Modern criminology is a child of the 19th century, the time in which almost all modern sciences were developed. Over the centuries, these sciences have enabled the creators of criminalistics to develop many of the methods that most countries still use to fight crime today. Like any pioneering science, it was initially dominated by a few strong and great personalities; idealists, dreamers, realists and opportunists. This was the time when the science of poison became a weapon against criminals. It was a time when it was possible to extract hidden secrets from corpses with the help of forensic medicine. It was an era full of famous cases in which forensic science tested its weapons, discovered criminals and celebrated its victories as well as its defeats.
In the early 1840s, few people had heard of 24-year-old Frenchwoman Marie Lafarge. Just a few months later, her name was known not only in Paris, London and Rome, but also in New York. She was accused of poisoning her husband. As in many other cases, it was the death of an insignificant Frenchman, Charles Lafarge, from the equally insignificant town of Le Glandier in a French province. But a new science, toxicology, the science of poisons, has put this trivial crime on display for all the world to see. For the first time, the world has learned that doctors and chemists were on trial, trying to extract from the corpse the secret of his death.
She wanted money
Charles Lafarge, a rugged young man, inherited his father’s foundry, but in 1839 the foundry was not in operation due to pressure from creditors. He hoped to find a bride to help him out of his financial difficulties. He contacted Marie Cappelle in Paris through a marriage broker, presenting himself as an industrialist with a small building in the provinces. Marie was sent to good schools by her foster parents and there she met several daughters of the aristocracy and nobility. However, her schooling did not help her much, as she was soon caught stealing some jewellery from the parents of a fellow pupil, the Leautaud noblemen.
The nobles swept the incident under the carpet, as they did not believe she was guilty. When she was first introduced to Charles Lafargue, she found him repulsive, but was attracted by the thought of becoming a noblewoman. They married immediately and set off for Le Glandier together in the carriage of Marie’s maid Clementine. But Marie could not have been more disappointed. A desolate landscape, dirty muddy roads, and instead of a castle, a dilapidated part of a convent full of rats. Her husband’s relatives were peasants and looked askance at the lady from Paris.
She calmed down after a few weeks, seemingly resigned to her fate, was kind to her husband and even helped him to borrow some money from the banks to pay off his creditors. Before Charles went to Paris to negotiate the loan with the banks, Marie signed over all her property to him in case of her death, and proposed to him that he should also name her as heir to his estate at Le Glandier after his death.
Charles did so, but as a precaution, he secretly made a second will, leaving all his property to his mother. Marie sent her husband an Easter cake to Paris to remind him of her love for him.
On 18 December, the cake was delivered to the hotel where Lafarge was staying. He ate one piece and soon began to convulse, vomit and have diarrhoea. He stayed in bed for a day and threw the cake in the garbage.
He returned home on 3 January 1840, still very weak and ill. But he had brought 28,000 francs with him to pay off his creditors. He was still vomiting, so Marie called the doctor, who thought he had cholera. He was not suspicious when Marie asked him for a prescription for arsenic to poison the rats that had spread through the house.
Marie took exemplary care of her husband, whose health was visibly deteriorating, cooking for him and giving him medication, most often a small dose of gum arabic, which she kept with her. On 10 January, the maid noticed Marie shaking a white powder from her milk. She was suspicious, so she showed the rest of the milk to the doctor, who tasted it, tasted the bitterness and concluded that it was very probably lime that had come off the ceiling and fallen into the milk. But the maid saw that Marie had also added the same powder to the beef soup. She informed Charles’s mother and his sisters of her suspicions and they were all convinced that Marie was poisoning her husband.
On 14 January, another doctor came to Le Glandier, examined the patient and declared that all the signs pointed to arsenic poisoning. Charles Lafarge died the same day. While it was rumoured in Le Glandier that Marie had poisoned her husband, she calmly prepared to mourn and sent her husband’s will to the notary, not knowing that it was invalid. Meanwhile, her brother-in-law had already gone to Brives to report his suspicions to the gendarmerie.
On 15 January, Justice of the Peace Moran arrived in Le Glandier with three gendarmes. Marie shed tears so convincingly when he arrived that he was convinced she had been framed. Nevertheless, he took with him all the evidence he could find; the remains of milk, soup, bits of broth and the remains of arsenic used to kill rats.
The Justice of the Peace requested that the body of the deceased be opened to establish the cause of death. He knew that recently, several professors had succeeded in detecting arsenic not only in food, but also in the bodies of the deceased. It was then and there that the triumphal march of toxicology in forensic science began. But this, too, has its own story, which is very interesting.
“Drag the poison from its hiding place, show it and we’ll hang it”, exclaimed Henry Fielding, founder of the Bow Street Runners, a hundred years ago. It was the first professional police force in London, made up of six men and founded in 1749. He shouted this when a neighbour’s widow was accused of poisoning her husband.
But doctors found no poison in the defendant’s house and no evidence that she had ever had it. It would have been possible to prove the presence of poison in the body of the deceased, Fielding was convinced. But how, even the doctors could not answer that question. It had been almost 30 years since the Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave believed that different poisons gave off different odours, either in a glowing state or in vapour form.
