Poisoning the Pecks of Grand Rapids

by Tobin T. Buhk

  To reporters, it seemed as though the DA was trying too hard to convince them he had no other suspects in the crime. Naturally, they became convinced he had, and thus newspaper reporters eyed Margaret Horton with even more suspicion than before.

  There was plenty of material to keep reporters gossiping. When Margaret’s identity as “Mrs. A.W. Walters” became known, Swann had asked Harry Mack Horton to provide a photograph of his wife. Horton sent two snapshots. On the back of one photo, Swann immediately recognized the name of Dr. Muller—the physician who helped Waite acquire arsenic to “kill cats.” Waite, Swann had learned, also expressed his interest in bacteriology to Dr. Muller and asked him for an introduction to an expert in the field.

  Scrawled onto the back of the other photograph were the name and telephone number of Grace Hoffman, a professional singer. On Saturday morning, Swann had an interesting chat with the pretty, petite vocalist. She relayed two conversations she had had with Margaret Horton that caused the DA to sit up in his chair. A few days before Aunt Catherine gave Waite $40,000, Margaret boasted that she had just come into a considerable amount of money. A few days after John Peck died, Margaret said she was in deep trouble, although she didn’t specify what type of trouble. Swann also learned that when Waite purchased specimens of typhoid and diphtheria, he was with an unidentified female.

  Margaret Horton had some explaining to do, so Swann invited her in for an interview with John Dooling and George Brothers.

  While Waite’s “studio companion” waited in the hallway of the criminal courts building along with her lawyer, Harold Spielberg, Dooling questioned one of the men who supplied Waite with dozens of germ cultures.

  William Webber rubbed his hands together as Dooling stared at him. The documents found in Waite’s safety deposit box led straight to Webber, a clerk at Cornell Medical School’s bacteriology laboratory.

  On six different occasions, the frightened clerk said, Waite came to the laboratory to acquire specimens. Webber admitted procuring the bacilli, including typhoid, pneumonia, diphtheria and tuberculosis, but he insisted he played no part in any murder plot.

  “He asked for the germs and represented himself to be a practicing physician and surgeon and told me he was conducting a series of experiments with cats,” Webber explained. Waite told the clerk that he brought the germs home, where he conducted his experimentations.

  Dooling immediately recognized the reference to cats—the same reference Waite used when he obtained arsenic from Timmerman’s pharmacy.

  Webber scratched his head. Waite, he added, always dropped by after hours. “It was irregular to give him the germs after hours, but I believed what he said and let him have them.”89

  The “dove among crows,” Mrs. Margaret Weaver Horton. This is one of three photographs that circulated widely in newspapers throughout the United States. From the New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress.

  Webber said that Waite acquired the specimens during the period from December 22 until March 8—a timeline that led investigators to believe that Waite tried to infect John Peck but became impatient when it didn’t work and turned to arsenic instead. The receipt proving Waite purchased the poison from Timmerman was dated March 9.

  Webber also said that a woman accompanied Waite on one occasion.

  Dooling called Margaret Horton in from the hallway.

  “That’s the woman,” Webber exclaimed. “She came with Dr. Waite when he bought the germ cultures.”

  It was Margaret Horton’s turn on the hot seat. She and her attorney took their places in the wooden armchairs while Dooling and Brothers whispered to each other. For “Mrs. A.W. Walters,” it would be the beginning of a very long day. Over the next six hours, the assistant district attorneys grilled Margaret Horton.90

  Their first question: was she “K. Adams”?

  Margaret crinkled up her nose. She had no idea who that person was. She did, however, admit fibbing to reporters when she denied knowing Waite checked her into the Plaza as “Mrs. Walters.”91

  She denied any knowledge of Waite’s plot to murder the Peck family. Waite always spoke about his in-laws, she explained, with affection and praise. He never alluded to their demise or any plot, although he did remark about their poor health on numerous occasions.

