A Simple Case of Silver Poisoning

by Deborah Blum

In two earlier posts, I wrote about the possible copper poisoning of the great British poet and artist William Blake and the apparent gold poisoning of the powerful mistress of a French king, Diane de Poitier.

The very simple lesson in both stories seems to be that regular metal exposure will kill you. And certainly there are many other examples to support this. The metal lead is a notorious neurotoxin, and recent news stories link it directly to the poisoning of some 18,000 people in mining regions of Nigeria. The metal mercury is equally dangerous, enough so that all of us are warned against eating too much seafood--especially long-lived fish like salmon and tuna--because of environmental mercury contamination in the oceans.

One could argue, of course, that this is too simple a lesson. As always in toxicology, the dose makes the poison. Health experts today actually recommend regular metal intake, at least in very tiny amounts, for strengthening everything from bones to immune function. My daily multivitamin, for instance, contains 8 milligrams of iron and .5 mg of copper. And also trace amounts of zinc, nickel, manganese, molybdenum and chromium. I occasionally worry that over a lifetime I'll have swallowed a tin can's worth of metal. And some health experts worry that long time, metals like copper and iron in vitamins may bioaccumulate (build up in tissues).

But you might ask, are all metals health risks in larger quantities? An interesting--but definitely peculiar--exception turns out to be silver, one of the precious metals. The following is a story, concerning that point, from my recent book, The Poisoner's Handbook:

In the chilly January of 1924, scientists at the New York City Medical Examiner's office got a chance at a true oddball case, the death of the Famous Blue Man. The man had spent most of his life as one of the human curiosities exhibited at Barnum and Bailey’s, the Greatest Circus on Earth, as it traveled around the country. The Blue Man had recently died at Bellevue; the pathologists said his body was one of the strangest they’d seen stretched on a marble table in the morgue.

The famed human oddity was 68 years old when he checked himself into the hospital, short of breath and complaining that when he lay flat, he couldn’t breathe at all. As his hospital records noted, he was a tall, thin man, with glistening white hair and an equally glossy white mustache. His skin was so deep a blue to appear black at a distance. His lips were blue; his tongue was blue. The scleras--what would usually be called the whites of the eyes--were also blue.

This wasn’t the exhausted bluish patchiness of cyanide poisoning though. The skin was smoothly colored with an almost lustrous look. It was that overall effect of polishing that led the doctors to a diagnosis--the Blue Man was suffering from a disease called argyria (from the Greek word argyros meaning silver). The condition was known to deposit silver through the body, staining the tissues to a deeply polished blue-gray.

The Bellevue doctors suspected that the Blue Man, a former British army officer, had achieved his later fame by dosing himself with silver nitrate. This was a salt made by dissolving silver into nitric acid and evaporating the solution, leaving behind a glossy powder, which could be mixed for other uses. Silver nitrate was easily available;  it was used in photographic processing, by dentists to treat ulcers in the mouth, and blended into drops that went into the eyes of newborn babies to prevent infections.

Their patient firmly denied any silver exposure, denied any self-medication at all. As he’d told his circus admirers, he was a freak of nature, he insisted, and blue at birth. But when he died that fall--from rapidly worsening pneumonia--they decided to take a thorough look at his story. The resulting autopsy showed that he was blue-silver on the inside too, the membranes smooth and glistening, the muscle tissue a dull, reddish brown with a faint silver tint, the spleen colored a bluish red, the liver bluish gray. Even the brain shone silver, its familiar curves and coils slightly reflective in the pale light of the morgue.

Still, how much metal did his body contain? To find out, city toxicologist Alexander Gettler made an acid solution of the organs and cooked it dry, creating a gray ash. He flushed hot water, ammonia and nitric acid through the ashes, washing the silver out of them. He then measured the silver from each organ, totaling up the results to calculate the whole body content. Gettler’s conservative estimate was that the Blue Man’s body contained a good three-and-a-half ounces of solid silver. About half the metal was in the muscle tissue, another fourth in the bones, and the rest mostly concentrated in the liver, kidneys, heart and brain.

But the silver hadn’t killed the Blue Man. He had died of the pneumonia; the only effect that silver doses seemed to have had was to turn him that remarkable deep indigo color. “Among the heavy metals which may become deposited in the human body in relatively large amounts,” Gettler wrote in his report on the case, “silver is of slight and perhaps least toxicity.”

Of course, the toxicology lab was now in possession of a nice quantity of pure silver. His co-workers took the gleaming pellets acquired from the Blue Man’s body, melted them down and shaped them into a bullet. Just in case, his friends assured Gettler, he ever had to analyze a vampire. He carefully placed the bullet on his desk. Just in case, he replied.

It's a good story--or so I think--but it also makes a case that, among the metals, silver is relatively neutral in effect (as long as one doesn't care, of course, about turning blue or accumulating internal silver deposits). It also led me to consider the possibility that with some effort, one could become the amazing precious metal human, storing wealthyinternally ,so to speak, in which case my choice would be platinum.

