stop drinking

simply because a law had
been passed to stop drinking.

People who had money could get
better quality alcohol,

but poor people had to take
what they could get.

BLUM: You're poor.

You have your little home still.

What are you going to put in it?

You can distill
any organic material.

So people were
distilling sawdust.

They were distilling
their furniture.

And when you are
distilling wood,

you are making methanol.

NARRATOR: As methanol breaks
down inside the body,

it produces formaldehyde,
and then formic acid.

This destroys the optic nerve.

Vision blurs,
and blindness closes in.

Meanwhile, the victim suffers
acute nausea, then seizures,

and descends into a coma.

BLUM: But what's so awful
about methanol poisoning

is that this doesn't
happen instantly.

This breakdown of methanol
into formic acid

can actually take
up to five days.

So while you think you're okay,

your body is cooking up
this very poisonous brew.

NARRATOR:
With the onset of Prohibition,

methanol became
one of Gettler's obsessions.

He worked wholeheartedly

to stop the spread
of the poison,

even devising a portable test

for Prohibition agents
to use on the road.

He confirmed that
when red-hot copper

was dunked in a methanol-heavy
drink...

Formaldehyde!

NARRATOR: It would release

a nose-stinging whiff
of formaldehyde.

But nothing Gettler did

could stem the slowly rising
tide of poisoned alcohol.

FIERRO: All over the city, more
and more and more and more people

were dying from drinking.

But these were not
natural deaths.

These were due
to a toxic substance.

These were poisoning deaths.

NARRATOR: Norris, for his part,

did everything he could
to publicize Prohibition's toll:

Writing articles,
giving interviews

and lecturing the authorities.

But the only remedy
Norris held out

was the repeal of Prohibition,
and that was nowhere in sight.

BLUM: Norris and Gettler,
they were very different.

If you look at what mattered
to them the most,

you see Gettler,
he's building the science.

And even when
they don't win every case,

even when they had things
go wrong,

he's still building that.

He could retreat
into the laboratory, you know,

go back to all the beautiful
elegance of chemistry

and find comfort in that,

whereas Norris doesn't
always have that comfort.

He was always out there
where the failures were public.

He gave his life to this,

and so those losses
and failures

and things that he didn't
achieve wore him down.

NARRATOR: For Norris, the
battles were endless.

Mayor Hylan
had cut funding so sharply

that he was personally
bankrolling the department,

subsidizing salaries
and buying new equipment.

And every case
seemed to conjure up

a new set of adversaries;

The more lucrative the poison,
the more powerful the opponent.

In 1924, Norris came up

against one of the most
lucrative poisons of all.

FIERRO: The building began to be
known as the looney gas building

because the employees there
began to do strange things.

They had memory problems;
They got irritable;

They would develop,
in retrospect,

what we would call
the signs of a dementia.

NARRATOR:
On the 24th of October,

Ernest Oelgert became delirious
at work,

dodging about in terror,

shouting, "There are three
coming at me at once."

Later that night, Walter Dymock

walked out of the second
floor window of his bedroom.

Nobody knew how long
he lay on the ground

before a passerby had him taken
to the hospital.

24-year-old William McSweeney
started acting so strangely

that his sister-in-law
called the police.

It took four men to get him
into a straitjacket.

Pressed for a statement,

a spokesman for their employer
explained,

"These men probably went insane
because they worked too hard."

The victims had all been
working on a product

that promised to revolutionize
the auto industry:

Leaded gasoline.

Engineers had recently found

that if a small quantity
of tetraethyl lead

was added to gasoline,

it made the fuel burn
more efficiently.

As a result,
engines ran cooler,

more quietly,
and delivered more horsepower.

BLUM: Standard Oil and General
Motors formed a corporation

in which they were the provider
of leaded gasoline.

They picked the name "Ethyl"

because they didn't
want to use lead.

People were a little
weirded out by lead,

and so they were pretending

this was just some other magic,
wonderful formula.

NARRATOR: Lead was one of
the oldest known poisons.

1,700 years before
the introduction of Ethyl,

a Greek physician
had observed that lead

caused "the mind to give way."

Tetraethyl lead had been
developed in the 1850s,

but it had never been
widely used, in part because

it was too easily absorbed
into the body.

If the dangers of tetraethyl
lead were well understood,

so were the financial
implications.

In the 20 years since Henry Ford
introduced the Model T,

cars had transformed
American life.

A vast infrastructure
was taking form:

Assembly lines in Detroit,

roads spreading
across the landscape,

filling stations
dotting the countryside.

Six billion gallons of gasoline

were sold in the United States
every year.

If that gasoline was leaded,
Standard Oil and GM

would make a profit
on every drop.

But the headlines
coming out of New Jersey

were putting all of that
in jeopardy.

BLUM:
Standard Oil and General Motors

held a big press conference
in New York City

with Thomas Midgley,
the inventor of leaded gasoline.

He washed his hands
in a bowl of tetraethyl lead

to prove how safe it is.

NARRATOR:
Reporters were skeptical,

and the authorities
were spooked.

New Jersey ordered Standard Oil

to shut down
the looney gas building.

But the Ethyl Corporation

insisted that its product
was harmless.

At that point, the public health
authorities in New Jersey

went to Charles Norris and said,
"Can you help us?"

NORRIS: Body is identified by toe
tag bearing the name Walter Dymock,

who died at Reconstruction
Hospital of New York,

October 28, 1924 at 1:30 a.m.

FIERRO: The medical
examiner is a physician.

NORRIS: A young
adult white male...

FIERRO: So his relationship
to the dead body

is that of a doctor
to a patient.

"That's my patient.

"And he tells me
what happened to him.

"He tells me
if he has disease or injury.

"He often can tell me
how he received it.

He's asking me
to tell a story."

It is very powerful.

You have an obligation
to the patient

to get it right.

NARRATOR: Norris had little doubt
about the nature of the poison:

Everything pointed
to tetraethyl lead.

