18 tiny deaths, p.10
18 Tiny Deaths, page 10
Bodies recovered at the scene looked “as though covered in heavy oil skins,” Magrath said. “Their faces, of course, were covered with molasses, eyes and ears, mouths and noses filled.”31 He examined the bodies as quickly as they arrived at the morgue. “The task of finding out who they were and what had happened to them began by washing the clothing and bodies with sodium bicarbonate and hot water.”
Autopsies showed that several of the victims had been crushed or fatally injured by debris. Some were horribly mutilated, their chests caved in and limbs twisted. Many victims suffocated to death, molasses filling their airway and lungs. They had drowned in molasses. Twenty-one people died in Boston’s molasses disaster, and about 150 people were injured. Despite all his training and the thousands of cases he had examined up to that point, nothing prepared Magrath for the devastation wrought by a common storage tank.
Magrath became involved in the most controversial case of his career on April 15, 1920. Two employees of the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company in South Braintree, Massachusetts, were robbed and shot to death while carrying the company’s $15,700 payroll into the factory.32
Magrath performed the autopsies on Alessandro Berardelli, a thirty-four-year-old security guard, and forty-four-year-old Frederick A. Parmenter, an unarmed paymaster. The men were fathers with two children each. Berardelli was shot four times and Parmenter twice. Magrath measured the path of each wound, using his fingers to retrieve the projectiles, never grasping with metal instruments that might scratch the bullet and obscure rifling marks.
As each .32-caliber projectile was recovered, Magrath used a surgical needle to scratch a Roman numeral on the base of the bullet—the one surface without significant markings. The bullets were numbered individually, in sequence, so Magrath could verify his mark and describe the damage caused by the projectile in court.
Police charged Italian-American anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti with the homicides of Berardelli and Parmenter. The men were swept up in postwar hostility against foreigners and radicals, and the prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti became a cause célèbre throughout the country.
Sacco, a shoemaker and security guard, and Vanzetti, a fish peddler, denied involvement in the crime. Neither of them had a criminal history. Both men were carrying handguns when they were picked up for questioning by police. Sacco had a Colt automatic pistol he said was necessary for his job as security guard. Vanzetti’s gun was a .38-caliber Harrington & Richardson revolver he said he carried to protect himself while carrying cash he earned selling fish.
The case against Sacco and Vanzetti was built on a profusion of confusing witness statements and ambiguous ballistic evidence. Both men had alibis for the day of the crime. Vanzetti had peddled fish to customers that whole day. Sacco also accounted for his whereabouts. Still, five eyewitnesses placed Sacco and Vanzetti at the scene of the crime.
Prosecutors claimed that the revolver found on Vanzetti had been taken from Berardelli, the slain guard, but Vanzetti’s gun was never positively linked to Berardelli. Others have suggested that Berardelli didn’t even have his gun with him on the day of the robbery.
Witnesses said that Berardelli was shot twice, then two more times while lying prone on the ground. The .32-caliber bullets Magrath recovered from Berardelli’s body were consistent with the witness statements, with two wounds in the back fired by a person standing over the body. Magrath described one projectile, which he had etched with the Roman numeral III, as the fatal bullet. This bullet pierced Berardelli’s right lung, severing the pulmonary artery.
To Magrath’s eye, nearly all the bullets recovered from Berardelli looked the same, and none of them could have been fired by the .38-caliber weapon found in Vanzetti’s possession. But bullet III was different from the others. The other five projectiles had markings with a right twist produced as the bullet spins down the gun barrel. Bullet III, the fatal bullet, had a left twist, consistent with Sacco’s automatic pistol.
The ballistic evidence was less than conclusive but still sufficient for a jury whose prejudices had been inflamed by the depiction by prosecutors of Sacco and Vanzetti as disloyal radical aliens. Additionally, Sacco and Vanzetti did themselves grievous harm when they lied to police during their initial questioning, believing they were being detained for their political beliefs. Police questioned them about their political activities and loyalty to the United States. Months earlier, the U.S. Department of Justice had initiated a program of mass arrests and deportation of aliens suspected of being communists or sympathetic to the cause. Sacco and Vanzetti knew of two friends who had been deported so far and thought they were about to be next.
