A View to a Kill in the Morning: Carbon Dioxide

By Deborah Blum 

In 1940, inspired by a tragic accident, a New York pathologist came up with the scenario for a perfect murder.

His idea was based on the deaths of five longshoremen, their bodies found in the cargo hold of a steamer docked on the East River. The boat had been carrying cherries from Michigan. The men had been bunking in the room where the fruit was stored and to the shock of their co-workers, as they started to unload the cherries, all five were found lifeless in their beds.

When investigators from the New York City medical examiner’s office arrived, they discovered that the fruit had been chilled by placing large containers of “dry ice” in the storage area. Dry ice was, of course, not ice at all but carbon dioxide (CO2) in its solid form, resembling breathtakingly cold chunks of frosted glass. At standard atmospheric pressure, water (H2O) freezes as temperatures slip just below 32 °F. Carbon dioxide solidifies (a process called deposition) at −109.3 °F.

As it warms – say, as it sits in a fruit storage area – it begins returning to its gaseous state, a transition known as a phase change. The solid chunks shrink without the seeping wet of melting water ice, hence the name dry ice (patented in 1924 by the DryIce Corporation of America). Instead there is a steady seep of gas in the surrounding air. Mostly this is nothing to worry about - unlike its chemical cousin, carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide is not acutely poisonous – and, in fact, the chilly vapors lifting off dry ice have been used to create a fog effects in places ranging from theatres to Halloween parties.

But there is a risk. Carbon dioxide is denser than oxygen-rich air and can, notably in confined spaces, essentially displace the breathable atmosphere, settling into its surroundings like an invisible but suffocating blanket.

And this is what the city’s medical examiners realized had happened to their dead longshoremen. The men’s blood was “saturated with carbon dioxide and the men had obviously died from asphyxia,” explained assistant medical examiner Edward Martens in his 1940 book, The Doctor Looks at Death.

Still, he added, finding CO2 in the blood went only part way to solving the puzzle. Carbon dioxide is always naturally present in human blood. It’s a byproduct of the way we metabolize oxygen and as it builds up, we exhale it away. If a person is murdered by suffocation and cannot exhale, the gas also builds up in the blood: “Exactly the same autopsy picture would have been found if the men had died from being smothered by holding, say, a pillow over their mouths.” 

“This brings up a rather interesting possibility for a method of murder that would be extremely difficult to detect,” the doctor, Edward Marten, continued. “I pass this on, for what it is worth, to writers of detective stories.” In his scenario, a sleeping or heavily intoxicated person slumbers in bed. The killer places a bucket, packed with dry ice, on the floor, shuts all windows, and closes the door tightly as he leaves. Within a few hours, the victim suffocates. When someone else opens the door, normal air refills the room, whisking away all trace of the murder weapon: “The trick is that when dry ice evaporates it leaves absolutely no trace behind, so that the investigating detectives would find nothing except a dry and completely empty pail.”

Still, Marten considered that a better tip for fiction writers than real-life killers. The purchase of dry ice was easy to track, the material so cold as to bring on frostbite if handled improperly, and an ideally airtight room almost impossible to find. And someone, after all, might wonder about that peculiarly placed empty pail. 

Nevertheless, I’d like to take this moment to pay tribute to carbon dioxide, as one of the most important – and dangerous- gases on the planet. We tend to discount its lethal potential by contrast with its toxic chemical cousin, carbon monoxide (CO). Thanks to its ability to block oxygen circulation in the blood stream, carbon monoxide drifting from faulty heaters, generators, cars accidentally left running, furnaces and other fuel-burning machinery is estimated to kill some 500 people in the United States every year and send thousands of others to doctors and hospitals.

And we tend to discount carbon dioxide as an actual poison because we’re focused instead on all the other ways it can – and does - cause trouble. These days, its best known as a greenhouse gas, for its ability to trap heat in the atmosphere. Numerous studies have found that levels of CO2 have risen steadily due to human activities – ranging from industrial burning of carbon-rich fuels to deforestation to agricultural practices. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates, for instance, that in 2005, “global atmospheric concentrations of CO2 were 35 percent higher than they were before the Industrial Revolution​.” Although other gases are also linked to the current scenario of human-induced climate change, carbon dioxide is considered by many to be the most important factor.