But he needed proof:

Proof that the men
had absorbed the lead at work

and proof that it had
killed them.

NARRATOR: For Gettler, that meant
solving three separate problems.

First, he had to confirm

that there was in fact lead
in the men's bodies.

He processed a sample
of brain tissue

to isolate lead
in a clear solution.

Then he added chemicals

to make any lead
turn a bright red.

A deeper color indicated
a higher concentration.

Gettler had the answer
to his first question:

The brain was riddled with lead.

Next, he needed to precisely
measure the concentration.

For this, he compared
the shade of his solution

with reference samples.

Have a look.

Wow.

Harry, Alice,
have a look if you want.

We won't be able to get accurate
readings with the colorimeter:

The levels are too high.

So we start over.

Instead of breaking down
the tissue with acid,

we'll dry it out
on a steam bath

and then ash it
in the electric muffle.

Harry.

Okay.

Alice, start by
clearing this up..

NARRATOR: In order to get
a precise measurement,

Gettler would have
to isolate the lead

and then calculate its weight.

When Harry's ready, start with
a hydrogen sulfide reaction.

We'll make our way from there.

NARRATOR: The concept was simple
enough, but it meant separating

less than one-ten-thousandth
of an ounce of lead

from a pound of human tissue.

Through an arduous process,

Gettler arrived
at a precise number.

But the last question remained.

He had to trace the lead's
passage through the body

by analyzing every place that
it might have been deposited.

The only way to do that

was to carry out
the same grueling procedure

on the men's
bones, blood, brains,

lungs, livers and kidneys.

FIERRO:
This was pioneering work.

And what Gettler found

was that these gentlemen

were having chronic
tetraethyl lead poisoning.

They were inhaling it

in addition to absorbing it
through their skin.

And when you inhale that lead,

it gets carried
into the blood stream

and deposited in the tissues,
especially the brain tissues.

NARRATOR: Norris didn't
bother to conceal his anger

when he issued the report.

"There was an astonishingly
large quantity of lead

"in the brain and body
of this man," he told reporters.

Norris said, "This is such
a dangerous compound"

that we need to take it out
of gasoline now."

NARRATOR:
The authorities were listening.

New York City banned
leaded gasoline,

then New Jersey,
and then Philadelphia.

It looked like the trend
might spread.

BLUM:
Calvin Coolidge was president.

He was a very "small government,
non-regulation" kind of guy.

So Standard Oil and GM
went to Coolidge,

and they said, "Could we
deal with this right awa".

So Coolidge appointed
a panel of experts

that only included
industry scientists.

NARRATOR: Coolidge's panel reported
its findings in January of 1926.

It recommended gloves, masks

and other precautions
for workers,

which effectively controlled
the dangers of production.

But it concluded that
the public's exposure

was too low to be of concern,

and dismissed Norris's plea
for a ban.

As a result,
the federal government

lifted all restrictions
on the sale of leaded gas.

Soon, ethyl would be added

to 90% of the gasoline
sold in America.

An overjoyed
Standard Oil spokesman

likened it to "a gift of God."

Inventor Thomas Midgley
was less effusive;

He had had to take
a leave of absence

after being diagnosed
with lead poisoning.

The episode was a bitter defeat
for Charles Norris.

In July of 1925,
he traveled to Europe,

where he spent six months
being treated for exhausti.

NARRATOR: By the fall,
Norris was back at work

in a city that had grown
faster, more vibrant

and more dangerous than ever.

Norris was relieved when his old
nemesis Mayor Hylan left office,

although he had doubts
about his replacement.

Gentleman Jimmy Walker
flaunted his fast living,

sported a show girl mistress

and was unruffled by frequent
accusations of corruption.

When the City Council
voted to double his salary,

he dismissed the critics
by telling them,

"Imagine what you'd have to pay
me if I worked full time."

It soon became apparent
that Jimmy Walker

wasn't going to solve
Norris's budget troubles,

but neither would he
make trouble for him.

Norris took up his duties
with renewed enthusiasm,

and with a style
that was a source of wonder

to his toxicologist.

Norris didn't do anything
by half measures.

He wouldn't shuffle out
to a crime scene, you know,

and just sidle in.

He would generally sweep out
of a chauffeur-driven limousine,

saunter over to the body
and have a look and say,

"Yeah, yeah, okay, guys,
I've seen enough.

You can take him back
to the office now."

He was just larger than life.

NARRATOR: Norris never
knew what awaited him

when he was called
to a crime scene.

He was well accustomed to death,

but even so, some episodes
were hard to forget.

Norris.

McAllister.

You with the M.E's office?

I'm the M.E.

Oh, okay.

Pretty cut and dried.

Patrolman sees a guy
dumping something suspicious

into the water off India Wharf.

The guy takes off.

The patrolman
finally tackles him

and finds he's carrying
half a woman's body.

Brings him in,
we get his address,

come here and find this.

That's the other half
of the body over there.

This guy did not
want to get caught.

You can't hold that man
for murder.

Sorry?

He didn't kill her.

She died from carbon
monoxide poisoning.

But...

There's multiple stab wounds.

She was already dead.

The D.A. says she was alive.

He's wrong.

I'm taking possession
of the body.

Good night.

The D.A. is not
gonna like this.

BLUM: The police immediately
said to Norris, "Are you crazy?"

It doesn't take them
half a minute to say,

"What we have here
is a dismemberment murder."

KRAJICEK: You have a man
with blood on his clothes,

who's caught throwing
the lady's limbs in the water,

and in his apartment on the
kitchen floor is the torso.

And the knife is lying there
beside it.

It truly seemed like
an open and shut case.

FIERRO: When the police went and
they find a body in pieces,

I mean, your first thought
has to be,

"Something very bad
has happened here."

Because we don't ordinarily
cut bodies up

and dump them in the river.

I mean, normal people
don't think that way.

NARRATOR: Francesco Travia
was, by luck and by design,

very much an outcast.