The lies they told police about their politics came back to haunt them at trial. Prosecutors argued that the lies were evidence of “consciousness of guilt.” Innocent men, they told the jury, had no reason to lie.
Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty and sentenced to death. After several years of appeals, they were executed at Charlestown State Prison on August 21, 1927. Magrath was present to witness the execution and declare Sacco and Vanzetti dead.
The prosecution of Sacco and Vanzetti remains one of the most contentious and controversial criminal cases of the twentieth century. Evidence in the case is still debated and contested. Some believe the men were guilty as charged. Others contend that the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti is among the great miscarriages of the American criminal justice system.
5
KINDRED SPIRITS
DURING THE EARLY 1900S, Prairie Avenue began to decline as the character of the neighborhood around it changed. The area’s proximity to the city’s business and transportation hubs, once so desirable to Chicago’s elite, became more valuable to commercial interests.1 One by one, the grand mansions of Prairie Avenue and nearby streets were razed for large commercial buildings, apartments, and parking lots. Wealthy residents fled to more pastoral environs in suburban communities farther from the city center.
About two dozen Prairie Avenue homes were converted to furnished rooms for rent, some housing as many as forty-five people. Marshall Field Jr.’s mansion at 1919 South Prairie was converted into the Gatlin Institute, a hospital for the treatment of alcohol and drug addiction. No longer an exclusive address of Chicago’s elite, Prairie Avenue became overrun with transients and the unfortunate.
By 1920, the elderly Glessners were among only twenty-six original Prairie Avenue settlers who still lived on the street.
At this time, Frances Glessner Lee was spending most of her time in Boston and at The Rocks and had little need for the Chicago home her parents had purchased for her after her marriage to Blewett Lee. The residence at 1700 Prairie Avenue was sold in 1921.
For several years, likely starting around 1920 or 1921, Lee operated an antique shop in Littleton along with her older daughter, Frances, who was then in her early twenties. The antique shop was located in a former one-room schoolhouse and was called the White Schoolhouse. Lee and Frances visited dealers and antique shops throughout New England, touring through New Hampshire, Vermont, and Boston and going as far as New York City. Having grown up in a family steeped in crafts and fine furnishings, Lee had an experienced eye for antiques. The women looked for undervalued bargains or items that could be cleaned up and sold at a reasonable profit.2
Lee kept detailed written notes on her competition, making a list that described the offerings, reliability, and prices of each dealer. The antique shops along Boston’s Charles Street, Lee said, were “very fishy.” She noted if a shop had “city prices”—charging a premium—and which dealers were dishonest. “Highway robber,” she said of G. F. Mylkes of Burlington, Vermont. About the Old English Antique Shop of New York City, she just said “Fakes.”
When the women found a good dealer—reliable, with a good selection and reasonable prices—Lee assigned it a code word, presumably so that she and Frances could talk business in the presence of other dealers and shop owners. E. H. Guerin of Pembroke, Massachusetts, was described as “average—probably honest” and code named Catholique in Lee’s notes. The New England Antique Shop in Boston was code named Paintbrush. The White Schoolhouse remained in business until Frances married Chicago attorney and entrepreneur Marion Thurston “Bud” Martin, an entrepreneur and aspiring businessman, in 1928.
In September 1926, Lee’s uncle, George B. Glessner, died at eighty-one years of age. John Jacob’s only surviving brother, he had been an officer in Warder, Bushnell, & Glessner and subsequently International Harvester. The childless millionaire left in his will the amount of $250,000 in cash and securities—comparable to about $3.5 million in present-day money—to his only niece, Frances Glessner Lee.