Until then, forensic doctors had rarely identified the presence of poisons in the body, and even then they were rarely successful, most often when the perpetrators used corrosive poisons, such as acids that visibly corroded tissues, or poisons that caused inflammation, such as the love poison “Spanish fly”, which damaged the kidneys. However, it was generally considered that a corpse was poisoned if it was black or macerated, and the heart of a poisoned person was also thought to be indestructible if it was put in a fire.
No one knew at the time how many people died from poisoning, not only from murder, but also from the ignorance of doctors, who prescribed in large numbers various drugs that were essentially poisonous. Arsenic, antimony, mercury and phosphorus were the most well-known poisons at that time, but the knowledge of doctors about the others was in the dark.
People still remembered poisoners such as Pope Alexander VI. Borgia and his son Cesare, and they were also frightened by the dark image of Teofania di Adamo, who not only murdered herself but also sold poison to other murderers in the 17th century with her “acqua tofana” (white arsenic solution).
It was common knowledge that arsenic is odourless and tasteless and can be easily dissolved in soups, cakes and drinks. It was also known that the signs of arsenic poisoning were difficult to distinguish from those of cholera, which was a common disease at the time. In 1775, however, an apothecary in Köping, Sweden, discovered that white arsenic, when chlorine is added to it, turns into arsenic acid, which, if it comes into contact with zinc, produces a poisonous gas that smells of garlic. This led to the creation of hydrogen arsenic gas, which soon played an important role in toxicology.
But these were only the first beginnings in the world of poisons. The true father of toxicology was Mathieu Joseph Bonaventura Orfila, who published the first part of his famous book Traité de poisons ou Toxicologie générale in 1813. In Europe, it was listened to by everyone, police officers, doctors and lawyers as well as judges. He set up a laboratory in his flat, experimented with arsenic and gave courses.
The second part of the book was published two years later, and he wrote several more books on the subject, becoming Dean of the Faculty of Medicine in Paris in 1832 on his own merits. He was, of course, most interested in arsenic, and found that it could be demonstrated in almost all human organs, if only one had the patience. So if arsenic was not found in the human stomach, it had to be found in the liver, the spleen, the kidneys and even the nerves. According to him, arsenic in the human body was only definitively proven if the yellow residue in the glowing metal tube formed a metallic surface. This was his procedure for proving arsenic at the time.
But even his knowledge has hit its limits. In some cases, his method didn’t work, and he wondered why. Only James Marsh, an Englishman, helped him out. He invented a new procedure for proving arsenic. He hung a piece of zinc at one end of a U-shaped glass tube and a piece of human gastric secretion at the other and heated it all up. When the steam from the secretion reached the zinc, even the smallest amount of arsenic in the secretion formed arsenic hydrogen, which, when burned, left dark stains. Marsh also found that arsenic is an integral part of our bodies and can even be found in the bones of people who have died natural deaths, as well as in nature, for example in the soil.
The police officer who digs up the body in the cemetery will find arsenic in the bones, which is far from a guarantee that the person was also poisoned with arsenic. This was the toxicological background when, on 16 January 1840, the investigating magistrate Moran was given the task of proving that Charles Lafarge had been poisoned with arsenic.
Arsenic in your body?
Poor Lafargue was buried, but during the autopsy, the entire stomach and its contents were preserved and all the substances seized by Moran in La Glandier were protected. Although four years had passed since 1936, the news of the new procedure for detecting poisons, introduced by James Marsh, had not yet reached the French countryside. In the case of bread soup and sweet water, the addition of sulphur water produces a strong yellow precipitate which dissolves in ammonia. This is how doctors have detected the presence of arsenic. But in the residue of vomit, the precipitate was only slightly yellow. This suggested that there was too little arsenic to be proven. However, they argued that the fluids in the stomach contained enough arsenic acid to suggest that Charles Lafargre had been poisoned.
The investigating judge was thus convinced of Marie Lafarge’s guilt. He also managed to seize a small dose that Marie always had around her neck. He shook the white powder on the glowing coal and a garlic smell developed. More proof that Marie Lafarge was carrying arsenic.
On 25 January, Marie and her maid were arrested and imprisoned in Brives. The next day, all the French newspapers reported the murder in La Glandier. But there was another surprise. The nobleman Leautaud was reading the newspapers and remembered the theft of jewellery from his estate. He asked the police to search the Lafarges’ house, and indeed the missing jewellery was found during the search.
Marie Lafarge claimed that the jewellery had been entrusted to her by the nobleman Leautaud himself, with a mandate to sell it. Of course, no one believed her. Before the poisoning trial began, Marie was sentenced to two years in prison for theft.
The real trial began on 3 September 1840 in Tulle. The whole of Europe watched, the courthouse was surrounded by police and soldiers, and all the accommodation in the town was sold out. In his opening speech, the prosecutor pointed out that the investigation of poison killings had recently made revolutionary progress, made possible by chemistry, since it was now possible to find poison in the victim’s body, which had previously been impossible.
But as chance would have it, Marie Lafarge Paillet’s main defence lawyer was at the same time the lawyer of the man everyone considered the father of modern toxicology, Orfil. Paillet quickly saw that his client was being accused of many things, but he saw the main danger in whether it would be possible to prove traces of arsenic in her husband’s corpse. If this could not be proved beyond doubt, Marie Lafarge would be saved.