Of course, even that doesn’t really give full credit to the ways that carbon dioxide can alter the environment. For instance, scientists calculate that our oceans absorb a good proportion of the gas generated by human activities. Unfortunately, when you dissolve CO2 into H2O you rather logically end up with the compound H2CO3, better known as carbonic acid. If you don’t recognize it, it’s the rather weak acid found in carbonated soft drinks (although not so weak that countless middle school students haven’t studied its corrosive effect on everything from teeth to lug nuts).

It’s not surprising, then, that marine biologists have expressed alarm about the increasing acidification of the oceans. One recent report I found examined increases in carbonic acid levels on California mussels, finding a notable thinning of their shells and a decrease in their overall size. A study conducted by Norwegian scientists also found that overall that mussel larvae decreased in size, but suggested, hopefully, that the effects might be mitigated if, as seemed probable, only the larger larvae would survive. Of course, mussels aren’t far from the only species at risk, as a National Science Foundation​ report concluded recently, listing everything from coral to marine algae. This is just another way of saying that we’re deep into a global chemistry experiment with one of nature’s most important – troublesome and occasionally lethal – chemical compounds.

There are many reasons, in fact, why we should regard carbon dioxide with respect, if not wariness. And, certainly, one finds that kind of response at a subconscious level. A rather fascinating experiment a couple of years ago found that just inhaling a small amount carbon dioxide triggered a fear response in mice. And there’s an equally fascinating wealth of research about the relationship between human panic disorders and CO2 inhalation. Far beyond my New York murder scenario, there’s rather horrifying evidence that occasionally this can be a panic-worthy gas.

The best example of that comes from a real life event, a catastrophic natural release of carbon dioxide in Lake Nyos in Cameroon during the summer of 1986. Beneath that beautiful lake, geothermal seeps release CO2 into the deep lake waters, normally trapped near the bottom by pressure and cold. But in this case, apparently, the lake became oversaturated with the gas and on August 21, 1986, the lake waters effectively turned over, carbon dioxide fizzing explosively upward, the waters of Lake Nyos turning a startling red as iron deposits were stirred about. The rapidly released gas settled in a suffocating layer into the valleys around the lake. So many people died – an estimated total of 1,746 – that eventually the website Snopes.com felt compelled to investigate. Snopes reported that the event was real and, in fact, not the only case of suffocation deaths due to carbon dioxide seeps at lakes in Cameroon. Since that time, in fact, measures have been taken to maneuver the gas out of the lakes. 

And this, of course, brings me back to plotting a CO2 murder. I discovered Martens’ theory and his long out-of-print book while researching early 20th century forensic toxicology a few years ago. At first, I just liked the improbability, a medical examiner cooking up a supposedly unsolvable murder. But what’s stayed with me is the implicit message –that we’re talking about a dangerous compound.

It’s a message to remember as we move deeper into our global experiment in greatly increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in our environment. For those who haven’t taken the experiment seriously – in my opinion, still far too many – it’s a reminder that they should start doing so now. And for those who need no reminder of the bigger carbon dioxide picture, I think I can still pass along at least one useful tip - in case of strangers bearing buckets of dry ice, sleep with your windows open.

photo credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dherholz/5886706782/ (smoke)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bryanchan/327644305/ (dry ice blocks)


(window) http://www.flickr.com/photos/chiotsrun/5843798932/


(earth) http://www.flickr.com/photos/randomcliche/2537646816/

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The Poisoner's Handbook

By Deborah Blum

 My book, The Poisoner's Handbook, comes out in paperback this week. It was published a year ago, and I had the pleasure of joining Women in Crime Ink as a blogger shortly later.

It's been a wonderful year to be the author of a story about 1920's forensic detectives figuring out how to catch poison killers. The book was named one of the top 100 books of 2010 by Amazon. I've visited more than 15 cities to talk about it, and I am actually booked to continue talking about through October of this year. I do sometimes show up wearing the Victorian poison ring that I purchased in honor of the book.

"Where did women actually get those rings?" my son asked me. "Did they go to the jeweler and ask to see the rings kept under the counter?"

As you may guess, my family and friends worry a little about my ongoing obsession with poison, murder, and the more sinister aspects of chemistry. I'm awfully prone upon hearing the name of a poison - say, mercury - to relate the story of 1920's film star Olive Thomas (Mary Pickford's sister-in-law) who was killed by mercury. And don't get me started on arsenic. My neighbors have promised my husband that they are looking out for him. My husband now drinks his coffee at a distance.

