The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York

“Chloroform” focuses on how the police handled poisoning cases in New York prior to the establishment of the medical examiner position. During the 1910s, New York’s government was largely corrupt, ruled over by the Democratic party “political machine” known as Tammany Hall. Tammany Hall sought to influence elections to keep itself in power. This power included control over the city’s coroner, a position that was elected by popular vote and “required no medical background or training […] even though [coroners] were charged with determining cause of death” (20). These coroners included Patrick Riordan, who had previously lost his practice and was the subject of a public controversy for drinking on the job.

Blum explores how the coroner system’s corruption often led it to fail in its job, such as in the case of poisoner Frederick Mors. In January 1915, Mors went to the New York district attorney’s office and confessed to having committed a series of poisonings. An Austrian immigrant, Mors had been working at the German Odd Fellows home in Yonkers, where he helped care for sickly senior patients. After the home’s superintendent suggested to Mors that he carry out the “removal” of the facility’s “sickliest” patients, Mors began poisoning some of the elders.

While Mors initially tried arsenic, he soon switched to using chloroform, believing it to be a cleaner way of killing individuals. Discovered by the scientist James Young Simpson, chloroform was often used as an anesthetic in surgery. However, doctors soon discovered that chloroform seemed to sometimes randomly kill a patient, with little understanding as to why. In spite of this apparent danger, chloroform continued to be used in medical facilities, and Mors was able to easily procure chloroform for his poisonings.  

The police arrested Mors and went to Odd Fellows to search for evidence to prosecute him. When they approached the coroner about examining Mors’ victims’ corpses, the coroner claimed that there was “no way […] to find evidence of [chloroform] in a corpse” (13). This belief was largely based upon the murder trial of William Rice, who was purported to have been killed by chloroform poisoning in 1900. During the trial, medical experts expressed contradicting opinions as to how chloroform would affect a decomposing body, leading to a belief that chloroform was undetectable after death. However, Blum notes that medical tests actually did exist in 1915 for identifying chloroform in a corpse—something the coroner would have known if he had been trained in medicine. As a result of the coroner’s error, the district attorney could not bring Mors to trial and instead sought to have him committed to a mental asylum. When Mors was scheduled to be deported, he instead fled the asylum, with the police unable to find him. 

Following controversy over the coroner system, New York City enacted a law replacing coroners with trained medical examiners who passed an exam proving their medical expertise. However, when the law came into effect in 1918, the mayor, John Hylan, an associate with Tammany Hall, opposed the law’s reformist measures. Hylan decided to reinstate the disgraced Patrick Riordan to the medical examiner position, launching a public outrage that prompted New York’s state government to intervene and force Hylan to select a qualified medical examiner. Hylan hired Charles Norris, who had received the second-highest score on the examination.

Norris immediately began to set up his department in “Bellevue [Hospital]’s recently completed pathology building,” complete with a new “forensic chemistry laboratory” (32). However, the resentful Hylan decided to sharply cut the budget for the medical examiner’s department, leading Norris to constantly pester Hylan as he sought to receive better funding. Norris decided to use a recent inheritance to purchase supplies for his department’s laboratory that the city refused to buy. Norris also set about revamping the relationship between the medical examiner’s office and the police, requesting that the office be immediately notified in the event of a “homicide or suspicious death” (33). Such corpses would then be delivered to Norris’s forensic chemist, Alexander Gettler, who would analyze the body in the lab to determine whether poisons or other chemicals had played a part in death. Gettler quickly gained a reputation as a capable forensic chemist due to his willingness to create new tests for identifying poisons and his thoroughness in searching for ways “to detect ever smaller and smaller amounts of each poison” (38).

One of Gettler’s initial investigations was into wood alcohol (otherwise known as methyl alcohol), an industrial alcohol derived from lumber. Though the alcohol was known to be poisonous for the human body, bootleggers would often distill wood alcohol and sell it as moonshine. As the body consumes methyl alcohol, it produces the deadly formaldehyde and formic acid, leading to “severe poisoning, blindness and often death” (40).

In the lead-up to Prohibition, which was set to go into effect in January 1920, Gettler realized that many saloons and bootleggers were already serving toxic wood alcohol in lieu of regular liquor. As Gettler noticed a sharp intake of corpses suffering from alcohol poisoning, he feared that Prohibition would only drive more individuals to consume the deadly moonshine. Gettler decided to create a test for identifying wood alcohol in a human cadaver, which previously did not exist. Though Gettler created a number of different tests, his preferred one began with “grinding up a chunk of [the corpse’s] tissue” and then adding chemicals to the tissue that would produce formaldehyde if wood alcohol had been present (47). Gettler’s test allowed the medical examiner’s office to prove that wood alcohol poisoning was on the rise. In December 1919, the month before Prohibition was to begin, Gettler and Norris held a press conference warning of the dangers of wood alcohol.