  Waite, Margaret said, told her he was studying bacteriology and even took her to a laboratory where he acquired specimens. Waite told her these were chemicals he was using to test their effect on various bacteria. Waite even showed her the germs under a microscope. “Why, he put some of them under a microscope and let me see them wiggle.”

  Next, Dooling asked Margaret to detail the nature of her relationship with Waite.

  She insisted that they never slept together, describing their relationship as platonic. They playacted, that was all. “We studied Shakespeare. Dr. Waite played Romeo to my Juliet,” Margaret said.92

  Margaret remained calm as the district attorney hurled one accusation after another at her, but she grew enraged when Brothers suggested that Waite paid her for her affection.

  The allegation stemmed from a curious coincidence: the same day that Catherine Peck’s attorney raised $8,000 from a real estate transaction, Harry Mack Horton and his wife obtained about the same amount.

  This sudden incursion of money coupled with Horton’s seemingly laissez faire attitude toward Margaret’s playacting with another man led Dooling and Brothers to suggest a scenario in which Waite paid her for her favors.

  Margaret offered an alternate explanation for the large sum of money. “He [Harry Mack Horton] got the money from wireless telegraphy with Mexico. He didn’t get it all at once, but in small sums.” She felt her temperature rise and her heart beating in her neck. She hated it when they besmirched Harry. Just because he stood by her, investigators and press alike had dragged out every detail of his life in some perverted effort to make him seem like a criminal. They even brought up the fact that he filed for bankruptcy on January 1, 1915, only to be discharged on December 29, 1915, as if it suggested something nefarious. It was true that she first met Waite around the time Harry was discharged from bankruptcy, but that was nothing more than coincidental.

  She paused and drew in a deep breath to calm her nerves before continuing. “I’ve only done what a million other women do constantly, in being guilty of a slight indiscretion. It was just my luck to have it all come out like this.” She addressed the allegation that she had planned to run off with Waite, explaining that she studied languages for her stage career and for no other reason. “Of course, it didn’t imply that I was going abroad with Dr. Waite because I studied the languages with him. I couldn’t sing Italian operas in English, could I?”93

  Margaret denied ever singing in a disreputable establishment. She hated the description “cabaret singer” that was used by several reporters. She considered it an insult. “I was never a cabaret singer,” she insisted, defensively. “I never sang in any hotel except the Metropole and that was only for the opening week, but I sang at entertainments and concerts, because I was then studying at the Cincinnati College of Music and needed the money, as I was supporting myself and paying for my musical education.”94

  Arthur, she explained, never gave her anything, although he did pay for her lessons at the YMCA School of Expression.

  Dooling asked her about the diamond ring Waite gave her when he said goodbye.

  Here, Spielberg spoke on Margaret’s behalf. She did receive the ring, “but she gave it back. It [the ring] cost $2,000, but she gave it back.”95

  Margaret blushed and hoped that Harry didn’t recognize her embarrassment. She wanted that ring, so badly in fact, that she would later attempt to get it back through Spielberg.

  The press had a field day following Margaret Horton’s interview. The headlines transformed her into a wild, home-wrecking seductress with a history of domestic destruction.

  A Grand Rapids News writer mocked Margaret and alluded to an underco
ver relationship when he wrote that she and Waite “studied Romeo and Juliet in a very realistic manner.”96

  The dailies of both Grand Rapids and New York aired the dirty laundry of Cincinnati engineer Paul Held, who told reporters that Margaret Horton destroyed his marriage, although not in the way most would expect. When “Otila” came to live with him and his wife, Held explained, his wife fell “completely under her control.”

  “Men flocked to see Otila,” Held said, describing Margaret’s magnetic charm. “Finally, my wife began to love Otila more than she did me. She sued me for divorce and named Otila in the petition. The girl skipped out before the case was tried, but my wife got the divorce. Otila came back and lived with my wife for a year and a half.”97

  Ray Schindler, always one step ahead of Swann’s men, realized that the evidence of Waite’s diabolical plot to infect the Pecks would be found in the Coliseum.