He sought advice from Orfilo himself, who took him to his laboratory and proved that the procedure of the doctors at La Glandier was negligent, incomplete and ineffective. He wrote an expert opinion on this and Paillet appeared with him at the hearing, saying that the prosecution was not at all familiar with the latest Marsh procedures for proving arsenic in the body.
The prosecution conceded provisional defeat and agreed to repeat the process of proof using the Marsh method, to be carried out by local chemists. Paillet protested and asked for experts from Paris, but in vain. The process thus became a struggle to prove the correctness of the latest toxicological findings. The fate of Marie Lafarge took a back seat.
When the local chemists gave their report on 5 February, they assured that they had re-examined Lafargue’s stomach using the Marsh method, and the result showed that not a trace of arsenic could be detected. Paillet was triumphant and almost wept with happiness, but he rejoiced prematurely.
In the meantime, the prosecution obtained the works of Orfila and Marsh and triumphantly claimed that it is known and proven that arsenic sometimes cannot be proven in the stomach, but can be proven in the liver and other organs. It was therefore necessary to carry out a third investigation, and this time to investigate the other organs of the corpse using the same method.
On 8 September, the doctors returned to Tulle with a third examination. The courtroom was packed to the rafters and there was a large crowd outside the court. There was complete silence as the results of the third investigation, carried out by the Marsh method, were read out, which included examinations of the spleen, lungs, heart, intestines and brain of the deceased Lafargue. “We found no traces of arsenic,” it was reported. The hall roared. Madame Lafarge turned to the gathering with a charming smile and thanked them. She was innocent.
But the prosecution did not give up, because in the first investigation, however, deadly arsenic was found in the drink that Madame Lafarge prepared for her husband. The prosecution demanded a new investigation, to be carried out by Orfila himself. He did indeed come to Tulle, took all the evidence and appeared before a packed court on 14 September. He said that he had examined the remains of the stomach and other organs and found that they contained a large amount of arsenic. Examination of the soil in the cemetery showed that it did not contain any arsenic and that it had therefore not entered the organs of the corpse from the soil.
The doctors who failed to find arsenic in Lafarge’s organs may have carried out the Marsh procedure ineptly. Madame Lalarge suffered a nervous breakdown at this statement and was taken back to her cell. Her fate was sealed. She was sentenced to life imprisonment. In October 1841, she was taken to Montpellier, where she spent ten years, writing her memoirs. She was only released when she became very ill with pneumonia, where she died a few months later at home, still claiming her innocence.
In the first years after the end of the trial, “Lafargists” and “Anti-Lafargists” were still arguing, each convinced of the other’s right. Many doctors, chemists, pharmacists and lawyers were now attracted by the new field of criminology, coming to Paris and becoming Orfil’s disciples. Thus began the century of forensic toxicology. Orfila had already pointed out that, in addition to metal and mineral poisons, plant poisons were also very important but little known, representing a complex and unique world.
In 1803, a German pharmacist isolated morphine from opium, and in the following decades, other scientists and pharmacists isolated poisons mainly from exotic plants. Because these poisons had the same basic character – they were alkaline – they were called alkaloids. They mainly affected the nervous system, and were considered as medicinal in small quantities and lethal in large quantities.
For example, strychnine was isolated from the bluebell (nux vomica) in 1818, quinine from the bark of the quinine tree in 1820, caffeine from coffee, nicotine from tobacco in 1828, and atropine from the wolf cherry in 1831. It took some time, however, for these poisons to be recognised by ordinary mortals as well as doctors, and then murder and suicide rates rose sharply.
Death in the Castle
Late in the afternoon of November 21st 1850, a group of panicked people, three girls – a chambermaid and two nannies – and a young man who was a coachman, appeared in front of the parish priest in the Belgian municipality of Bury. They were all employed at the nearby castle of Bitremont and asked the parish priest for advice.
Things were happening in the castle that terrified them. The villagers were convinced that the owner of the castle, Count Visart de Bocarmé, had been nursed by a lioness when he was young and that he had therefore taken on her character. Until he settled in the château of Bitremont, he travelled extensively around the world, and, being in financial straits, in 1843 he married a bourgeois woman, Lydie Fougnies, who was said to have had a great deal of money, as her father was an apothecary.
But the woman’s dowry was not as large as the Count thought. Nevertheless, he threw parties, feasts and hunts, spent lavishly and employed a bunch of servants. Debts mounted, as did quarrels and wild love scenes between the Count and his wife. But Lydie Fougnies had a brother, Gustave Fougnies, who became the main heir to the fortune after his father’s death. Although he was very ill – his leg had been cut off – news spread that he was to marry. This would have floated the only chance that the Count would have of getting his hands on the fortune after his death through his wife.
But by the time the parish priest heard the story of the four servants, Gustave Fougnies had been dead for a day. He lay naked in the castle of Bitremont, with scars on his cheeks and a black mouth. The unfortunate Gustave had been visiting the castle that day, and the servants heard him cry out terribly at lunch and fall to the ground. The Countess informed the maid that her brother had suffered a stroke. The Count ordered the servants to go to the cellar and fetch vinegar, which he then poured into Gustav’s mouth. He then stripped the unfortunate man of his clothes and began to wash the naked corpse with vinegar.