The newspapers called him
a longshoreman,

but he spent most days
by himself

in a cramped apartment
near the Brooklyn waterfront.

He spoke no English,
had very little money

and no real friends.

And he wasn't telling
the police, or anyone else,

how Anna Fredericksen had died.

But Charles Norris
was sure he knew the answer.

If you die of carbon
monoxide poisoning,

the skin flushes
this very notable cherry pink.

And carbon monoxide stains
the blood such a brilliant red

that weeks later,

you can take blood
from a corpse,

months sometimes even,

and ill find
that profound effect.

NARRATOR: For Norris, it was
a tragically familiar sight.

As the main ingredient
in illuminating gas,

carbon monoxide killed
more New Yorkers every year

than tuberculosis, measles
and typhoid combined.

It was deadly,
and it was everywhere:

Piped into countless homes

for lighting, cooking
and refrigeration.

The police assumed that the gas

had leached into Fredericksen's
body after she died.

Norris thought
that was impossible.

Even so, Travia
was charged with murder.

BLUM:
So this set up a confrontation.

The police were not trained
in forensic science,

so they didn't understand it

and they didn't have
any respect for it.

And you had Norris saying,
"We're going to prove to you

"that science really matters
in understanding these cases

and solving them."

It was a really interesting
kind of take-no-prisoners moment

in this push to have forensic
science taken seriously.

NARRATOR: Norris asked
Gettler to determine

whether a dead body
could absorb carbon monoxide.

Gettler came up
with a simple experiment.

He retrieved three unclaimed
bodies from the morgue,

enclosed them in sealed
metal boxes

and piped the boxes
full of illuminating gas.

Dr. Norris!

Here.

I think he's dead.

We agree, then.

Looks clean to me.

Me, too.

And the blood tests?

Negative so far.

This is the last one.

As you suspected.

NARRATOR: After the
bodies had been soaking

in the gas for several days,

Gettler looked for the telltale
pink flush

and tested the blood
for carbon monoxide.

Send that up
to the tox lab, please.

NARRATOR: When Francesco
Travia went to trial

in the spring of 1927,

he finally told his side
of the story.

Once in a while,
a neighbor, Anna Fredericksen,

would come around
looking for a drink.

That's how the evening
of November 29 began.

Over the next few hours,

Travia and Fredericksen
polished off a bottle together,

and then he asked her to leave.

She refused.

The next thing Travia remembered
was waking up on the floor

with Anna Fredericksen's body
lying nearby.

FIERRO:
He thinks he's killed her.

So his major preoccupation
becomes what?

Getting rid of the body.

Well, she is described
as a large woman,

so how's he going to get rid
of this large woman?

Well, obviously,
make her a small woman.

NARRATOR: Alexander Gettler then
testified that Anna Fredericksen's body

couldn't have absorbed
carbon monoxide after she died.

The gas had killed her,
not Francesco Travia.

Then, the source of the poison
was revealed.

During their argument,

a coffee pot had been
tipped over on the stove,

extinguishing the flame,
causing a massive leak.

Travia, either through lower
exposure or higher tolerance,

had awoken.

Fredericksen had not.

The jury found Francesco Travia
not guilty of murder.

Although he served time for
illegally disposing of a body,

Norris and Gettler had saved him
from the electric chair.

For them, the Travia case was
a long-awaited vindication.

You need the police to see
scientists as partners.

You need to make that hostility
go away

if forensic science
is going to work.

And you see,
post the Travia case,

everyone wanting to move
in that direction.

KRAJICEK:
Norris and Gettler were elated.

Justice was done
because of science.

These guys were all about
getting it right.

And in this case, they did.

NARRATOR: On Christmas Eve, 1926,
hospitals all over New York

were flooded
with patients hallucinating,

blinded, comatose and dying.

NORRIS: Are there many more?

Dozens.

NARRATOR: A batch of highly toxic
liquor had hit the streets.

LERNER: For a year or two after
Prohibition went into effect,

people were drinking
the same old stuff:

Commercial liquor
the bootleggers were selling.

But as Prohibition progresses,

as the liquor supply becomes
more and more unreliable,

people start adulterating
the product,

they'd start diluting
the product.

And then the biggest threat

comes from the diversion
of industrial alcohol.

NARRATOR: For decades, the
federal government had required

that any alcohol not intended
for drinking be poisoned.

That way, alcohol used

in cosmetics, medicines
or manufacturing

could be kept out
of the liquor supply.

It was called "denaturing,"
and under normal circumstances,

it simply allowed the government
to regulate the market.

But once Prohibition
took effect, denatured alcohol

became an attractive source
of bootleg liquor.

In Bowery dives, denatured
alcohol was served straight up.

It was called "smoke,"
and it cost a few cents a glass.

The great majority of drinkers
weren't quite so desperate.

Bootleggers didn't want to kill
their customers off,

so they would do things like
redistill denatured alcohol

to distill out the poison.

And you could do this
to come degree.

But virtually every time,

you would leave trace elements
of the poison in it.

NARRATOR: Norris asked Gettler
to analyze samples of liquor

that had been found
near the victims.

He identified
a bewildering array of poisons:

Methanol, gasoline,
benzene, cadmium, iodine,

ether, formaldehyde and more.

Most of them were there by order
of the federal government.

LERNER: They adjusted the
denaturing formulas,

and they tinkered...

you know,
they always were looking

for better ways
to poison alcohol.

It reaches a point

where no one can be sure
of what they're drinking.

Whether you're in the most
exclusive nightclub

or whether you're
in the seediest dive,

you really had no idea
what was in your glass.

NARRATOR: Prohibition
was becoming a contest

between chemists
working for the government

and others working
for the bootleggers.

Norris used Gettler's findings
as the centerpiece

of a national campaign
against Prohibition.

The campaign resonated
across the country.

More and more Americans

were coming to see Prohibition
as a failure,

and Norris helped cement
that impression.

