by E. J. Wagner
The marriage was unhappy. Chantrelle tormented Elizabeth by frequently jesting in public that his medical knowledge would allow him to poison her without a trace. After ten years of wretched matrimony, in October 1877, he insured her life, over her objections, for one thousand pounds. The policy was unusual—it would pay only if Elizabeth died by accident.
On January 2, 1878, a maid entered the bedroom of Elizabeth Chantrelle to find the lady deeply unconscious. Some vomited pieces of fruit stained the bedclothes. There was a strong smell of gas. Amazingly, there had been an accident.
A Dr. Carmichael, who had never treated the patient before, was called. After a brief examination, he sent a note to Dr. Henry Littlejohn, who was both police surgeon and toxicologist. (He was also a colleague and frequent collaborator of Dr. Joseph Bell.) The note read, “Dear Sir, if you would like to see a case of coal gas poisoning, please come.”
Littlejohn’s immediate impression was that the symptoms were more in keeping with narcotic poisoning than gas exposure. He collected the vomited matter and had Elizabeth sent to the hospital, where the unfortunate woman expired.
The postmortem revealed no narcotics in the corpse but a lethal quantity of opium in the vomited material. This was not unusual. It was known that opium could escape detection in animal tissues if the deceased lived long enough for it to have passed through the system.
Upon examining the premises, the gas company found a broken gas bracket and determined it had been deliberately damaged.
It took a jury only one hour and ten minutes to find Eugene Marie Chantrelle guilty of murder. Three weeks later, he was hanged.
The Chantrelle case attracted great attention. Many felt that toxicology had redeemed itself as a weapon in the interest of justice. But although a number of researchers believe that Littlejohn consulted with Joseph Bell on the case, Bell’s name does not appear on the official documents. He is known to have suppressed knowledge of his involvement in a number of forensic cases, evidently fearing that it might damage his reputation as a gentleman. The Smethurst affair had cast a long shadow. Along with problems of trust, toxicologists had to battle the very complex nature of their calling and the fact that every advance seemed to be followed by a setback.
Heavy metal poisons such as arsenic and antimony could now be found even in small quantities in human tissue. Determining how they got there was another matter. Arsenic, for instance, is common in the environment. It is found in rocks, in soil, and, until the late twentieth century, in synthetic materials such as paint and wallpaper. Arsenic is naturally found in small amounts in the living human body. An excellent preservative, it was often an ingredient in embalming fluid. Experimental burying and exhumation of corpses disclosed that bodies could absorb arsenic after death, thus raising the ghastly possibility that convictions based purely on the presence of arsenic might have been in error.
Recovering plant alkaloid poison from dead tissue had long been a major problem, as the alkaloid left no detectable traces. Orfila, considered the father of toxicology, thought it might be hopeless.
In 1851, a Belgian chemist named Jean Servais Stas devised a complex method for extracting the potent poison nicotine from human remains to solve a murder. Grinding the corpse’s organs to a pulpy mass, Stas then combined them with alcohol and acid, which separated the alkaline poison from the tissue. Building on his work, chemists all over the world developed reagents to test for various alkaloids.
It seemed the problem was solved. But research on the bodies of people known to have died of natural causes disclosed that certain alkaloids form in the body after death. These cadaveric alkaloids could appear dangerously similar to plant poisons. The stage was set for decades of conflicting expert testimony.
As the nineteenth century wore on, scientists published their findings at a rapid pace, newspapers were full of accounts of sensational crimes, and the public’s taste for suspense fiction grew. Although some lugubrious commentators warned that access to such material would give criminals new and dangerous ideas and make crime harder to combat, calmer heads found this unlikely—most of the fiction published was wildly inaccurate and the tabloid press even more fanciful. But it is true that poisoning cases grew in complexity as new and dangerous drugs became available.