The Countess picked up her brother’s clothes and threw them into a cauldron of boiling water and began to wash the floor where the body lay with vinegar. In the morning, the Count appeared and started scratching with a large knife on the wooden floor where the corpse lay, which had been placed on a bed in a room. The Count still had bloody scratches on his hands. The parish priest informed the investigating magistrate in Tournai, who had already heard about the strange events in the castle and went there with the gendarmes and the doctor.
The body was quickly autopsied. The brain was perfectly healthy and there was no sign of stroke. However, severe ulcers were observed on the mouth, tongue, throat and stomach, as if the deceased had drunk some corrosive liquid, presumably sulphuric acid. Gustave Fougnies’ death was certainly painful and agonising. All the damaged internal organs were removed from the corpse, placed in a container of pure alcohol and taken to Tournai. The Count and the Countess were arrested.
The next day, the container containing the deceased’s organs was taken to Brussels to the military school of the well-known chemistry professor Jean Servais Stas. When Professor Stas found out how much vinegar had been used to wash the corpse, he suspected that the perpetrators were trying to hide the use of some other, as yet unknown poison. He mixed some of the organs from the soda with plain water, filtered, heated and distilled it several times, and finally obtained a brownish-reddish liquid. To this he added an etchant and the mixture began to smell like mouse urine, a smell that chemists have encountered many times over the years when dealing with the poisonous alkaloid conine.
How to prove that the unfortunate Gustav was murdered with plant poison, when no one has been able to prove it in the corpses of the deceased until now? Professor Stas filtered again, heated, added various adulterants, including ether, until the smell of the mixture became stronger and more narcotic. Science has known only two plant alkaloids with a strong smell; conine and nicotine, 50 milligrams of which were enough to cause death in a few minutes. Could Gustave Fougnies have died from nicotine?
After many years of experimentation, a small amount of a substance with an unforgettable smell and taste of tobacco remained in the container. He repeated the experiment six more times and the result was always the same. Now Stas realised that when plant poisoning is suspected, the affected organs must first be cut into small pieces, alcohol added and exposed to acid so that the mixture penetrates the tissue and dissolves and binds the plant poison-alkaloids.
Stas put part of the mixture in a bottle, sent it to the investigating magistrate in Tournai and recommended that he find out whether the Count and his wife had ever been involved with nicotine. The investigating magistrate went to the castle and questioned the maid again, who told him that the Count needed a larger quantity of tobacco leaves to make cologne. No laboratory equipment could be found in the castle, as the Count had already removed it, but the investigating judge found that the Count had travelled to Ghent to see a chemist a few months earlier.
After a long search, they did indeed find a chemist there, whom the Count visited under an assumed name, interested in extracting nicotine from tobacco leaves. He asked whether the plant poisons really left no traces in the body, and the chemist confirmed it.
The investigating judge searched the castle for traces of nicotine and found them on the wooden floor, on some of the clothes and on the buried remains of the cats on which the Count had tested the poison. The burns in Gustav’s mouth, throat and pharynx also had to be explained. Gustav was probably thrown to the ground and held by the Count while his wife poured sulphuric acid into his brother’s mouth. Why they did this was not clear, as there was no need to do so. They were probably just not so sure of the poison’s effectiveness.
Three months later, the trial of the Count and his wife began, and they now blamed each other. The Count claimed that he had experimented with nicotine and had therefore put it in a wine bottle, which his wife had mistakenly switched and offered to her brother as if it were a bottle of wine. The jurors needed only one hour to reach a verdict. While the wife was released, to everyone’s outrage, the Count ended up in the morgue.
In the following years, many chemists and pharmacists, using the method developed by Jean Servais Stas, discovered new reagents that could be used to detect plant poisons in the human body. For morphine alone, there were a dozen different reagents. These methods, while they all had a secure future, were only harbingers of a shocking reality that plunged plant poison toxicology into a serious crisis and deepened doubts about its viability.
They gave him aconitine and he died
On 13 March 1882, at the Old Bailey in London, Williams gave the most important defence of his career. The eyes of jurors, prosecutors, judges, spectators and the pale-faced thirty-year-old sitting on the dock were on him. Dr George Henry Lamson is said to have murdered his paralysed father-in-law, Percy John, with aconitine on 3 December 1881. Professors Stevenson and Dupre were convinced that, during the examination of the deceased, they had found an alkaloid in the corpse which showed all the signs of the poison of aconitine.
No process has attracted this kind of attention for many years. There were many people in the courtroom, mostly women. Perhaps because the accused was a doctor who had been a surgeon in the Serbo-Turkish war in 1876 and had become addicted to morphine there. After his return to London, he could not settle down. He was constantly in financial difficulties, chased by creditors, borrowing money and not paying it back, and cheque fraud. All this was discussed in the courtroom.
The motive for the murder of my father-in-law, who was a cripple, was clear; money. If he died, Lamson’s wife would get part of the estate. On the third of December, Lamson visited his father-in-law. He brought a cake, cut it and the three of them ate their piece. They drank tea and some sherry. Then Lamson recounted his travels in America, pulled some capsules out of his pocket and began to talk about a new American invention that made it easier to take medicine. He opened one of the capsules, filled it with the sugar that came with the tea, and told Percy to try and see how easy it was to swallow the capsule, which he did, laughing. He was taking a lot of medicine for the pain.