Lee’s son, John, did undergraduate work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his master’s degree in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1922. He went to work in the aviation industry, designing airplanes. In 1926, John Lee married MIT classmate Percy Maxim of Hartford, Connecticut. John and Percy made their home in Connecticut where John worked for the United Aircraft Corporation.
The following year, in June 1927, twenty-one-year-old Martha Lee married Charles Foster Batchelder, a Harvard-educated engineer who had been hired by George Glessner to divert an unused water reservoir he had acquired for use on The Rocks estate. The Batchelders set up residence in Augusta, Maine.
With her children successfully launched into their own lives, Lee needed a place to stay in Chicago for those occasions when visiting with her parents or taking care of business in the city. In 1928, she purchased a twelve-room apartment in a high-end building at 1448 Lake Shore Drive for $55,000, about $800,000 in today’s money.
In the first days of January 1929, George Glessner, Lee’s brother, began feeling ill at his home on The Rocks estate—pain in the lower abdomen, fever, and a general malaise. He was diagnosed with acute appendicitis and admitted to a hospital in Concord. Surgery to remove the inflamed appendix was successful. However, during his recovery, George developed pneumonia and died. He was fifty-seven years old.
The period after her brother’s death was a low point for Lee. She was as distant as ever from her extended family. Her children were grown and having children of their own. She had little to occupy her time since closing the White Schoolhouse. The death of somebody close often leads to reflections upon mortality, looking inward to take full measure of the legacy that remains when we leave this mortal coil. Lee felt melancholy, alone, and unmoored.
To compound matters, Lee had to go to Boston for medical care at Massachusetts General Hospital. The nature of her condition is unknown but evidently involved a surgical procedure that required a lengthy convalescence in Phillips House, the hospital’s deluxe private care facility. An eight-story building located on Charles Street near Boston’s Beacon Hill, Phillips House was an innovative concept when it opened in 1917. Wealthy people avoided the open wards typical of hospitals at the time, preferring to have procedures done in their home, a private home offering nursing care, or in a hotel room as it was when Lee had her tonsils removed. Medical care had come a long way since then. Patients who were able to afford it no longer needed to have surgical instruments disinfected on the kitchen stove but could receive care with the latest in anesthesia, aseptic surgery, and modern technology. Phillips House offered tastefully furnished private rooms. A fenced-in rooftop and verandas on the north end of the building allowed patients plenty of sunshine and fresh air during their stay.3
Lee, fifty-one years old at the time, was a patient at Phillips House for an extended period of 1929. By coincidence, her old friend George Burgess Magrath was hospitalized at Phillips House during some of this time. She could not have foreseen how the time spent recuperating with Magrath at Phillips House would become a pivotal episode in her life and lead to the work that stands as her legacy.
The medical examiner had a severe infection and inflammation affecting both of his hands, a consequence of circulatory problems caused by his failing liver and repeated exposure to formaldehyde and strong disinfectants. It was his third time being admitted for care at Phillips House for his crippled hands. The condition was very serious and could lead to amputation.
Lee and Magrath rekindled their friendship during their sojourn at Phillips House. They whiled away the endless hours visiting and talking, often sitting together on rocking chairs on the veranda overlooking the Charles River. They reminisced about long-ago days; life at The Rocks, the 1893 World’s Fair, youthful memories. They talked about music, art, and literature. And they talked about Magrath’s career as medical examiner. Lee found Magrath’s work endlessly fascinating. Magrath’s stories were so much more interesting than the usual conversations among women in Lee’s social circles. Magrath was concerned with weighty subjects that mattered: life and death, crime and justice. The world was an unpredictable and often violent place, Lee knew. Magrath helped make order out of chaos, satisfying the most basic human drive to understand why death happened.