  That afternoon, while Dooling and Brothers interrogated Margaret Horton, Schindler and Andrew Taylor made a sweep of Waite’s apartment to search for any possible evidence missed during earlier searches. They emptied bookcases, pulled out dresser drawers and overturned cabinets.

  They placed on the kitchen table anything and everything related to the biological warfare Waite apparently waged against the Pecks.

  Their two-hour sweep netted a large cache of evidence. Stacks of glass slides piled in tiers on the table glittered under the sunlight. In all, they found 180 slides with labels such as “tetanus,” “Asiatic cholera,” “typhus,” “pneumonia” and “tuberculosis.”

  By Saturday evening, March 25, Margaret Horton’s face had appeared on front pages across the nation. Thanks to the Evening World, she had gained national infamy as Waite’s other woman despite her insistence that they weren’t lovers. Harry Mack Horton became the unwitting victim of Margaret’s newfound stardom. Margaret loved Harry, so she wanted to do everything she could to protect her image and that of her husband. After her six-hour marathon interrogation, she gave a brief statement to the press.

  Margaret wanted to emphasize that she and Waite knew about, even spoke about, each other’s spouses. “As I told you last night, he often spoke to me about his wife, and about his father-in-law. He wanted me to come up to his house to meet his wife. She would just fall in love with you, and so would Father, he told me. I would willingly have gone to visit his people, but it just seemed as if my many engagements would never give me the opportunity. On the other hand, as I told, I was just as urgent in asking him to come to the house and meet Mr. Horton.”

  As for her role as “Mrs. Walters,” Margaret explained, “I told you last night the circumstances under which we engaged the room at the Plaza and just what my position was there in regard to him.”

  A few of the reporters chuckled at Margaret’s choice of words. Over the past few days, many of them wondered about the positions she and Dr. Waite had shared at the Plaza.

  Margaret went on to explain why she made such a hasty retreat from the hotel. When Waite returned to Grand Rapids after delivering the body of John Peck, she said, he called her at the Plaza. She heard an uncharacteristic nervousness in his tone when he told her to leave immediately. “They are accusing me of something I didn’t do. You must leave at once,” he said.

  She did as she was told and promptly paid the bill of $250, which raised a few eyebrows, because Margaret insisted she didn’t know that Waite had dubbed her “Mrs. A.W. Walters.” If she paid the bill for the room, the reporters wondered, she must have known about the pseudonyms Waite chose. They also quoted the Plaza’s assistant manager who stated that Waite, who presented himself as “Mr. Walters,” actually introduced Margaret as his wife.98

  Few readers believed that Margaret Horton’s sheets at the Plaza were white, and even fewer understood Harry’s unrelenting loyalty—a fact Harry discovered when they returned home that evening to find a mailbox stuffed with letters.

  “Open your eyes, you boob!” screamed one letter.

  The negative press caused Horton to go on the offensive. In a lengthy interview, he characterized Margaret as a “dove among crows” in New York City. People simply didn’t understand Margaret’s innocent nature, he said.

  “How do you know your wife is a spotless dove?” the reporter asked.

  “Well, I’ll tell you. In the first place, I know my wife is a beautiful woman. But that is no reason why I should watch her as a hawk does a dove. She is armored by her innocence. And I am not afraid of other men, male crows, for I treat women with chivalry, and I expect that other men will do the same.”99

  While Harry Mack Horton described his Shangri-La, one of the city’s crows was trying to figure a way out of its cage.

  Waite couldn’t afford Stanchfield, and his family, resigned to Arthur’s guilt, decided they would attempt to keep him out of the electric chair by plea bargaining with Swann for a reduced charge of second-degree murder.

  The family agreed that their appeal to Swann would depend on several factors: a complete confession of guilt, evidence that Arthur was mentally unbalanced, cooperation from the Peck family and consent from Catherine Peck to pay for the attorney. Together, they could only muster $5,000, but perhaps, with mercy, Catherine Peck would do this one last thing to keep Arthur out of the chair.

  Walter Drew, Catherine Peck’s attorney, circa 1916. From the Bain News Service, Library of Congress.