Then Lamson said goodbye. Not ten minutes had passed when Percy collapsed, started vomiting and complained of a gagging sensation. He was getting more and more restless, he felt like the skin was being torn from his body. He was in severe pain, so the doctor, who was called several times, gave him injections of morphine. Shortly before midnight, he died.
The autopsy showed no abnormalities, but alkaloid poisoning was suspected and Lamson was immediately suspected. On 4 September, a police inspector inspected the room where they had dined on the fateful evening and seized a cake, sherry and sugar. Meanwhile, Lamson had already travelled to Paris, and to everyone’s surprise returned a few days later and appeared at Scotland Yard, claiming that he was not responsible for Percy’s death. When he was arrested, he was apparently under the influence of morphine and a book on plant poisons was discovered among his luggage.
The seized objects and Percy’s internal organs were examined by Professors Stevenson and Dupre. Dr Stevenson was an exceptional expert, having “tasted” more than fifty plant poisons, and was therefore able to identify each one by taste before the results of the laboratory tests were known. He immediately recognised the taste of aconitine with his tongue. He then tried all known plant poison reagents in the laboratory, but without success. In 1881, no reagent for aconitine had yet been discovered.
He decided to experiment on animals, and they died shortly after receiving the aconitine from exactly the same symptoms as the unfortunate Percy. He found that just a few milligrams of aconitine caused death and was convinced that Lamson was just trying to mask the slightly sour taste of the poison with sugar.
Meanwhile, the audience in the auditorium listened open-mouthed to Lamson’s supporter Williams. After his opening remarks, Stevenson asked whether he was aware of the latest findings of Italian toxicologists, who had found that the decomposition of a corpse in a deceased person who had never been in contact with plant alkaloids leads to the development of alkali substances, i.e. alkaloids that react in the same way as plant alkaloids. In Italy, there have been several cases in recent years where non-plant alkaloids have been replaced by plant poisons and people who have never committed any murder have been accused.
Stevenson is sharp. Is it really possible that Williams had a weapon in his hands that could have been used to obtain Lamson’s acquittal? He himself was unaware of the work of Francesco Selmi, an Italian professor of chemistry at the University of Bologna, who had extracted alkaline extracts from the corpses of persons who had died natural deaths, which bore an uncanny resemblance to the plant poison aconitine. Stevenson wriggled out of it, cautiously claiming that he had not read the Italian’s work, but that he had heard of such cases, but that there was no solid evidence for generalising such claims. Will he be able to save Lamson, as there was enough other incriminating evidence against him?
He failed and Lamson was sentenced to death on 14 March. But doubts remained about the correctness of the verdict. Ten years later, one of the most famous trials in America has added to this suspicion, while at the same time helping to clarify the issue once and for all.
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Concealing traces of poison
In May 1892, Ike White, a reporter for the New York World newspaper, surprised readers with a sensational account of his visit to the mortician. There he met a Mr Smith from Newark, who accused Dr Buchanan of murdering his wife. Dr Buchanan was certainly less interested in his own medical practice than in his regular visits to the brothel, which was owned by Annie Sutherland, and Smith was merely the manager of the pleasure house.
In 1890, Dr Buchanan began courting and married the much older, plump and bloated Annie. Annie sold the brothel, made Dr Buchanan her heir and moved with him to New York. Administrator Smith was out of a job and convinced that Dr Buchanan only wanted his wife’s money. He was also able to tell that the couple had often quarreled about money and that Dr Buchanan had been going around saying that his wife was addicted to morphine and would soon die.
Indeed, Annie Buchanan died after only a year and a half of marriage, and the doctor diagnosed the cause of death as a heart attack. The medical examiner ignored Smith’s account, convinced that he was only speaking out of hatred for Dr Buchanan. However, the story was picked up by reporter Ike White, who specialised in murder mysteries as a reporter.
The newspaper published the story as the sensation of the month. But Dr Buchanan was no longer in New York. White found out the hard way that he had gone to Halifax, Canada, to remarry his ex-wife Helen. The two then moved to New York, where Dr Buchanan was to receive his expected inheritance.
Ike White was convinced he was on the trail of a big sensation. He frequented the pubs where Dr Buchanan was a frequent guest and learned that he had once said that those who murdered with morphine were just plain queers, because it was possible to escape punishment. “For every acid there is a base opposite, and for every reaction there is a counter-reaction.”
White also visited the doctor who confirmed that Annie Buchanan had died of a stroke. He admitted that there were some small signs of morphine poisoning, but he did not see the main sign, pupil constriction, and was convinced of a cerebral haemorrhage. However, he acknowledged that he knew that these haemorrhages were frequent and could be indicative of symptoms of morphine poisoning.
While wandering the pubs, Ike White met Dr Buchanan, who disappointed him. He was a small, unprepossessing man who poured whisky after whisky. White was struck by his pupils, which were unusually large and dilated. He remembered a former colleague of his who had eye problems, so his doctor advised him to put atropine in his eyes to help him examine his ocular background. White shuddered at the thought, which seemed so fantastic and unbelievable to him that he initially pushed it away. Later, he thought that Dr Buchanan had dripped atropine into his dying wife’s eyes to prevent the pupils from constricting because of the morphine. Was that his secret?