But I continue to find the subject endlessly fascinating. Poisoners themselves, with their devious ways and cold-hearted plotting, tell us a lot about who we are, often at our worst. Poisons themselves are a reminder that we need to navigate with care and knowledge through the chemical world in which we live.

Of course, poisons really are fascinatingly wicked chemical compounds and many of them have fascinating histories as well. In honor of the paperback publication, I thought I'd share with you a few of my favorites:

1. Carbon Monoxide: It’s so beautifully simple (just two atoms--one of carbon, one of oxygen) and so amazingly efficient a killer. There’s a story I tell in the book about a murder syndicate trying to kill an amazingly resilient victim. They try everything from serving him poison alcohol to running over him with a car. But in the end, it’s carbon monoxide that does him in.

2. Arsenic: This used to be the murderer’s poison of poisons, so commonly used in the early 19th century that it was nicknamed the inheritance powder. It’s also the first poison that forensic scientists really figured out how to detect in a corpse. It stays in the body for centuries, which is why we keep digging up historic figures like Napoleon or U.S. President Zachary Taylor to check their remains for poison.

3. Radium: I love the fact that this rare radioactive element used to be considered good for your health. It was mixed into medicines, face creams, and health drinks in the 1920's. People thought of it like a tiny glowing sun that would give them its power. Boy, were they wrong. The two scientists in my book, Charles Norris and Alexander Gettler, proved in 1928 that the bones of people exposed to radium became radioactive, and stayed that way for years.

4. Nicotine: This was the first plant poison that scientists learned to detect in a human body. Just an incredible case in which a French aristocrat and her husband decided to kill her brother for money. They actually stewed up tobacco leaves in a barn to brew a nicotine potion. Their amateur chemical experiments inspired a very determined professional chemist to hunt them down.

5. Chloroform: Developed for surgical anesthesia in the 19th century, this rapidly became a favorite tool of home invasion robbers. If you read newspapers around the turn of the 20th century, they’re full of accounts of people who answered a knock on the door, only to be knocked out by a chloroform soaked rag. One woman woke up to find her hair shaved off, and undoubtedly sold for the lucrative wig trade.

6. Mercury: In its pure state, mercury appears as a bright silver liquid, which scatters into shiny droplets when touched. No wonder it’s nicknamed quicksilver. People used to drink it as a medicine more than 100 years ago. No, they didn’t drop dead. Those silvery balls just slid right through them. Mercury is much more poisonous if it’s mixed with other chemicals and can be absorbed by the body directly. That’s why methylmercury in fish turns out to be so risky a contaminant.

7. Cyanide: One of the most famous of the homicidal poisons and, in my opinion, not a particularly good choice. Yes, it’s amazingly lethal--a teaspoon of the pure stuff can kill in a few minutes. But it’s a violent and obvious death. In early March of last year, in fact, an Ohio doctor was convicted of murder for putting cyanide in his wife’s vitamin supplements.

8. Aconite: A heart-stoppingly, deadly natural poison. It forms in ornamental plants that include the blue-flowering monkshood. The ancient Greeks called it the queen of poisons and considered it so evil that they believed that it derived from the saliva of Cerberus, the three-headed dog guarding the gates of hell.

9. Silver: Swallowing silver nitrate probably won’t kill you, but if you do it long enough it will turn you blue. One of my favorite stories involving a silver bullet concerns the Famous Blue Man of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus who was analyzed by one of the heroes of my book, Alexander Gettler.

10. Thallium: Agatha Christie put this poison at the heart of one of her creepiest mysteries, The Pale Horse, and I looked at it in terms of a murdered family in real life. An element discovered in the 19th century, it’s a perfect homicidal poison. Tasteless and odorless, except for one obvious giveaway, the victim’s hair falls out as a result of the poisoning!

Now that I’ve written this list, I realize I could probably name ten more. But, I don’t want to scare you.

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The Chemistry of Murder

by Deborah Blum

Just for the moment, consider yourself a forensic scientist, an investigator summoned by the police to the scene of a rather puzzling death.

The scene in question is a small, rather shabby apartment in which there has clearly been a gas leak. The cops have opened all the windows to air the place out. In the bedroom at the rear of the dwelling you find a young woman who has clearly been dead for several hours. She lies on the bed - pale, cold and stiff.

Immediately, you realize that something is very wrong with this picture. You have the body sent back to the city morgue for blood tests. And those tests confirm your initial suspicion - the woman did not die of carbon monoxide poisoning.