LERNER:
Instead of people stepping back

and saying,
"this isn't working,"

the drys push
the federal government

to basically double down
and say,

"Let's literally double the
amount of poison in the alcohol,

and that will stop people
from drinking."

NARRATOR:
On New Year's Eve 1926,

the Treasury Department
announced that denatured alcohol

would be made still more deadly.

LERNER:
It's just stunning to see really

what you could only describe
as mass poisoning

brought about by government
policy.

If Prohibition,

if its intent was
to stop people from drinking,

you know, the evidence
is right there in front of you,

you know, something has gone
drastically wrong.

NARRATOR: By New Year's,

the refrigerators in the morgue
at Bellevue were full,

and corpses lined the hallways.

Norris spent the day
chronicling the epidemic.

NORRIS: Garvin,
John, 32 years old;

Found unconscious
at 32nd Street and Broadway

at 1:30 this morning.

Gordon, Mabel, 31 years old,
of 40 East 133rd St.

George F. Carlisle, 42,
of 215 West 90th St.

Washington, John, 40 years old,

found dead in a hallway
at 302 Hudson Avenue, Brooklyn.

Carl Carlson, address unknown.

Unidentified Man, about 28 years
old, 5 feet 8 inches...

Patrick McCabe, 48 years old,
of 400 West 48th St.

Unidentified Man,
about 60 years old,

found in front
of 306 East 32nd St.

Thomas Callan, 44 years old,
300 West 112th St.

Dr. Norris?

Edward McLaughlin,
291 Division Ave., Brooklyn.

NARRATOR: In Norris's eyes,
Prohibition had become a plague.

NORRIS (dramatized):
Nearly 10,000 in this city

will die this year
from strong drink.

Our national casualty list
for the year from this one cause

will outstrip the toll
of the Great War.

These are the first fruits
of Prohibition.

This is the price
of our national experiment:

In extermination.

NARRAT: In the fall of 1927,

New Jersey authorities
asked Norris and Gettler

to investigate the case
of a woman

who had been dead
for five years.

It was their first encounter
with a terrifying new poison.

The story began in 1917, when
Amelia Magia got her first job.

Her parents were struggling
to make ends meet,

and she wanted to help.

Amelia and her two sisters

spent their days
in a New Jersey factory

decorating watch faces
with paint

that emitted a beautiful
blue-green light.

The country was at war,
and soldiers in the trenches

had found that
these luminous watches

were just bright enough
to read at night

without being seen by the enemy.

SUPERVISOR: Break time, girls!

NARRATOR:
The paint was made with radium:

Less than a millionth of a gram
per watch.

That was enough to give it
a magical glow.

Hey. Hey.

NARRATOR: Amelia and her
friends liked to play with it:

Sprinkling it in their hair
or painting their fingernails.

You still do that trick?

Yeah, my brother
and his friends still love it.

Here.

Close your eyes.

No, but it'll get in my eye.

It's good for you, right?

BLUM: When radium was discovered
in the late 19th century

by Marie Curie
and her husband, Pierre,

they named it radium
because of its radioactivity.

And it was thought to be
a wonderful thing.

Radium was almost immediately

put into medical practice
for shrinking tumors,

so the idea was it has nothing
but health-giving properties.

NARRATOR: Within no time,
radium was being used

to treat everything
from acne to insanity.

Children were fed
radium-laced candies and sodas,

women bought radium-based
facial creams,

and radium clinics
offered free injections

of the new wonder drug.

It was understood that
like most medicines,

radium could be hazardous.

But everyone assumed that
any danger was fleeting,

that radium would
pass through the body

without leaving a trace.

BLUM:
So when you are a dial painter,

and you're painting watches
with radium paint,

then you're just thinking

you're doing something good
for yourself, right?

You just have
a little extra exposure

to this wonderful,
healthy element.

NARRATOR: In 1921, after
four years at the factory,

Magia had to quit her job.

She had been losing weight,
and her joints ached terribly.

She developed anemia and bled
constantly from the mouth.

Within months, Amelia's lower
jaw had disintegrated so badly

that her dentist removed it

by lifting it out
with his fingers.

Amelia Magia died on September
12, 1922, at the age of 25.

The death of a young immigrant
wasn't news.

But Amelia was only the first.

The next year, another dial
painter died a similar death,

and then another, and another.

By 1925, five were dead,
and several others...

including Amelia's two sisters...

were showing the same
terrifying symptoms:

Anemias, ulcers, tumors
and decaying bones.

FIERRO:
It was a miserable death.

And it didn't occur quickly.

Of course,
the radium company said

radium was not the problem.

I mean, they were not
acknowledging

any responsibility.

NARRATOR: Mauntil long afters
they had left their jobs.

No one had ever seen
a poison that took effect

after months or even years.

Despite the company's denials,

the local medical examiner,
Harrison Martland,

was convinced that radium
was the killer.

If that was true,

he was up against
an entirely new poison.

In the fall of 1927, he asked
Norris and Gettler for help.

Gettler devised a test
to find radium

in a set of human remains,

and on October 15, the body
of the first known victim

was delivered to Bellevue:
Amelia Magia.

FIERRO: They exhumed her
bones and they cleaned them.

And then Gettler,
he did his tests.

He covered some sheets
of X-ray paper

so that light
could not expose them.

Then he placed the bones
on them

and left them in the dark
for a couple of days.

And when he returned
and removed the paper,

he saw where the bones
had been placed.

Gamma rays were beating
on that X-ray paper,

just as if we were
in the doctor's office

getting an X-ray.

Gettler showed that the radium
was in fact in the bones.

They're still glowing
five years later.

NARRATOR: Confronted
with Gettler's findings,

Amelia Magia's former employer
was forced to offer compensation

to some of the survivors.

But he still insisted that
the whole affair was a fraud.

"We unfortunately gave work
to a great many people

who were physically unfit,"
he explained.

"Cripples and other
incapacitated persons

"were engaged.