He informed the police, who ordered Annie Buchanan’s body to be exhumed. But Dr Buchanan suspected he was being followed and disappeared. He was found with the help of a worker at the cemetery, whom Dr Buchanan had paid to inform him if anyone wanted to dig at his wife’s grave.
A forensic examination found morphine poisoning and confirmed the possibility of atropine in the eyes of the deceased. Dr Buchanan was arrested. “New York Holds Its Breath” was the headline of the World newspaper when the trial of Dr Buchanan began on 20 March 1893. Sullivan, his defence lawyer, had studied all the literature on alkaloids in six months and was also familiar with the work of the Italian Selmi, and knew what his defence had to be based on. He was also helped by the discovery of Dr Vaughan, who had found in the remains of the pancreas of a corpse a “mortuary alkaloid” of the same colour as in the case of morphine poisoning.
The forensic toxicology expert Rudolph Witthaus, who was hired by the plaintiffs, had also combed through all the literature on alkaloids and was well prepared. He was convinced that the evidence of the existence of morphine in many of Annie Buchanan’s organs was so strong and extensive that there was no doubt about it.
Then the defence, led by Sullivan, made a crowning demonstration. With the help of a toxicologist and the weeks-old remains of a decomposing pancreas from a patient who had never taken morphine, it proved by an experiment in the courtroom and in front of the audience that rotting pancreatic tissue excretes a substance that has all the hallmarks of morphine.
The room was speechless and the defence was confident of victory. But then the turning point came. The defence called Dr Buchanan himself as a witness. This mistake was well exploited by the other side. During cross-examination, Dr Buchanan became confused, changed facts and made things up, and the jury was convinced that he was lying. After 28 hours of deliberation, they found him guilty. Buchanan’s lawyers spent the next two years trying to save his life.
Meanwhile, Dr Witthaus was able to show that the defence’s Crown evidence was sloppily conducted using impure amyl alcohol, which had a major impact on the proceedings. On 2 July 1895, Dr Buchanan was taken to the morgue.
In the following decade around the turn of the century, there were many reports of errors in the demonstration of plant alkaloids due to sloppy observations and the use of impure means, and the necessity of several successive tests to obtain correct results. This was the first step towards the search for an absolutely reliable method for the demonstration of plant alkaloids in cadavers. In the first quarter of the 20th century, pharmaceutical chemistry and industry also succeeded in producing artificial synthetic products which were similar to, and sometimes superior to, plant alkaloids in their therapeutic as well as their toxic action.
In 1939, pharmacologists discovered the synthetic drug dolantine, which combined the actions of the natural alkaloids atropine and morphine and was also known as a medicine. During World War II, synthetic polamidone was produced in Germany and was far superior to morphine as a painkiller. The old plant poisons were thus joined by a veritable flood of synthetic alkaloids.
Before World War II, a synthetic alkaloid antihistamine was developed in France, which was also used to treat asthma. They also managed to crystallise the synthetic alkaloids, and it turned out that these crystals take on characteristic shapes under X-rays so that they can be identified. Despite the successes of toxicology, it remains an open question whether the amount of poison found in a corpse can also be used to estimate the amount of poison used, and thus to infer whether it was murder, suicide or professional poisoning. Was this not the ultimate goal, the crowning achievement of all the efforts of toxicology?
Is there arsenic in the ground?
On 4 December 1911, Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Alfred Ward knocked on the door of the London flat of insurance agent Henry Seddon and told him, “You are under arrest for the murder of Eliza Barrow with an azren.”
Since Marie Lafarge was arrested decades ago, questions about this poison have been raised again and again. In 1842, the German chemist Hugo Reinsch discovered a new method of proving arsenic poisoning. He added hydrochloric acid to a solution supposed to contain arsenic, boiled it and then placed copper wires in it. A greyish layer appeared on the wires. The question that Orfila had already dealt with arose again. Is it possible that there is also natural arsenic in the human body, which comes into the body from unknown sources in nature and accumulates in individual organs? It would be necessary to find out how much arsenic from external sources can enter the human body without danger, how much arsenic is in the soil in cemeteries and how much is in human hair.
This was the situation in toxicology when Inspector Ward arrested Henry Seddon. Eliza Barrow was a 50-year-old plump and slightly mentally retarded woman who had inherited some money, which she guarded carefully. She lived in a rented flat with Henry Seddon, a man in his forties with a wife and five children, who was interested in money and nothing else. In this, he and Eliza were alike. So Eliza transferred her £1600 worth of “Indian shares” to him in return for a weekly annuity for life, calculating that this was better for her financially.
But her bank got into trouble and, at Seddon’s suggestion, Mrs Barrow withdrew all the money and hid it in her bedroom. A few days later she fell ill, vomiting, with joint pain and diarrhoea. Twelve days later, she was nearing the end of her life and cried out, “I’m dying!” Seddon decided that there was no need to call the doctor again.
The following day, the unfortunate woman died. Seddon went to her room and searched it, and was seen counting notes. He quickly took care of the death certificate, which listed the cause of death as “epidemic diarrhoea”. The burial was so quick that even her relatives were not informed, but the cheapest burial was chosen. Seddon, who also received a commission from the undertakers for arranging the funeral, informed Eliza’s cousin Vonderhab that his cousin had died, leaving him only £10. He told him that he had paid £11 for the funeral and that Vonderhab therefore owed him another £1.