In fact, further investigation finds that she was suffocated with a pillow before the gas came spilling into the apartment. The killer set the scene hoping that the police would believe it was an accidental death.

So what was the giveaway clue? What made you suspicious when you surveyed that sad little scene?

In fact, this one has an easy answer. If the woman had died of carbon monoxide poisoning, she would not have been pale. Her skin would have been flushed pink; people have actually been known to comment on the healthy look of corpses after a carbon monoxide killing.

There's a very straightforward chemistry to this. When we breathe life-giving oxygen rich air, the oxygen attaches to proteins in blood that carry the gas to every cell in our body. But carbon monoxide (a simple mixture of one carbon atom to every one oxygen atom) bonds much more efficiently to those proteins. I tend to think of it as a chemical thug. It muscles oxygen out of the way, grabs onto the carrier proteins (hemoglobins) and rapidly saturates the blood. That means that even if you are breathing air with some oxygen in it, the carbon monoxide crowds it out.

When enough carbon monoxide invades the blood stream, people die - usually a saturation above 50 percent although some people have been killed by levels in the 40 percent range. Carbon monoxide is a byproduct of the burning of fossil fuels - from gas for lighting, to natural gas for heating, to gasoline in automobiles - and it is an exceptionally efficient killer; in a closed garage, for instance, with a car left running, it has been known to kill people in as little as ten minutes. An analysis by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimated that about 500 people in the United States die from carbon monoxide poisoning every year and 15,000 require emergency treatment for exposure to the gas.

These poisonings leave visible evidence behind. As carbon monoxide levels rise, it sets off a reaction that turns the blood a deep cherry-red, a rosy chemical pink. Even the internal organs gain a dark cherry appearance, easily visible on autopsy. If a body is found pale and cold, many things could be responsible for that death - but definitely not carbon monoxide.

The crime scene I described above actually comes from a murder case in my book, The Poisoner's Handbook, and occurred in 1923. Further investigation found that the dead woman's husband had taken out an insurance policy on her life, suffocated her with a pillow, and then - this is the 1920s, when gas lighting is still prevalent - snapped a gas fitting on a lamp in the bedroom and let the illuminating gas flow out, assuming that police would be fooled.

When pathologists took a closer look at the body, they discovered that he had held the pillow so tightly against her that he had left bruises on the back of her head. When the full chemistry workup was done, the scientists found merely normal urban levels of carbon monoxide in the blood - nothing close to lethal at all.

The husband went to prison and in this case it would be you, the good forensic scientist, who put him there. If someone tried this today - using, say, a "leaky" gas generator instead of old-fashioned illuminating gas - they too would get caught. They too would go to jail. Because a little chemistry - even as simple a calculation as this - goes a long way in catching a killer.

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The Strange Death of Mike the Durable

by Deborah Blum

In the winter of 1933, the empty store stayed dark all day, dusty wooden crates piled high behind the windows. But if you lived close by, you knew that the door opened at night and that behind the stacked boxes was a bare-bones little speakeasy, a sofa, four tables, a plywood bar along the back wall, a fair supply of bootlegged whiskey, and a bartender who slept it off at night on the sofa.

The speakeasy, such as it was, kept its owner out of the breadlines. Barely. Sometimes his patrons paid; sometimes they didn’t. They’d empty the ragtag of coins out of their pockets and put the rest on a tab. Sometimes they paid that tab, sometimes not. The worst was old Michael Malloy, who drifted in and out of employment – street cleaner, coffin polisher - according to whether he was able to stay upright. There were nights when the owner would have sworn that he was pouring most of his profits down Mike Malloy’s neck.

Malloy and money were the topics of discussion one night after he’d had passed out again atop the plywood bar. The speakeasy boss, Tony Marino, and several of his friends were playing an idle game of pinochle, drinking some bootlegged whiskey, all of them worrying over money and the Depression’s hard times.

If only one of them had a wealthy relative or, barring that, a sick one with a good insurance policy. The right kind of dead family member would have really come in handy right then. Too bad none of them had an expendable relative. But perhaps, Marino suggested, they could create one -- someone no one would miss, someone hardly worth keeping alive anyway.

As the story was later told, to a man, they turned to look at Mike Malloy, snoring off another bender in the backroom bar. And at the moment, in a ragtag speakeasy in the Bronx, was chosen the worst possible victim of a murder scheme, a man the newspapers would later dub “Mike the Durable.”