"What was then considered
an act of kindness on our part

has since been turned
against us."

FIERRO: Business could run wild
with workers' safety in those days.

Whether it was lead
or whether it was radium

or all sorts of other toxic
substances in the workplace,

there was no serious agency
to protect workers.

NARRATOR:
Amelia's suffering was over,

but for other Radium Girls,
the ordeal was just beginning.

The tragedy would continue
to unfold for decades,

as over 100 dial painters

were slowly poisoned
by the radium in their bones.

FIERRO:
These ladies were doomed.

They would take that brush
and bring it to their lips

to get a fine point on it.

Radium was going right
into their bloodstream

through their mucous membrane.

BLUM: Radium essentially
masks itself as calcium.

You have this wonderful
system that the body uses

to deliver calcium to the bones
to make them stronger.

The body sees radium,
thinks it's calcium,

and takes it right to the bone.

And it stays there.

It literally starts
to break the bones apart.

Their spines would crumble.

Their bones would break
as they walked across the room.

None of these girls
could be saved.

Nothing the doctors could do
would bring them back.

NARRATOR: The world's enchantment
with radioactivity was ending.

Within a few years,
the market for radium tonics,

patent medicines and health
products had collapsed.

But there was no agency

with the power
to ban radium outright.

The dial painters tragedy
marked the beginning

of a profound shift
in public opinion.

Faith in scientific progress
was being undermined

by fear of its consequences.

Norris and Gettler had been
sounding that warning for years,

urging the government
to protect its citizens.

Finally, that message
was being heard.

LERNER: New York was a
very different city

once the Depression hit.

In the early 1930s,

almost half of the city
is out of work.

The party atmosphere
of the 1920s is gone.

Sort of a dark tone
takes over the city.

There's a fear
that the Depression

was something so drastic that
we would never recover from it.

That this really was the end.

NARRATOR: By 1933, New York had
become a landscape of breadlines,

soup kitchens
and homeless encampments.

The Roaring '20s
were a distant memory,

except for one thing:
Prohibition.

LERNER: Nothing the Prohibitionists
had promised had come to happen.

They promised a safer society

and we had
a more violent society.

They promised the ends
to the public health problems

and instead we got
more public health problems;

They promised prosperity and
here we were in a depression;

They promised that
this would clean up the cities,

that didn't happen;

They promised it would clean up
politics, that didn't happen.

Everyone's saying,
"Just set it aside.

"Let's be done with this.

"It's over.

"It doesn't work.

It's never going to work."

NARRATOR: Congress voted to
overturn the 18th Amendment

in February of 1933.

But Prohibition would remain
in force

until three-quarters of the
states had voted for repeal.

Until then, the smoke joints

would continue
to ply their trade;

Places like the Mermaid Tavern
in the Bronx,

the hideaway of a man

who would become known
as Mike the Durable.

BLUM:
Mike is this Irish drifter

who has, you know,
a tab longer than his arm

and doesn't pay it.

And one night,
the owner and his friends

were sort of bemoaning
the bad times

and wishing they knew someone
who would conveniently die

and leave them some money.

And they all look at Mike Malloy
passed out again and think,

"Here's our guy."

NARRATOR: There were
four men in on the plan:

Owner Tony Marino,
bartender Red Murphy,

local undertaker
Frankie Pasqua,

and a fruit vendor,
Daniel Kriesberg.

In short order,
the conspirators

bought three insurance policies
on Mike Malloy's life.

BLUM: So their thought was,
"Here's this shaky alcoholic.

"We'll just dose him up
with major amounts of alcohol

and he'll keel over."

But he loved it.

So after a week, they said,

"Okay, we'll try
a little poison alcohol,"

which was killing people
across the city.

He loved that too, right.

Kept coming back.

So then they thought,
"Okay, we'll try poison food."

And the amazing thing to me
is the things he actually ate.

There was one sandwich
that had rotten sardines,

ground glass, metal shavings.

He loves it, comes back forore.

So they took him out to a park.

It's February,
pour ice water on him,

figuring he'll die of pneumonia.

No, the ice water
just wakes him up.

He goes back to the bar
and sleeps it off.

And so finally, they wait
until he's unconsciousness,

lie him down in the street

and then persuade a taxi driver
to hit him with the car.

But does he die?

He does not.

He is knocked to the sidewalk

where some very helpful
policemen rescued him.

And about a week later,
he comes back, you know,

he has a broken arm
and a bad headache.

NARRATOR:
It was bartender Red Murphy

who finally solved the problem
that was Mike Malloy.

He and Kriesberg rented a room,

liquored Malloy up
until he passed out,

and then rigged a rubber tube
from a gas jet to his mouth.

It took just an hour

for the carbon monoxide
to finally kill him.

The conspirators
got their payoff

and set about enjoying
the fruits of their labors.

Until the police picked up
rumors of the affair.

BLUM: So they exhume
Mike Malloy's body.

By this time, Gettler has built

this phenomenal groundwork
on carbon monoxide

really going back
to the Travia case.

So it's a piece of cake
over at the Bellevue lab.

He finds this lethal level
of carbon monoxide

and that was it.

NARRATOR: The conspirators had
made one critical mistake.

In his haste to finally
put Mike Malloy in the ground,

undertaker Frank Pasqua
neglected to embalm the body.

Had he done so,
the embalming fluids

would have destroyed all traces
of carbon monoxide.

But as it was, Gettler was able
to provide the evidence

that sent all four men
to the electric chair.

They were soon forgotten,

but Durable Mike Malloy
would live on in memory

as the subject of songs, plays,
novels and movies.

Smoke joints like Tony Marino's
finally disappeared

when Prohibition ended
in December of 1933.

Poisoned alcohol
almost disappeared as well.

In the first full year
after Prohibition,

Norris counted
only two methanol deaths.

But the Depression had triggered
a spike in violent deaths,

driven by soaring rates
of suicide.

On average, three New Yorkers
were killing themselves

every day.