In New York City in 1891, a young medical student named Carlyle Harris had been secretly married to Helen Potts, a residential pupil at the Comstock School for Young Ladies, for almost a year. The other girls at Comstock were told that he was Helen’s fiancé. Harris claimed that the marriage had to remain secret for fear his family would not continue to support his studies if he married while still at school.
Helen’s mother began to insist on disclosure. Not surprisingly, Helen developed insomnia, for which Harris prescribed six lowdose capsules of quinine and morphine. (In those halcyon days, medical students were allowed to prescribe.) This was a common sedative at the time, and it was made to order by McIntyre & Son, a respected New York pharmacy.
Harris picked up the capsules and gave only four of them to Helen. She was directed to take one capsule a night. She did so for three uneventful nights. On the fourth evening, she awoke in a delirium, breathing with great difficulty, her pupils clearly contracted. The school doctor’s frantic efforts to save her were to no avail.
Harris produced the two capsules he had held back, which upon examination proved to contain only a benign dose of morphine. Helen was buried, but so many questions were raised by the newspapers that she was exhumed. The New York toxicologist Rudolph Witthaus found morphine in all of the girl’s organs but no quinine. The implication was that the last capsule she took contained only pure morphine. Given the size of the capsules, it would have been an overdose. The pharmacy insisted that it could account for all the drugs it dispensed and that there was no mistake on the pharmacy’s part.
Harris was arrested and charged with murder. The investigators concluded that Harris had filled one of the four capsules Helen had been given with a lethal dose of morphine, which he could easily obtain at the medical school. He had kept two capsules to enable him to show that they were harmless in case Helen took the fatal one last. Harris was convicted and executed in 1893.
It was a plot intricate enough to have been influenced by a Sherlock Holmes story. It is interesting to note that A Study in Scarlet, the first novel in which the Great Detective appeared, had been published in the United States by J. B. Lippincott in 1890, just a year before the Harris case. The book attracted more attention and much greater popularity in America than it had in its native Britain, and it was widely discussed. It includes a famous scene in which the character Jefferson Hope describes how he plotted to kill his victim, saying:
“One day the professor was lecturing on poisons, and he showed his students some alkaloid, as he called it, which he had extracted from some South American arrow poison, and which was so powerful that the least grain meant instant death. I spotted the bottle in which this preparation was kept, and when they were all gone, I helped myself to a little of it. I was a fairly good dispenser, so I worked this alkaloid into small, soluble pills, and each pill I put in a box with a similar pill made without the poison.”
The name of the poison isn’t given, but the method of deployment is. Did Carlyle Harris read A Study in Scarlet and see in it a way out of his difficulties? It’s equally possible that one of the investigators read the novel and realized how the murder of Helen Potts had been accomplished.
As Sherlock Holmes remarked in “The Adventure of the Dancing Men,” “What one man can invent, another can discover.”
Whatever remains
• The hypodermic syringe was developed in 1853 by Charles Pravez and Alexander Wood, working simultaneously but separately. Its minuscule punctures have served as important clues in a number of historic medical murders.
• In 1965, Dr. Carmela Coppolino died of a homicidal injection of the anesthetic succinylcholine. Her husband, Dr. Carl Coppolino, was convicted of the crime.
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• In 1975, Dr. Charles Friedgood was found guilty of killing his wife by injection of Demerol. It is of dubious comfort to note that homicides of this nature are often performed by well-trained health care professionals in the privacy of their own homes.
• The summation offered by Justice Fitzjames Stephen in the 1889 trial of Florence Maybrick lasted two full days and was riddled with errors of fact. By long tradition, judges of the period were rarely censored and were allowed enormous control over juries. During the early Victorian era, an undecided British jury could be locked up without fire, food, or light until it reached a verdict. No doubt as a result of this draconian rule, juries were rarely hung, and the accused often was. By the more enlightened 1870s, a sequestered jury was allowed refreshments and warmth as long as it paid the bill for them. At the whim of the judge, trial sessions often stretched for many hours with no break for the call of nature. Judges were thoughtfully provided with vases discreetly hidden behind the high bench, but the unfortunate jury was not so privileged.