  Distraught and emotional, Frank Waite asked Catherine Peck’s attorney, Walter Drew, to represent Arthur in the proceedings. A reporter eavesdropped on the pathetic sight.

  “Mr. Drew,” Frank Waite wailed, “for God’s sake, help us. We know Arthur is guilty, but help us save the boy from the electric chair. Help us to do that and we ask no more.”100 The reporter scribbled Waite’s words in a notebook while Drew contemplated the proposal. Frank shrugged, “It is hopeless to present that Arthur is not guilty.”

  Drew, realizing the conflict of interest, said he couldn’t defend Arthur but agreed to help find a suitable representative. He phoned Catherine Peck, who agreed to try to dissuade her family from pushing for the death penalty.

  Nonetheless, Drew doubted an insanity plea would succeed. Swann indicated that he had obtained enough evidence to quash such a defense. Besides, the Waite family couldn’t afford the high cost of hiring alienists to testify on Waite’s behalf.

  Meanwhile, Frank went to Bellevue, where he would try talking Arthur into giving a full confession.

  8

  “THE MAN FROM EGYPT”

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK

  Tuesday, March 28–Wednesday, March 29, 1916

  Ray Schindler stood in a corner of the room as Frank Waite approached his brother’s bedside. He eavesdropped as Frank explained that Swann might entertain a plea deal keeping Arthur off death row if Arthur gave a complete confession.

  Arthur stared at Frank for a few seconds, shrugged and agreed to tell the truth. Tears welled up at the corners of his eyes and began sliding down his cheeks as he made several admissions. He had lied about obtaining arsenic for Peck’s suicide. He bought the poison specifically to do away with his father-in-law. When he could no longer stand the old man’s suffering, he finished him off with a chloroform rag and a pillow he pressed against Peck’s face. At first, Waite denied murdering Hannah Peck but then changed his story and admitted spiking her food with bacteria cultures.101

  Frank Waite grasped his brother’s hand and gave it a gentle squeeze.

  For the first time, Frank felt a sense of hope. He would broker a deal with the DA. If Arthur agreed to repeat his confession to Swann, he might not have to die in Sing Sing’s electric chair. Arthur agreed, once again and for a stenographer, to detail every facet of the twisted fairy tale he had authored for the Peck family.

  Frank also wanted to do what he could to return the money Arthur had taken. He asked Arthur to sign a document that turned over his assets to Catherine Peck. Without question, Arthur scribbled his name at the bottom of the paper.

  Fr
ank then left the ward and called Swann to tell him about the confession. Swann arranged for a transcriptionist to accompany him to Bellevue the next morning.

  That evening, a stunning twist occurred in the case. Walter Deuel, the attorney who had consulted with the Peck family, decided to represent Arthur Warren Waite.

  He took the case, he explained to the press, at the request of Catherine Peck, to make sure his client received a fair shake. “I assure you,” Deuel stated, “that I am retained only to see that full justice is done. I am sure the district attorney wants only to bring out all the facts.”102 Deuel, the former head of the DA’s “homicide bureau,” knew his business.

  Swann, followed by a transcriptionist, Mancuso, Dooling, Brothers and Schindler, shuffled into Waite’s Bellevue room, expecting to hear the climactic confession Frank Waite had promised. It would conclude one of the most fascinating criminal cases in the city’s history.

  Schindler thought Waite looked like a man about to spill his guts. He had seen that same agonizing look on the faces of many suspects. But each time Waite began to say something remotely incriminating, Deuel interrupted and said that his client was far too exhausted to continue.

  Deuel, however, failed to completely muzzle his client, who shocked everyone when he remembered a pertinent detail he had neglected to tell Swann in his first confession: the “man from Egypt.”103

  His body, Waite explained, contained two souls who lived side by side: one gentle and kind and the other malevolent. “Another man, or spirit, at times occupies my body and makes me two personalities—one good and the other bad. I was powerless against him. When I felt him take hold of me I knew I was gone.”