Vonderhabe went to Scotland Yard and the investigation began. The body was exhumed and the arsenic poisoning was diagnosed using the Marsh method. The amount of arsenic in the corpse now had to be determined. When the body was examined in the septic tank by toxicologist Willcox, he found that her weight had dropped from 60 kilograms when she was alive to only 23 kilograms after her death.
Until then, it was impossible to determine the amount of arsenic used for poisoning, even using the Marsh procedure. Willcox therefore embarked on a complex procedure in which he compared the amount of tissue used during the examination of each organ by the Marsh procedure with the minimum amount of arsenic he found in each organ. He multiplied all these results by 200 to obtain a comparison with the corpse, which was now much lighter due to the outflow of body fluids.
He found that Elise had 7.3 milligrams of arsenic in her stomach at the time of her death. He repeated the same process for all the other organ tissues. When he added it all up, he came up with 131.57 milligrams of arsenic, enough to cause fatal poisoning.
On the fourth of March 1912, Seddon appeared in the Old Bailey courtroom and one of the most passionate forensic-toxicological battles in London’s history began. Seddon’s defence was taken over by Hall, one of London’s most famous barristers. Contrary to his usual belief, he did not believe in Seddon’s innocence, but he defended him vigorously as if he were defending an innocent man. He was smart enough to know that he would not be able to ignore Willcox’s calculations of the amount of arsenic in the corpse.
But he disputed the accuracy of the calculations, saying that the body had lost too much fluid for the results to be correct. What Willcox showed was, in Hall’s view, highly questionable data using a multiplier of 200. In addition, a different amount of arsenic was found in the victim’s hair at the hair roots than at the hair ends. Is it possible, then, that the poison had entered Eliza’s body a year earlier and that Seddon could not have been the culprit?
The next day, Willcox quickly went to the forensic building where Eliza’s body was still lying and checked the amount of arsenic in her hair. What he found secured his victory in court. The arsenic had got into the victim’s hair from the outside, as the body was lying in the ground.
On 18 April 1922, Seddon was hanged at Pantonville Prison. Willcox won, but Hall’s doubts about the accuracy of the calculations of the amount of poison only influenced the further development of toxicology. A tortuous wrangle began over the correct method for determining the amount of poison in the body. While Willcox had seen the use of photographic apparatus to measure the quantity, he had not seen the use of the spectrophotometer, which made it possible to determine even extremely small quantities of poison in a corpse. New methods have also shown that arsenic is much more widespread in the soil than had been thought.
Twelve unproven murders
This was a major step forward for toxicology, and it seemed that it had finally won. But in the spring of 1952, an event put it to the test again. It happened in the south-western French town of Poiters. At the heart of the affair was a woman accused of murdering no fewer than twelve people with arsenic. Her name was Marie Besnard, born Devaillaud, and she was referred to in the newspapers as the ‘Black Widow of Loudun’.
On 21 July 1949, when she was arrested, Marie Besnard was 53 years old, a fairly well-off farmer from the small town of Loudun. She was no different from other women in the French countryside, with its small farms, artisans and tenants, where everyone knew everyone and where money was still stashed under the bed, they partied in taverns and did each other’s business.
It was this long-standing pursuit that sparked the Marie Besnard affair. And as usual, the pursuit began with Madame Pintou, the postmistress.
In October 1947, Leon Besnard, husband of Marie Besnard, died after a short illness. Shortly before his death, he is said to have told a postmistress that his wife was poisoning him. She reported this to the investigating inspector, 25-year-old Pierre Roger, who was unaware that the affair would last for 14 years. Initial investigations did not yield any specific results. But in 1947, Dietz, a 20-year-old German prisoner of war, was working on the farm, and everyone thought he was the lover of the 30-year-old Marie.
Until his arrival, the town’s inhabitants had been disturbed by a flood of obscene letters, which were later discovered to have been written by Marie Besnard herself, because of her unfulfilled sexual desires. She herself denied this.
Then the letters stopped arriving when young Dietz came to the farm. Marie was supposed to get rid of her old husband because she had a young lover. In 1949, her mother Louise, who lived on the farm, died at the age of 78. Her death was unclear and the doctor kept changing his opinion on the cause of death. At one time he gave the cause as kidney failure, at another angina pectoris, then urinary poisoning and finally severe influenza.
When Marie Besnard hired a detective of dubious reputation to intimidate all those who mentioned her husband’s murder, the police had enough suspicions and decided to exhume the corpse of the deceased Leon Besnard, as well as Marie Besnard’s mother. Qualitative and quantitative tests revealed 39 milligrammes of arsenic in the body of Leon Besnard and 58 milligrammes in that of his mother.
Inspector Roger arrested and interrogated both Marie Besnard and Dietz’s lover, but then released him and he immediately fled across the border into Germany. The investigation revealed that suspicious deaths had been occurring in the Besnard family and in its neighbours, dating back as far as 1929, when her first husband is said to have died of tuberculosis. Then, as soon as her husband’s aunt made Marie Besnard her heir, her aunt and her husband’s sister died alongside her husband’s sister. In 1940, her husband’s grandmother and her husband’s father also died.