• There were two famous medical forensic experts named Littlejohn, father and son. They were both knighted, and both taught at the Medical School at Edinburgh. The father, Sir Henry Duncan Littlejohn, had the official title of Professor of Medical Jurisprudence. His son, Sir Henry Harvey Littlejohn, was appointed Professor of Forensic Medicine. The similarity of names has led to frequent confusion among historians. One surmises similar confusion among the Littlejohn family and social circle, as the younger Littlejohn was informally referred to as “Harvey.”
CHAPTER 5
Disguise and the Detective
“Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well staged performance.” —Sherlock Holmes in The Valley of Fear
Things are seldom what they seem / Skim milk masquerades as cream,” Gilbert and Sullivan warned in H.M.S. Pinafore, the witty, popular operetta that tickled the English stage in 1878. Nowhere was this observation more appropriate than in the world of Holmes and Watson based at 221B Baker Street.
Sherlock Holmes is a supreme master of disguise and the dramatic arts, frequently demonstrating his skill as he gathers information in the pursuit of justice. He is adept at makeup, clever at costume, and gifted at altering his movements. Watson describes his friend’s ability at extraordinary metamorphosis in “A Scandal in Bohemia”:
It was close upon four before the door opened, and a drunken looking groom, ill-kempt and side-whiskered, with an inflamed face and disreputable clothes, walked
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into the room. Accustomed as I was to my friend’s amazing powers in the use of disguises, I had to look three times before I was certain that it was indeed he.
Not only can Holmes change his physical appearance, Watson continues in the same tale, but he also has the ability to submerge his unique personality in that of the role he adopts:
It was not merely that Holmes changed his costume. His expression, his manner, his very soul seemed to vary with every fresh part that he assumed.
This style clearly places the Great Detective in the vanguard of theatrical expression. During the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century, the supremely artificial, declamatory style of acting was by far the dominant one in Europe. In the tradition of the famous French actress Sarah Bernhardt, stage gestures were sweeping. Histrionic poses were struck and held for as long as thirty seconds. Lines were recited sonorously and rhythmically rather than naturally. Makeup was elaborate and highly artificial. Much of this overly emphatic technique originally developed because of the inadequate lighting and poor acoustics that existed in early theaters, but it continued in vogue simply because both actors and audiences were accustomed to it.
The idea of a player completely immersing himself in a role, speaking his lines simply and naturally, creating the illusion of spontaneity, as Holmes is credited with doing, was a novel one in conservative Britain. Some of the credit for it must go to Bernhardt’s great Italian rival, Eleanora Duse, who refused to wear stage makeup and whose natural delivery charmed her audiences and inspired a new realism in theater.
But the impetus for an acting style so natural that it was believable at intimate quarters can be traced even further back, to late eighteenth-century France. The teeming world of thieves, informers, whores, and cutthroats that swarmed in the shadow of the guillotine gave rise to a clever progenitor of both disguise artists and forensic reasoning: Eugène François Vidocq (also known as François Eugène Vidocq).
In considering Vidocq’s life, it is difficult to separate fact from fiction. Details of his adventurous career are cloaked in legend and garnished with myth. Most historians give his birth year as 1775, although some express a preference for 1773. Either way, it was within a year of the coronation of Louis XVI, the French king who was fated to lose his head in 1793 amid the turmoil of revolution.
There is general agreement that Vidocq was born the son of a baker in Arras, France, and that he was an obstreperous child who blithely stole from his parents. As a youth, he reportedly ran away with a troupe of actors and learned much of the dramatic art from them. The written records show that he then joined the military, although the reasons for this are in dispute. He managed to fight on both sides of the war between France and Austria, changing uniforms and identities with ease. He was a frequent dueler, brawler, and womanizer.