It was easy to lose sight

of the suffering
behind those numbers,

but in the spring of 1935,
one story made it all too real.

KRAJICEK: By all accounts,

Frederick Gross was a very
pleasant and polite fellow.

He lived in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

In 1935, Bushwick
was sort of the hinterlands...

a neighborhood of immigrants,
cold water tenements...

and it was a neighborhood
of poverty.

Frederick Gross was a bookkeeper

for a little import/export
company.

In order to keep him
on the payroll,

the company said, "Look,
we've got to cut your salary."

We're cutting you
from $35 a week to $20 a week.

He kept his job,

but he wasn't making enough
money to feed his family.

He had five kids.

They went to bed hungry
most nights.

There was no coal in the cellar
to keep the flat warm.

He wore a suit
that he owed money on.

He was in dire straits.

NARRATOR: One evening, Gross's
wife Katherine told him

that one of the boys
wasn't feeling well.

Gross put him into pajamas
and tucked him into bed.

By morning, he was dead.

EVANS: The first to die
was Frederick, age nine.

He was followed
by his younger brother, Leo.

And then, Katherine,
the wife, died.

And then after a passage
of three weeks,

his two daughters died.

And eventually,
rumors reached the police

and they started
to investigate.

The only person who's not
getting sick is the dad.

So of course,
the police are thinking,

"This guy is really doing
a number on his family."

NARRATOR: Gross was arrested.

The police questioned him
for 28 hours,

and for 28 hours,
he insisted he was innocent.

Finally, Gross was delivered
to his cell,

where he collapsed onto his c,

still wearing
his one good suit.

The police were left
with five bodies

and one dramatic clue.

BLUM His 18-month-old
daughter, before she died,

a neighbor described her,
you know, as bald as an egg.

All of her beautiful hair
had fallen out.

His son in the hospital
was bald.

NARRATOR: The investigators
suspected poison,

and the hair loss pointed
to a highly toxic heavy metal

that was widely used
in pesticides: Thallium.

Their suspicions were
corroborated

by a local pathologist,

who coirmed that all
the bodies contained thallium.

And they weren't long in
figuring out how it got there.

KRAJICEK: It turned out that Frederick
Gross's employer sold thallium

as a pesticide against rodents
and bugs and whatnot.

They also sold cocoa.

And Fredrick Gross
had brought home

a couple-pound tin of it
one week

and then brought home

another two-pound tin
of it a week later.

The Brooklyn prosecutor said,
"That's a lot of cocoa."

BLUM: So you know, if
you're a police officer

and you're connecting
all these dots...

dying family,
amazingly untouched Dad,

access to poison, the poison,

and access to what appears to be
the method of delivery...

it looks like a perfect case.

NARRATOR:
When the same pathologist

confirmed the presence
of thallium in the cocoa,

the Brooklyn D.A. had everything
he needed to go to trial.

But the case troubled him.

Why had Gross done it,

and why did he keep insisting
he was innocent?

He hasn't taken out any of those
handy insurance policies, right?

He's not wealthier.

And they're discovering that
no one believes he did it.

NARRATOR:
Hoping to dispel his doubts,

the D.A. sent the evidence
over to Alexander Gettler:

The tissue samples,
the cocoa, the tin, all of it.

The heart of the mystery
was the alleged murder weapon:

The cocoa Gross had fed
to his children.

Gettler devised a procedure

to remove any thallium
from the cocoa

and isolate it
in a clear solution.

GETTLER: Okay,
Harry, that's good.

NARRATOR:
But that was just the beginning.

Gettler's procedure
also isolated other elements

that could be mistaken
for thallium.

He needed to confirm
beyond a shadow of a doubt

whether the solution
actually contained the poison.

Okay, why don't you get
the photo plate, please?

NARRATOR:
The theory of spectroscopy

had been around
for almost a century.

It was based
on a peculiar phenomenon:

When any element is heated
to the point that it glows,

it emits a characteristic color.

GETTLER: So if we do have thallium,
we should see some green.

NARRATOR: But this color is
visible only for the brief moment

it takes a sample to evaporate,

so precise identification is
impossible with the naked eye.

Okay, let's get
the spectrograph.

NARRATOR: But if the flame
is viewed through a prism,

the resulting color spectrum is
like an element's fingerprint.

Each element has its own
spectrum; No two are alike.

And if that spectrum
was projected

onto a sheet of photo paper,

it could be preserved
for careful analysis.

The spectrograph had been
designed to do just that.

It had never before been used
in a criminal investigation.

Gettler lit a gas flame
inside the spectrograph

and tuned the flame so that
it emitted no visible light.

Okay, Abe, are you ready?

Ready.

NARRATOR: He then inserted a
drop of the thallium solution.

And expose.

Good.

And that's it.

Let's see what we've got.

NARRATOR: The last step was
to compare the photo paper

with a chart of known
color patterns.

Ready.

NARRATOR: Thallium's fingerprint was
two characteristic bands of light.

2918 and 3519.

No!

Okay.

How about 5105 and 5218?

Yes.

Copper.

From the tin.

Well, we know cocoa
wasn't the murder weapon.

Okay, we've got
to move quickly.

NARRATOR: Gettler proved that the
cocoa hadn't been poisoned at all;

Rather, copper from the tin
had leached into the powder.

The pathologist who first tested
the cocoa

had mistaken one for the other.

The case against Frederick Gross
was starting to fall apart.

BLUM: So they exhume the
bodies of everyone who died,

and Gettler discovers that
thallium is in the bodies

of all these dead children,
but not in the mom.

That she had coincidentally
died of encephalitis.

EVANS: So the police were left
with five bodies, no motive,

and no means of establishing
exactly how the thallium

had gotten into the victims.

But when they started
talking to neighbors,

it emerged that the mother,
Katherine,

was so depressed
with her current situation...

she'd recently found out
she was pregnant again...

and she said, "Things just
cannot go on this way."