This brings to twelve the number of sudden deaths. The bodies were recovered in a number of different ways, and all of them were analysed for high levels of arsenic. However, all the victims showed no signs of acute arsenic poisoning. This was not surprising, since the causes of death were always determined by inexperienced rural doctors. Marie Besnard’s interrogations and the forensic investigations lasted two years. The affair attracted the attention of the entire French public, and well-known lawyers saw it as an opportunity to increase their reputation. Thus, the famous lawyer Gautraut took over the defence of Marie Besnard. He knew that he would only succeed if he raised suspicions about the accuracy of the toxicological analyses of the accusation.
The trial began in Poitiers in February 1952. Any attentive listener would have noticed immediately that the defence did not actually have any credible witnesses, it was all rumour and performance. The defence had only one answer; arsenic in the remains of the corpses had been proved by one of France’s most famous toxicologists, Dr Georges Béroud of Marseille. And it was always Marie Besnard who inherited on the death of her relatives.
Béroud appeared in court with his toxicological analyses. He has done a truly gigantic job. Over a period of two years, hundreds of bottles of exhumed tissues travelled from Loudun to Marseilles, all of them subjected to toxicological procedures based on the Marsch method, refined with the findings of the Seddon trial. The soil in the cemeteries was also examined. Béroud, however, has always stuck to the findings of his profession. When the judge asked him whether he could confirm that these were criminal acts, i.e. murders, he replied: ‘Oh, no. I could never confirm such a thing. What I have stated is only that I found arsenic in the remains of the dead.”
He was unaware that he would soon fall victim to the forensic tricks that lawyer Gautraut had prepared. He was a victim of his own science, because he had partly neglected the bureaucratic recording of every detail and control of what ever was going on. No one knew how lawyer Gautraut had got hold of the correspondence between Inspector Roger and Béroud, but these files were now circulating in the courtroom. This was an attempt to portray Béroud’s work as disorganised or even as a mess, and to suggest that he was acting in accordance with Inspector Roger’s wishes.
The Court decided to have a new team of toxicologists re-analyse the tissues. This was an obvious success for Gautraut, who knew that the new analysis would be less accurate due to the deterioration of the excavated bodies. Some remains had even been reburied in the ground, so that in some places it was no longer possible to carry out forensic analysis at all.
But despite the major difficulties, a new group of toxicologists concluded that the data would be anything but favourable to Marie Besnard and would confirm Béroud’s results. They even found arsenic in Leon Besnard’s hair at twenty-four times the normal level. Gautraut, seeing that there was no point in waiting to confront Béroud again, did what lawyers usually do when they are in a pinch; he began to read the scientific literature.
He has read that arsenic is not radioactive in its normal state. It becomes so in a nuclear reactor when bombarded with neutrons. This turns arsenic into an element that emits rays, which can be measured. But there are other elements in hair that could interfere with correct measurement. This is what was shown when Leon Besnard’s hair was bombarded with neutrons in a small nuclear reactor. But Gautraut was not perplexed by these incomplete results, which gave him the chance to buy time, while the court could have started to question the work of the new toxicologists. And he did.
In March 1954, the trial resumed, this time in Bordeaux. The plaintiffs were represented by the state lawyer Steck. The court and the prosecution were confused when Gautraut started to explain something about atomic physics and the amounts of arsenic found in hair, since they knew nothing about atomic physics. They were even more disturbed by the fact that the latest research had shown that a larger amount of arsenic could also come into the hair from the soil in which the body was buried.
The Court decided to ask for a third opinion from toxicologists. However, as this could take a year or two, Marie Besnard was released on bail for that time on a bond of one million francs. The new prosecutor, Guillemin, contacted the well-known French physicist Fréderic Joliot Curie, who in 1958 re-examined the remains of Leon Besnard’s hair using an improved method and found a lethal dose of arsenic in the hair.
Incredibly, the investigation of the soil in the Loudun cemetery lasted for seven long years, all the way back to 1961. Bodies were re-excavated, soil moisture and composition measured, and groundwater movement measured. In November 1961, the process resumed, Marie Besnard was in the dock for the third time, and the pointless spectacle began again. Now it was just a question of how much arsenic could get out of the soil and into human hair.
Here, too, science has admitted that it faces an unknown world when it comes to the behaviour of arsenic in soil and in corpses. Previous research has not taken enough account of the peculiarities of nature. It has not been possible to establish a clear relationship between arsenic in the soil and arsenic in the corpse. It means nothing if the amount of arsenic in the soil is small and the amount in the carcass is large.
On 12 December 1961, the court acquitted Marie Besnard of twelve counts of murder for lack of evidence. A few years later, she was free to write a book of her memoirs, which immediately became a bestseller.
Toxicology was then pushed to its limits. The new science of microbiology should now be in a position to clarify these uncertainties. But in the 1960s it was still a thing of the future. Even before toxicology had managed to solve all its problems, a new danger had already emerged. It is already clear from the history of alkaloids that the pharmaceutical industry is bringing to the market ever new quantities of synthetic alkaloids which may be toxic at the same time. Millions of people are taking unknown amounts of these alkaloids every day, increasing the chances of murder, suicide or negligent poisoning. Today, hardly anyone kills with arsenic anymore and toxicology has had to take completely new directions in its development.