In the late eighteenth century, the country was convulsed by the convergence of the Reign of Terror and the French involvement in foreign wars. The constant presence in the streets of mobs of people bent on attending the ritual of the guillotine and regiments of soldiers marching to battle provided convenient cover for both escaped convicts and deserters.
Although it is usually Paris that we think of as the residence of “Madame la guillotine,” it was not only there that the dread machine entertained an avid populace. The larger provinces had been provided with their very own engines of death, although the chief executioner, M. Sanson, complained bitterly that these were of inferior quality.
Equipping the provinces was a complicated business, as the machines needed to be accompanied by a large assortment of important accessories. These included leather-lined wicker baskets, fetters, sawdust, brooms for the inevitable cleaning up, and hatchets or axes in case of unfortunate mechanical failure.
In his Memoirs, Vidocq described returning to Arras, the town of his birth, during a sick leave from his current military employers. Dressed as a civilian, he found himself caught up in a crowd that filled the narrow, winding streets, marching toward the fish market.
In the center of the market stood the hideously efficient machine. Strapped to the bloodstained bascule, the wooden seesaw plank of the device, was an elderly man who had been condemned as an “aristocrat.” Joseph Lebon, the notoriously cruel proconsul, stood on a balcony directing the proceedings. An orchestra was playing. The trumpets, Vidocq noted, were particularly loud. Lebon, who was smiling and wearing a stylish hat with a tricolor ribbon, kept time with his foot. The two halfmoon-shaped parts of the wooden lunette, or collar, were already fastened about the old man’s neck.
Lebon ordered a clerk, who was evidently drunk, to read a long and irrelevant bulletin about a military engagement, while the old man teetered on the plank. At the end of each paragraph, the musicians played a loud chord. At last, evidently tiring of the game, Lebon gave the signal, and the executioner pressed the declic, or lever, the blade fell, the head rolled into the waiting basket, and the enthusiastic crowd shouted, “Vive la république!”
Vidocq reports being sickened. He tells us that in the weeks that followed, he saw people in the grip of madness, hastily denouncing their neighbors before their neighbors could denounce them. He particularly noted one unfortunate, a M. de Vieux-Pont, who had his head confiscated merely because his pet parrot squawked something that sounded vaguely like “Vive le roi.” The parrot was adopted by proconsul Joseph Lebon’s wife, who promised to undertake the fortunate avian’s reeducat
ion.
In spite of his stated disgust for Lebon, Vidocq later gratefully accepted his help in escaping the attentions of the guillotine when an accusation by a rival placed him in danger. Lebon, it seems, felt warmly toward Vidocq’s mother.
Vidocq spent the ensuing few years dancing on the edge of the law. Arrested and jailed on numerous occasions on charges ranging from disturbing the peace to smuggling to deserting, he made a habit of escape, using complex disguises to do so. According to his Memoirs, he appeared at various times as a Jewish merchant, a naval officer, and a nun, the chaotic social conditions and the poor record keeping of the time providing convenient cover.
Comparative calm returned as Napoleon acquired increasing political power. He crowned himself emperor in 1804. The new government planted spies in a determined effort to apprehend criminals. Vidocq was caught in the net. Finding himself facing a particularly long sentence in the notorious galleys, he offered his services to the police as an informer and a spy. The offer was accepted, and Vidocq, this time with the complicity of the authorities, “escaped” from prison once more. Thus provided with a cover story bound to impress the denizens of the underworld and to win their trust, he took on the role of undercover operative.
From the beginning of his new career in 1811, Vidocq made good use of both his underworld connections and his ability at disguise. A great believer in data and records, he compiled detailed reports of the modus operandi of the criminals he investigated, an innovation at the time. He noted their physical characteristics and their associates. Like Sherlock Holmes, he valued system. Vidocq also hired and trained as his assistants a number of former convicts, planting them in prisons to acquire information. The operation he formed was so successful that the French government expanded it. It became known as the Brigade de la Sûreté and would eventually develop into a world-famous security force.