Life for Frederick,
he doesn't deserve this."

Gradually, the police realize
it was Katherine

who'd killed the children
by poisoning their food.

And she'd done it as an act
of kindness to her husband.

NARRATOR: On May 20, 1935,
a Brooklyn magistrate

dismissed the charges
against Frederick Gross.

Although Gross had suffered
terrible loss,

he had been spared
an even greater injustice.

Had he been condemned to die,
it's unlikely that anyone

would have questioned
the verdict.

What was left of Gross's life
he owed to Alexander Gettler.

Gross went straight
from the court to the hospital

where his only surviving
son was recovering.

Seeing the little bald boy
in the crib,

he started to cry.

The five-year-old
asked his father

why he hadn't come to see him
on visiting Sundays.

Gross replied,
"Son, I was busy."

FIERRO: I know exactly
what Norris went through.

You see this pain
and suffering every day.

You're working to bring
something positive out of it.

Whether it's answers
to families, insurers and courts

or if it's a public
health issue,

can you inspire the political
people to change things?

But it's physically wearing
as well, okay?

Physically wearing.

NARRATOR: By 1935, Charles Norris
had been on the job for 17 years,

fighting one uphill battle
after another.

And that spring,

he was drawn into one of the
most dispiriting battles of all.

Once again, the adversary
was City Hall.

Gentleman Jimmy Walker
was gone now.

His tenure ended
in spectacular fashion

when he fled the country

to avo being prosecuted
for corruption.

Norris had been hopeful
when Fiorello LaGuardia

moved into the mayor's office.

LaGuardia shared
Norris's dislike

of plutocrats and Prohibition.

But Prohibition aside,

the new mayor was
a law and order man,

and he set about
cleaning up the city gernment

with boundless energy.

Unfortunately for Norris,

that energy wasn't always
matched by discernment.

BLUM: Fiorello LaGuardia
had a deep distrust

of this wealthy
medical examiner.

I mean, Norris acted like
a guy with money.

He had a chauffeur.

He wore really good clothes.

If you were a suspicious mayor,
which LaGuardia was,

you'd say to yourself,
"Never mind his private income.

This is a guy on the take."

NARRATOR: In May of 1935, LaGuardia
accused Norris and his staff

of embezzling almost $200,000.

Norris's public humiliation
went on for almost a month

before investigators
finally acknowledged

that not only had he
not stolen anything,

but that he had in fact

"spent substantial amounts
of his own money"

to sustain the department.

Norris had had enough.

In June, he left the country
for a long-delayed vacation.

But when he returned
to work in the fall,

he hardly seemed rejuvenated.

He moved slowly
and joked with Gettler

about being too old
for the job.

On the ening
of September 11, 1935,

Charles Norris's heart
finally gave out.

BLUM: When Norris died in 1935,

there was this phenomenal
outpouring from people

right do to secretaries

talking about how much
he had taken care of them,

given them extra money
when they were struggling,

helped them when they
had problems.

Maybe that's a little bit
of an aristocratic thing.

But he really saw them
as people in his care.

NARRATOR: "Dr. Norris became
an almost legendary figure"

in the life of the metropolis,"
the New York Times observed,

"a genius who had
in his personality

much of the detective
and philosopher."

For Gettler, there was
little time to mourn.

The drumbeat of death
never let up.

Sometimes, the work
left him numb.

But other cases
burned themselves in memory.

One such episode

began less than two weeks
after Norris's funeral:

A bizarre murder that featured

an uncomfortably
familiar suspect.

NARRATOR: The Depression looked
different in the suburbs.

Here, just beyond
the city limits,

hardships were hidden from view.

But the jobs and the money
were disappearing all the same.

In the struggle
to make ends meet,

more and more families
were moving in together.

So nobody took any notice

when the Applegates moved in
with their neighbors.

Nor did it seem unusual
when Ada Applegate passed away

in the fall of 1935.

EVANS: There was nothing
about the death

to attract any suspicion
whatsoever.

It appeared to be just
another awful tragedy,

a woman dying in her mid-30s
for no accountable reason.

The attending physician,

he recorded a catch-all verdict
of coronary occlusion,

which could have meant
anything, really.

And there the story
may haveied,

except that the police received
an anonymous letter

comprised of clippings

from a case that had happened
12 years earlier.

It seemed as though
she had fallen

off the face of the earth.

In fact, Fanny Creighton was
living in Baldwin, Long Island,

and was a housemate
of Ada Applegate's.

EVANS: So once the police had
this information, they realize,

"Wait, Ada Applegate
is being buried today."

So they immediately went
rushing off the church.

And the funeral service
was actually underway

when the police
came storming in

and demanded everything
had to be stopped right now.

"We need the body!"

NARRATOR: Because there was no
poison specialist in the area,

the police sent
Ada Applegate's remains

to the most famous toxicologist
in the country.

Everywhere he looked,
Gettler found arsenic:

Four times the lethal dose.

The police didn't have
to look far for their suspect;

Among the mourners
at Ada Applegate's funeral

was Fanny Creighton.

They brought her in
for questioning.

To their astonishment, she
wanted to talk about her past.

NARRATOR: It had been so easy.

In the spring of 1923,

soon after Fanny convinced
her brother to move in,

she took out an insurance policy
on his life.

Charles never thought twice

when Fanny offered
to prepare his meals.

She had mixed arsenic
into his chocolate pudding.

There was plenty on hand

in the popular tonic that
Fanny used to lighten her skin.

FIERRO: Fanny Creighton.

She is the stuff
thatovels are made of.

Poison her own brother

for a thousand-dollar
life insurance policy?

Now, is that a profound
betrayal of trust?

(coughing loudly)

FIERRO:
Just a consummately evil lady.

NARRATOR: But Fanny had already
been declared not guilty

of the murder of her brother;

She couldn't be tried twice
for the same crime.

If Fanny was to be
convicted of anything,

the police would have to solve
the killing of Ada Applegate.