The saga of the almost invincible Mike, the improbably cursed murder syndicate, and the investigation that sent all four of those card players to the electric chair, is probably my favorite true crimes story from The Poisoner’s Handbook. It’s just natural Alfred Hitchcock material, with the same macabre sense of the ridiculous, a corpse that just won't go away, that pervades Hitchcock's film “The Trouble With Harry".

I’m not arguing that murder – in this case the death of a harmless and rather pathetic old man – is laugh track material. But this particular story is a dark comedy of errors. And it definitely proves that familiar saying – you couldn’t make it up – reminding us that even the most creative fiction writers can’t always top what people come up with all by themselves.

The conspirators in the Malloy scheme finalized their plans in January of 1933, clustered around a table at that no-name speakeasy. They’d persuaded their amiable victim to pose as the brother of bartender Red Murphy – in exchange for free whiskey – and taken out two insurance policies with a combined payout of $1,800.

In addition to Murphy, the others in the oddly assembled plot included Marino, a fruit vendor named Daniel Kriesberg, and Frank Pasqua, an increasingly money-strapped funeral home director. Their initial idea was simple. Prohibition was still in effect, and New York City was awash in poison alcohol, the product of shoddy home brews, government efforts to contaminate the liquor supply as an enforcement tool, and bootlegger concoctions. They would just provide Malloy with a generous allotment of bad alcohol and watch him go down.

But the old derelict thrived on bad whiskey, drank himself into a stupor every night, and returned the next day. So they decided on poisonous snacks to go with the liquor – bad oysters, rotten sardine sandwiches, sandwiches with metal shavings, sandwiches with glass. He loved those too.

A month later, they had yet another plan. They waited one night until he passed out, carried him to a park bench on a freezing February night and poured water on him. He didn’t even wake up during the soaking. But he was back next night without so much as catching a cold. Finally, the exasperated would-be killers hired a cab driver, Hershy Green, to run over Malloy in a nearby street. But a policeman found him after the accident and took him to a hospital. He was back in the bar, asking for a drink, a few weeks later.

It wasn’t until the end of February that they figured out a way to kill him, using illuminating gas, dense with poisonous carbon monoxide. Finally, they started collecting their insurance money. But unfortunately – at least for them - the story of the indestructible Malloy was too good to stay secret. It started circulating in other bars, making its way round other card games, until the Bronx police picked the rumors and began an investigation.

And the conspirators had other bad luck too. They’d paid a corrupt local doctor to sign a death certificate attributing Malloy’s death to poison alcohol and had their victim hastily buried. But the city exhumed the body. And even though this was several months after the death, forensic scientists could detect lethal levels of carbon monoxide in the old man’s tissues.

Both the cab driver and the physician made deals and testified for the prosecution. And Murphy, Marino, Kriesberg and Pasqua all went to the electric chair in the summer of 1934. A reporter for the now-vanished New York Daily Mirror recorded the execution in crisp staccato: “The kw-e-e- of the dynamo. Two thousand volts and ten amperes. The rip-saw current that tears one apart. Three shocks.” It was, he wrote, “the State’s toast to old ‘Mike the Durable’.”

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Jazz Age Science Enters Courtroom

by Deborah Blum 

The first week of December 1926 was clouded in fog. The mist lapped along the rivers, muffled the harbors, made eerie the dry creak of boats rubbing against docks in the water. 

Far too early one morning a Brooklyn police officer patrolling along the East River caught a half-glimpse of a man hurrying through the fog.  As the figure neared the edge of a wharf, the officer could see that the man walked slightly bent as he carried a heavy-looking bundle. The patrolman shouted for the man to halt but instead he hastily dropped his burden and kicked it into the river.

The officer called again as the man fled. Together with a hurriedly approaching fellow patrolman, he tackled the fugitive to the ground. But the stranger refused to answer any of their questions. They took him to the station house where, in the sudden brilliance of a lit room, the officers suddenly realized that their captive’s trouser cuffs and socks were sodden with blood. Once they’d pried out his name, they hurried to his apartment.  The kitchen was a scene from a horror movie, complete with bloody cleaver and jagged saw on the table and a woman’s body on the floor.

Half a body, actually. Everything below the waist was missing – and the police now deduced, long lost in the East River.