But as it turns out, becoming the Famous Platinum Woman,would work only if I was willing to insert the word "Dead" into that description. Platinum turns out not only to be wonderfully valuable but wonderfully poisonous. So, between you and me as concerns metal exposure, I'm hoping to limit myself to those multivitamins.

Who Killed Mob Daughter Susan Berman?

by Cathy Scott

An empty shell casing. That was the hardest evidence police found in the murder of mob daughter Susan Berman.

This is a story that begins in old Las Vegas with gangsters and the boys from the Jewish mob. It moves to San Francisco with the movers and shakers, to New York City and the literati, ending in Beverly Hills with the glitterati. It is a story about a path to murder.

Just before Christmas 2000, Susan, a screenwriter and author, was murdered, shot once in the back of the head with a 9-millimeter handgun. Her body was found a day and a half later, face down in her rundown, rented Benedict Canyon home, after neighbors reported Susan's dogs loose in the wooded area. During Susan’s lifetime, she had amassed a small fortune, only to lose it. She died penniless, a world apart from the one she’d grown up in.

She was the daughter of Davie Berman, Bugsy Siegal’s partner at the Flamingo Hotel. She was reared in the lap of luxury and Las Vegas royalty as the daughter of a notorious casino mogul and mob leader. It wasn't until college that Susan learned what her father really did for a living. The murder of Davie Berman’s only child had all the earmarks of a professional hit aimed at a person borne into the criminal underworld. That theory, however, was one of the first to be ruled out by investigators.

Recently, MSNBC took a close look at Susan’s case, interviewing friends, family and investigators. I, too, was interviewed, first in Las Vegas, then at a studio in Los Angeles. The producer said he based MSNBC's piece upon my book, Murder of a Mafia Daughter.

Los Angeles Police Department lead Detective Paul Coulter, whom I interviewed at length for the book and who chimed in for MSNBC, had a hunch. Whoever shot Susan in cold blood, he said, had done so by going through her front door. If she’d let someone in, that person was no stranger to her. Everyone knew Susan was careful.

Coulter began investigating everyone she had been dealing with. In the process, he discovered that Susan had rubbed some people the wrong way, including her elderly landlord, Dee Schiffer. Coulter also learned that Schiffer had been in the process of evicting Susan, which Susan had been legally fighting, for not paying her rent.

Susan also had a not-so-perfect relationship with her personal manager, Nyle Brenner, whom police also questioned, going so far as to search his house and office. But they stopped just short of calling him a suspect.

And, of course, there was Bobby Durst, Susan’s lifelong friend, who in the months before Susan’s murder had been living in Texas disguised as, of all things, a mute woman. Susan is believed to be the one who provided an alibi years earlier for Bobby after his wife Kathleen disappeared (that case remains unsolved). Susan loved Bobby like a sibling and would have done anything for him. A few months before her own death, Susan had asked Bobby for money to buy a used SUV and to catch her up on her rent. She sent the letter to his family’s business when she couldn’t locate him. Bobby sent Susan two checks, for $25,000 each, and told her the money was a gift. Susan had been unable to find him because Durst had been traveling, including in Texas.

A few months after Susan’s murder, in 2001, after arguing with Morris Black, an older neighbor in Galveston, Durst shot Black, then chopped up his body, wrapped the pieces in plastic bags, and dumped the remains in Galveston Bay. Durts, released on bail, fled the area. When he was later arrested, found in the trunk of Bobby’s car were two guns, one a 9 millimeter, the same caliber Susan was killed with. But, according to Detective Coulter, “The ballistics test was inconclusive.”

Durst pleaded self-defense in the Black case and his powerhouse attorney DeGuerin ultimately landed an acquittal for his client. Today, Bobby Durst is a free man.

As the lead detective on the case, Coulter, a veteran officer, said he would have done things differently in the Susan Berman investigation had homicide investigators been brought in early to handle the case. His office, in the Homicide-Robbery unit at LAPD’s Parker Center, however, was not given the case until 11 long days after Susan’s death.

In December of this year, a decade will have passed, with police no closer to solving the murder than they were in the winter of 2000.

In my research, I've gotten to know Susan. I walked through the English tudor home on South Sixth Street in downtown Vegas where she'd lived her first 12 years. It was a bright, cheerful house. I imagined her as a child, running down the long hallway into the welcome arms of the father she adored. I drove the route from her Las Vegas home to her Benedict Canyon house in Beverly Hills. I visited the restaurants she frequented in the town she loved and called home during the final 17 years of her life.

I went to the University of California, Berkeley campus where Susan earned her master's degree in journalism and where protests against the war in Vietnam were rampant. Susan made lifelong friends while attending Berkeley--friends in the writing world who later tossed work her way.

I visited her home in Benedict Canyon where she was murdered and found it gloomy and dark. Someone else lives there now.

And, finally, I visited the Home of Peace cemetery in East Los Angeles where Susan’s body is entombed in a marble wall alongside her mother, father, and uncle. A recent visitor had left flowers in bud vases for her mother Gladys, father Davie and her uncle Chickie. Susan's vases, one on either side of her shiny-brass headstone, were empty. I stood there looking at her grave, regretting I had not brought her a flower.

I only wish I could have met Susan face to face. She wanted so