EVANS:
Initially, the police suspected

that there was a love affair
between Fanny and Everett,

so maybe they killed his wife
in collusion.

But the more they dug into it,
they found that no,

it was far, far more
sinister than that.

BLUM: Ada Applegate's husband was
very unhappy in his marriage.

But the person he fixed on
was not Fanny Creighton,

but Fanny Creighton's
15-year-old daughter.

He decided that she was
the girl for him.

And what's really creepy
about this is that so did Fanny.

Fanny was starting
to resent the expenses

of having children
in the house,

so she sees this as a chance
to move the kid out.

She would send her daughter
up to his room at night.

She would chart her
daughter's menstrual period

so he could make sure that,
you know,

she didn't get pregnant.

KRAJICEK: Fanny believed
it ultimately was leading

to Ruth and Everett
Applegate marrying,

thus giving her more time
to do whatever she did

in Baldwin, Long Island.

EVANS: And the only obstacle

standing in the way
of this brilliant scheme

is Ada Applegate.

And sure enough,
she dies from arsenic poisoning.

NARRATOR: In January of 1936,
for the third time in her life,

Fanny Creighton
stood trial for murder.

Only now, Alexander Gettler
was testifying against her.

BLUM: I've always
wondered how Gettler felt

on the day that he testified
in the trial.

Here's this woman,
this woman that he had helped

essentially, he believed, save,

this so-called innocent,
young mother

who now is revealed
as a killer.

PROSECUTOR:
So the victim consumed

almost four times
the lethal dose of arsenic?

That's right.

Dr. Gettler,

Mrs. Creighton admitted that

she purchased rat poison...
"Rough on Rats," it's called...

shortly before Mrs. Applegate
became ill.

Do you have any reason
to believe

that this was
the murder weapon?

I do.

The type of arsenic
in the victim's body

was identical to the active
ingredient in that product.

The victim's stomach also
contained a quantity of soot,

identical to the inactive
filler in that product.

How sure can you be

that the victim ingested
"Rough on Rats"?

There is no doubt.

PROSECUTOR: Your witness.

BLUM: Defense attorneys
were starting to say,

"When Alexander Gettler
comes into a courtroom

"he's an unanswerable witness.

"His testimony
is so trusted at this point,

"his science
is considered so exact

that we can't win a case
when he's on the other side."

NARRATOR: On January 30, 1936,

the jury found Fanny Creighton
and Everett Applegate

guilty of murder.

They died seven months later

in the electric chair
at Sing Sing.

For Gettler,
Fanny Creighton's trial

was a measure of the changing
status of forensic science.

BLUM: When he started in 1918,

Gettler could not persuade
a jury to trust the science.

But you've seen in this,
what, a little over a decade,

this phenomenal pendulum swing

where people are starting to
look at these scientific results

and say, "That's it."

"They prove it.

That's the answer."

COLIN EVANS:
Before he came along,

juries just did not believe
forensic science.

Nowadays, of course, everything
has turned 180 degrees

and forensic science
is the most believed testimony

in modern day courtrooms.

FIERRO: Juries like the
certainty of science.

They like that a lot.

And I can understand that.

Imagine being a juror
trying to weigh

the contradictory testimony
of two credible people.

An honest man sits there
and he agonizes.

"Who do I believe?"

And when you can bring
that honest juror science

and he can believe it

and it has a foundation
in the reality of the universe,

he's going to look at that
every time.

NARRATOR: Gettler stayed at his post
as the world changed around him.

By the time he was ready
to retire in the fall of 1958,

New York was enjoying a level
of wealth and cultural influence

that surpassed
even the Roaring '20s.

The new prosperity had
dampened some darker impulses:

Homicides had dropped
dramatically.

And in large part
because of Alexander Gettler,

homicidal poisoning
had all but disappeared.

It had become almost impossible
to get away with it.

City employees were supposed
to retire at 70,

but New York made an exception

for its singleminded
toxicologist.

At 75, Gettler estimated
that he had analyzed

more than 100,000 bodies.

As Gettler closed out
his long career,

he could look back
on some remarkable changes.

He and his colleagues

had revolutionized
criminal investigation.

Forensic science had become
not just a respected discipline,

but a subject
of public fascination:

The scientific sleuth
was a regular feature

of radio dramas
and detective novels.

But Gettler had little time
for his fictional counterparts,

and even turned down
a TV series based on his work.

He wanted to stay far
from the limelight.

Have a good weekend,
Dr. Gettler.

NARRATOR: As Gettler saw
it, his true legacy

was the mission that
he and Charles Norris

had embarked upon
so many years before.

BLUM: Their mission was
to help the public,

to take this knowledge
and protect people.

Both of them felt very strongly

that there was no point
in doing it

if all you did
was solve murders.

NARRATOR: Together, Norris and Gettler
had pursued an elusive vision:

A partnership between forensic
scientists and government,

which would protect citizens

from the unintended
consequences of progress.

Norris didn't live
to see that vision realized,

but Gettler did.

By 1959, a powerful
federal agency,

the Food and Drug
Administration,

was policing the flood
of chemicals

in the food supply,
in drugs and cosmetics.

Although the system
was fallible,

no one seriously questioned
the government's duty

to protect its citizens.

BLUM: You see this profound
change in attitudes

toward public health
and regulation.

I mean, it's huge.

The idea is that
we can use smart science

to understand what puts us
at risk and what doesn't.

FIERRO: We have a societal obligation
to take care of our people

and to recognize when something
bad has happened to them.

We do not ignore
the fact of death.

We try and learn from it.

MICHAEL BADEN: When the medical
examiner's office moved from Bellevue

into the new building
around 1960 or so,

the motto that was put up
was a motto that Norris had.

It was from an old
Viennese morgue,

and translated
from the Latin means:

"Let conversation cease;
Let laughter flee;

This is the place where death
delights to help the living."

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"The Poisoner's Handbook"

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Someone needs to stop Clearway Law.
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