I’ve had a love-hate reaction to this story ever since I discovered it in the forgotten archives of New York City history. It’s terrible and it’s tragic.  It’s soaked in blood, literally. But it has a really terrific twist at the end. And even more important, it’s a classic story of chemical detective work from a time when forensic science was so new that scientists were a peculiarity in the courtroom.

I’ve been working as a science writer for most of my career, first at newspapers (won a Pulitzer in 1992 for writing about primate research) and as a book author. In the past decade, I’ve published books on the biology of sex differences, on the science of love and affection, and on whether it’s possible to prove life after death. I sound, I know, like someone with a short attention span. Mostly I just like exploring the different ways that science changes our lives, alters our history, explains who we are today.

Of course, when I first started thinking about writing a book about poison and murder it was also because I just found the subject fascinating. I grew up with my mother’s collection of early 20th  century crime fiction: Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Georgette Heyer, Leslie Ford, all of whom found poison to be the most seductive of murder weapons. I liked the idea of trying to catch some of that seductiveness in a book that would also explain the science of how poisons actually work. 

But it wasn’t until I started looking at the early history of forensics that I found a way to tell the story.  My book, "The Poisoner's Handbook," would become the tale of two forgotten scientists – medical examiner Charles Norris and toxicologist Alexander Gettler -- from early 20th century New York City who helped launch the science of forensics in the United States and also solved some of the most famous murder cases of their time.

The 1920s was a treasure trove of innovative, dangerous chemistry.  There were compounds created by military innovations of the Great War, by industrial applications, research into new medicines, and the speakeasy culture born with Prohibition, with its smoky jazz clubs and dubious cocktails. Morphine went into teething medicines for infants; opium into routinely prescribed sedatives; arsenic was an ingredient in everything from pesticides to cosmetics.

Against that background, early forensic scientists literally had to invent rules of chemical detection as they went.  Alexander Gettler, for instance, wrote the fundamental paper on cyanide (still cited by the EPA), created the first tests that could prove intoxication at time of death, discovered how to detect chloroform levels in the brain of a dead person, and did some of the fundamental work on the still-dangerous gas carbon monoxide and how it kills us.  He’s still mentioned by experts as “the father of forensic toxicology in the United States.”

The twist on that dismembered body story I mentioned earlier comes from work done by both Gettler and his boss, Charles Norris. As it turns out, it’s not so much a story of death by hacksaw as death by poison. The toxic material in question turns out to be the very lethal gas, carbon monoxide.

Norris was the pathologist on duty the night Brooklyn police discovered the partial body of Anna Frederickson in the apartment of Francisco Travia. By the time Norris arrived at the scene, the police had already charged Travia, a longshoreman, with hacking the woman to death. But Norris, after looking at the body, insisted that they were wrong.

The woman’s face and what was left of her body was flushed an odd cherry red. People who bled to death, he pointed out, tended to be waxy pale. He took the half-body back to the morgue at Bellevue for autopsy and sent tissue and blood samples to Gettler.

If you know carbon monoxide, you know it’s characteristic for people poisoned by the gas to be flushed pink, even after death. Carbon monoxide crowds oxygen out of the blood stream. Its chemistry gives it a more effective grip on blood-borne proteins that normally distribute oxygen.  As the blood is saturated with the by-products of carbon monoxide, a unique chemical reaction causes to become a brighter, pinker color.

Not only does the skin of a carbon monoxide victim become strangely rosy but also internal organs are stained a deep cherry-red. This effect is so persistent that carbon monoxide saturated blood will often remain that startling crimson weeks or even months after death.

Before the Travia case, Gettler had run experiments proving that the body cannot absorb carbon monoxide after death. So when tests showed that Travia’s victim had lethal levels of carbon monoxide in her blood, it was obvious that she had to have absorbed those killing levels while still alive. In other words, she was dead of carbon monoxide poisoning before Travia cut her up.

Faced with the evidence, Travia confessed that he and the victim had been drinking (illegally, since this was during Prohibition) that night. Both had passed out and when he awoke, she was dead. Not realizing that his gas stove was leaky, he was afraid that he’d be suspected of murder. So he decided to make the body disappear, cutting it apart and putting the pieces in the river.

The police refused to accept his explanation or the new strange science of forensics. But when Travia went to trial, the jury believed his story. He was found guilty of illegally dismembering a body and sentenced to a year in prison. If convicted of murder, he would have been destined for the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. The chemical detective work of Norris and Gettler saved his life – and would go on to make forensic toxicology an essential part of solving crimes today. 

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