“He used to tell me many of his most interesting cases, but never until they were settled and finished and ‘through the court,’ as he said he was a Public Servant whose job was to find the truth and steadfastly adhere to that truth when found, and also at the same time keep his mouth shut,” Lee recalled. “He didn’t give out information to the Press while a case was still under investigation, or pending in the Courts, but I never heard of this making an enemy for him amongst the newspaper people.”4
Magrath told vivid, engaging stories filled with drama, pathos, and occasional morbidly dark humor. There was the case of an elderly man found dead in his sixth-floor room of a Boston hotel, sitting in a Morris chair beside an open window. He was discovered when hotel staff checked on guests after a fire on the fourth floor. It was a small fire, confined to one room, and didn’t create enough smoke to asphyxiate the old man. Near the body was a small metal container with the residue of an unknown substance.5
Magrath learned that the man was a retired chemist. He had a morbid fear of fire, having nearly been burned to death as a youth. To avoid that fate, he always carried a small vial of aconite—a fast-acting poison derived from wolf’s bane—in case of an emergency. When he smelled the smoke and saw flame licking out the window, he was certain his end had come. He consumed the aconite, preferring to die by poison than by flames or smoke inhalation, although he was never at risk from the fire.
Another of Magrath’s oft-told stories was about the murder of Florence Small. Her husband, Frederick Small, thought that he devised the perfect crime. And he almost did.6
“I consider this one of the most remarkable of all my cases,” said Magrath, who was called in to help the New Hampshire State Police with the investigation.7
On September 28, 1916, the body of thirty-seven-year-old Florence Small was found in the debris of a fire that destroyed her Ossipee, New Hampshire, home. She had been burned beyond recognition, some of her bones exposed to such intense heat that they were calcified and crumbling.
Frederick Small was not at home when the fire erupted but miles away attending the movies in Boston with friends. A hired driver who took Small to the train station said he saw him say goodbye through the open door when leaving his house but did not see Mrs. Small or hear her reply. The fire broke out seven hours later. Certain things about Small’s behavior aroused the suspicion of police. The couple had recently taken out a life insurance policy, paying the surviving spouse $20,000. Only one premium payment had been made.
When Magrath asked Small his preference for a funeral parlor to receive his wife’s body after the postmortem examination, he said to the medical examiner, “Is there enough left of the body to require a casket?”
Frederick Small’s skinflint ways ultimately proved to be his undoing. The Smalls’ cottage was not maintained well. The cellar was prone to flooding and at the time of the fire was filled with several feet of standing water. The bed on which Florence Small had been lying burned through the bedroom floor, dropping her body into the cellar and preserving her body.
During Magrath’s postmortem examination, he found that Florence Small had a cord tightly wrapped around her neck. Her skull was fractured, and she had also been shot in the head with a .32-caliber bullet. More evidence was sifted from the ruins left from the fire—a .38-caliber revolver, a spark plug, some wire, and a charred alarm clock. Magrath noted something curious: a cast-iron stove with bits of fused metallic material on its surface.
The small defects “showed the stove had been subjected to a shower of molten steel,” Magrath said. “Neither cast iron nor steel fuses in the heat of an ordinary house fire.”8
Magrath looked around for something that could cause such intense heat and found evidence of thermite—a gray flammable powder used to weld steel. He theorized that somebody scattered thermite all over Florence Small’s body, the bed, and the bedroom floor and rigged an alarm clock to ignite the material.
Small denied responsibility for his wife’s murder. He claimed that she was alive when he left the house. She was assaulted by a lumberjack, he said. Few believed his version of events, and Small was charged with murder.
During the trial, prosecutors pulled a dramatic stunt. Without Frederick Small’s knowledge, the district attorney had obtained a court order directing Magrath to decapitate Florence Small and preserve her dissected head as evidence. Before the head was introduced as an exhibit in court, the judge suggested that women leave the courtroom. Some did, but eight women remained among the spectators craning to see the grisly evidence. Frederick Small sat in the courtroom sobbing, his face in his hands, while Magrath described the injuries inflicted upon his wife.
Magrath testified that Florence Small had been struck in the head at least seven times, but the skull fractures that resulted were not severe enough to be lethal. She had been shot through the forehead while lying supine by somebody standing over her. That injury would have been fatal, the medical examiner said, but she had already been strangled to death by the cord around her neck.
