The Poisoner's Handbook Read Online Free PDF Page A

out the poorest patients. And of the morgue there where, after a disaster, the bodies literally overflowed. In 1911 the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory building on Washington Square had burned; more than one hundred young seamstresses had died; their blackened bodies had been stacked like cordwood on the piers behind the hospital. Mothers from the Gas House district, the gritty, crime-ridden neighborhood just south of the hospital, used its name to threaten troublesome children; “I’ll send ye to Bellevue” was almost as dreaded a warning as “I’ll tell the Gerry Society on ye,” the nickname of the city’s Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children, hated for its relentless policing tactics.
    The hospital’s famed psychopathic ward, home to the lunatics, the crazies, the suicidal, and the homicidal, only added to the rumors. Its windows were barred; ivy climbed the stone walls—in the winter, their creepers tangled like old bones. Passersby swore, swore that at night they could hear screams through the glass, see shadows stalking past the windows like unchained beasts.
    The current head of that ward, an alienist named Menas Gregory, had been trying for years to change that haunted reputation. He angrily defended people in his care, many of whom had been brought in against their will when their families had them declared crazy. The lost occupants of his ward needed help, Gregory argued, not mockery, not groundless fear. He worried at how slowly people accepted that, even in his own institution. “There is, at the present time, no place where these patients may receive proper treatment.”
    Unlike many late-night arrivals to the psychopathic ward, though, Mors seemed happy enough to be there, Gregory told the police. They’d let him bring a pile of books—he was teaching himself better English—and he spent most of his time lying on his cot, reading, muttering over pronunciations. At the end of ten days, Gregory agreed that Mors was “not well mentally.” The man was definitely watchful, possibly a little paranoid. He seemed usually controlled, quiet, and polite. Mors was cold, calculating, and somehow just off, slightly inhuman in his reactions. But the alienist saw no evidence that their self-confessed murderer was delusional; it was extremely unlikely that he’d invented the killings; and he wouldn’t call him a homicidal lunatic. Did that make him capable of planning multiple killings? The Bellevue experts could offer a definitive yes. Did that give the district attorney the proof he wanted? A definitive no.
     
     
    YES, NO, MAYBE, all the answers led them nowhere, nowhere they wanted to be in a criminal investigation involving eight suspicious deaths. The Mors investigators weren’t the only ones stumbling their way through poison murders, but it wasn’t particularly comforting to realize that. If anything, a newly published survey only made their situation seem worse.
    That same January the city government had released a report declaring that thanks to ill-informed, corrupt, and occasionally drunken coroners, murderers in New York were escaping justice in record numbers. Infanticide, for instance, was almost never punished. And “skillful poisoning can be carried on almost with impunity.”
    The report was conducted by the city’s commissioner of accounts, a reform-minded zealot named Leonard Wallstein. The commissioner had spent a full year studying the long-established political coroner system and concluded that it was a joke, a travesty, a disgrace, a public scandal, and a sheer waste of taxpayers’ money. That was only the beginning of his list of epithets. He could add specific complaints about the coroner now in office, Patrick Riordan, who had been observed sneaking nips from his hip flask during recent criminal trials. Two Manhattan civic clubs were demanding Riordan’s removal from office.
    But Wallstein’s report, released in January 1915, was less concerned with the bad habits of one